October 1, 2023
If you are an illegal alien lucky enough to be picked for rescue by a wealthy, white, virtue-signaling Massachusetts resident — who also happens to be a cable news talking head and immigration attorney — you may be able to spend the rest of your life on one of the most beautiful spots on the East Coast.
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That’s what happened when Rachel Self, an immigration lawyer and occasional contributor to Fox News and CNN, decided to help a handful of illegals who ended up in Martha’s Vineyard a year ago. While Self may have thought she would get points for putting her money where her mouth is, her radical progressive views make her a poor candidate to be applauded in these circumstances. Case in point: Here she is on Fox News saying that the United States Constitution applies to all people, even illegals within our borders. She seems clueless that she’s using illegal entry across America’s border as the basis for determining legality within the Constitution. The reasoning is so bizarre as to be comical if it weren’t so dangerous to our rule of law.
Then again, as the Hoover Institution’s Victor Davis Hanson noted recently, “[h]uman rights activists insist that the borders themselves are nineteenth-century relics. And the global poor and oppressed thus have a human right to enter the affluent West by any means necessary.”
Self’s story was featured in a New York Times article in June, when they did a follow-up piece on what became of illegals flown to Massachusetts as part of Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s relocation program to transport illegal migrants to sanctuary destinations.
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While most of the migrants were shipped from the island to places like New York, Washington, and Michigan, a handful took up residence in Martha’s Vineyard, under the protective watch of Self.
The migrants who stayed behind were quoted as saying that they wanted to “reach the American dream like everyone else.” They also complained that Martha’s Vineyard was “not the place they had imagined for themselves” and said they were finding it hard to trust strangers after “being cast adrift” and used as “political pawns.”
Keep in mind that they will probably bring their extended families to live on Martha’s Vineyard. It’s hard to sympathize with their comments when Americans themselves are unable to figure out what the “American dream” even means anymore. As the success of Oliver Anthony’s recent songs has showcased, struggles with finances, depression, drugs and alcohol, and a myriad of deeply disturbing cultural issues are increasingly leaving Americans dazed and confused.
Meanwhile, a ferry ride away on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Gov. Maura Healey (who won her office by a landslide in 2022) is squeezing illegals in a little at a time. Healey’s office started out slow, placing six Haitian families at the Harborside Suites motel in South Yarmouth and warning that more families may arrive.
Yarmouth, one of fifteen towns in Barnstable County that make up the area known as “Cape Cod,” saw dozens of residents turn out earlier this month to protest their town being used as emergency housing for illegals.
The Yarmouth Board of Selectmen (a surprisingly outdated and sexist term for so progressive an area) sent a letter to the governor, whining that the motel she chose has had zoning violations in the past and is therefore not a suitable place for migrant families.
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“We have no affordable housing here. We have no resources here to support this influx of population in our town,” one resident recently told the Cape Cod Times.
The Times explained to readers that the governor has a right to place “migrants and displaced persons” in Yarmouth because “[i]n August, Healey’s administration declared a state of emergency, citing an influx of migrants seeking shelter and services as the state already faces an affordable housing crunch.”
A Facebook page, Cape Cod Concerned Citizens, was created for residents to sound off on their governor “forcing masses of illegal aliens into our towns without notice and without any planning for necessary resources.”
But what if the tiny area of Cape Cod becomes as inundated with illegals as New York City or Chicago, or a small town like Jamestown, N.Y., which found that it doesn’t “take too many to overwhelm the system“?
Liberal Cape Codders just can’t get their heads out of the sand dunes. Take this columnist at the Cape Cod Times, for instance, who signals his worldview by using terms like “climate catastrophe” (formerly known as bad weather) and “climate refugees.” Writer Lawrence Brown laments that as Americans try to cope with millions of illegals being forced on them by the Biden administration, they can’t come together to have a “sane conversation” and seek a balance point.
It’s not a conundrum, Mr. Brown. Here’s the balance point in three words: close the border.
As I remember, we had someone who was willing to address the situation. As Victor Davis Hanson wrote:
The Trump administration’s initial efforts to close the border had been continually obstructed in the Congress, sabotaged by the administrative state, and stymied in the courts. Nonetheless, it had finally secured the border by early 2020. … Yet almost all its successful initiatives were immediately overturned in 2021.
Seems like not so long ago when Cape Code crowed about “repudiating President Trump with record turnout” in the 2020 election.
The Cape Cod Times also revealed some shocking data: “[t]he number of economically disadvantaged Cape students has been climbing” and is now roughly 50%. Concurrently, the number of students who don’t speak English as their first language is around 30%. That’s just a microcosm of what Democrats want to do in every town in the U.S.
The mostly affluent, disconnected residents of Cape Cod — which has historically included liberal power-players like the Kennedys, Clintons, and Obamas — have long been funding progressive policies responsible for gutting American cities and small towns.
Like the mistaken Bolsheviks, liberal elites believe they are the vanguard of the proletariat. They can’t seem to comprehend that when they destroy the middle-class Americans that they find so contemptible, they will eventually destroy themselves.
Susan D. Harris can be reached at www.susandharris.com.
Image: Phillip Capper via Flickr, CC BY 2.0 (cropped).
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