The strange alchemy of cruelty and opportunity

I don’t know when they stopped teaching about the law of unintended consequences at Harvard and Vanderbilt law schools, but both schools must have cut it from their curriculums by the time Ron DeSantis and Gregg Abbott were students.  What Republican governors delight in and sell to their mini-MAGA constituents as cruelty, the migrants they have bussed and flown to liberal enclaves like Martha’s Vineyard, Washington D.C., and New York are experiencing as opportunity.  Migrants from Mexico, Central America and Venezuela who have been given free tickets north from Florida and Texas are entering an American workforce with 3.7 percent unemployment and 11,000 open jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  That number reflects reports to the Department of Labor from corporations and businesses that participate in the department’s gathering of statistics for its monthly jobs report.  It does not include people who employ occasional laborers for unskilled work, nor does it include estimates of the numbers of undocumented migrants who are hired to work off the books in jobs such as landscape work, construction and the like.

Since April, Texas has bussed about 8,000 migrants to Washington D.C., according to the office of Governor Greg Abbott.  The state sent another 2,500 to New York and 600 to Chicago.  Abbott directed that 50 migrants be dropped off near the home of Vice President Kamala Harris at the Naval Observatory in Washington last Friday, and a second bus carrying migrants arrived in the same location on Saturday.