We don't have a migrant crisis we have a shitty politicians crisis

I was taking the F train into the city yesterday when I saw a little kid selling candy. He looked around 8. He’s one of many asylum seeker kids who walk from car to car selling M&M’s for $2. Like most, he didn’t have a word of English, only perking up with understanding when I asked, “Venezuela?” “Si!” he replied excitedly. I cursed myself for not having cash. They can’t use cash apps, like some homeless people now do, because they can’t open bank accounts. Then I cursed every politician in America except for maybe the Squad.

The kid sat down in his seat and pulled out a solid wad of cash and happily flipped through it. “What a little badass” I thought. U.S. kids don’t walk three blocks to school alone until they’re practically teenagers, and this kid is navigating one of the biggest metro systems in the world, in a city of notoriously unfriendly strangers, without a word of English. But, that’s hardly surprising. Asylum seekers from Venezuela cross through the Darien Gap, a chaotic, dangerous stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panama. Probably after that, not a lot intimidates you.

Why does the kid and his brave family and others like them present a “crisis” causing hair-rending panic combined with total neglect by both parties? Here, my policy solution is free: let his parents work, open bank accounts, and put him in school. Crisis solved!

Virtually every economist agrees that all immigration boosts the economy of the city, state, and country they choose to live. The idea that they’re a burden is hugely exaggerated and also entirely of our creation. Mainly, the federal government doesn’t let them work, which Joe Biden could change through executive order. Meanwhile, the federal government hasn’t give enough money to the city. New York State can’t get it’s shit together to build a decent shelter (right to shelter is enshrined in the state constitution) and Eric Adams has confirmed every stereotype about liberal hypocrisy, going from boasting that the city welcomes immigrants to declaring, “There’s no more room.” The sadistic stunt pulled by GOP governors at the border, bussing asylum seekers to “sanctuary cities,” is a political coup. Images of asylum seekers miserably sleeping on the street outside the intake center in Manhattan single-handedly proved Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis’s point that liberal lawmakers talk a big game then soil themselves when confronted with a problem border cities face daily.

All of this inhumane incompetence comes down to the fact that politicians think short-term, to the next election, and through vile political optics than the long-term social and economic health of their jurisdiction. And the Democratic Party, boasts a unique political incompetence in trying to out-hardcore Republicans on issues like immigration and crime. Republicans get more extreme and keep calling Democrats soft. And it’s also had the deleterious effect of shaping the discourse in a way that just presumes mass migration is a problem. It’s not. It’s completely arbitrary that we allow, even encourage internal migration, but treat external migration like a military invasion.

Well no, it’s not arbitrary, it’s tribalistic and racist. People point to “cultural differences” for example. What, like the fact that they’re not dropping dead from fentanyl, alcoholism, obesity, and love hard work, unlike native-born Americans?