Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott seem to be using migrants to put across their extreme views

Republican governors are ramping up political stunts ahead of the midterms, thinks Holly Baxter

Migrants from Venezuela wait to be transported to a local church in Washington DC (AFP/Getty)

Last week, Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Texas governor Greg Abbott – both far-right Republicans of the Trumpian ilk – collaborated on a bizarre political stunt. Having conducted rallies and political campaigns around anti-immigration rhetoric and repeatedly blamed the southern border crisis on Democrats, the two used taxpayer money to send busloads and a planeload of migrants to blue states.

Over the week, thousands of confused refugees and immigrants arrived in New York, Washington DC and Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. The mayors of those cities claimed they had been told nothing in advance, and local people scrambled to find food, shelter and schooling for the new arrivals. On the island of Martha’s Vineyard – a particularly upmarket area known for boasting the summer homes of numerous multimillionaires, including the Obamas – a school bus filled with local Spanish students was deployed to help with translating what the Spanish-speaking migrants were saying.

Perhaps Republicans expected more of an outcry from Democrats, rather than a welcome party. Fox News certainly did its best to report that blue cities were “scrambling” to “cope with the influx”, although in reality a place like New York City can easily absorb 2,500 people who arrive unexpectedly, even if the logistics might initially seem difficult. Of course, nothing about this stunt will change the immigration situation in the United States. And it might not even make the governors as popular as they imagine.

Texas is a state where politics usually revolves around immigration, positioned as it is right next to the Mexican border. According to the latest US census, conducted in 2020, Texas is more than 40 per cent Latino (the vast majority of those – more than 80 per cent – are Mexican). That’s a huge chunk of the voting population. Hispanic and Latino people also make up the biggest working population in the state. Indeed, Texas has the second-highest Latino population, percentage-wise, in the whole of the United States, with California squeezing in just above it.

But Texas is a complicated state. Many border patrol and immigration officers who work at the border are Latinos, and they are proud to do their jobs in defence of the US. Many are also Catholics, who believe ardently in abortion restrictions. This means that the growing Latino population should be ripe for Republican-picking – something Donald Trump knew very well, spending a lot of money to (successfully) pique the interest of the Latino community with Spanish-language political ads. And, indeed, many of those people do vote red. So what is the point of Greg Abbott rounding up Latino migrants and sending them away from the state like that?

Florida governor Ron DeSantis (AP)

Although the stunt is sure to play well with media outlets and right-leaning white Texans, this smacks of bad political manoeuvring and perhaps a politician who spends a little too much time on Twitter. Like South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham – also a Trumpist Republican – Abbott seems to be making huge assumptions about how far right the Republican-voting population in the US actually is, as compared to the most vocal wing of his party. Since Trump, the Lauren Boeberts, Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Matt Gaetzes of this world have made themselves heard extremely loudly. But that doesn’t mean they are to most conservatives’ tastes. Indeed, Lindsey Graham was so confident of his own approach that he attempted to introduce a federal abortion ban bill recently – one that was roundly rejected by his own colleagues, who realised after the overturn of Roe v Wade that most Americans don’t actually want to see women’s bodily autonomy taken away.

What about DeSantis of Florida, a man expected to run for president in 2024? The former Trump acolyte is now a phenomenon in his own right. He seem to like keeping his name in the news, and he’s done so somewhat successfully with this migrant move. But DeSantis also relies on the Latino population in his state for success – and that population is made up primarily of Cubans and Venezuelans, refugees of failed communist states for whom “socialism” is a buzzword that gets them running 100 miles from the ballot box. These are the people DeSantis relies on to vote against Democrats, telling them again and again that Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Kamala Harris all secretly want to turn America into a communist nanny state and are surely puppeteering the old, ailing, useless Joe Biden.

Texas governor Greg Abbott (AP)

But the people DeSantis rushed to send to blue cities were, it seems, majority Venezuelan. Many of them even have family in Florida, and a number have now chosen to make their way to the state after being given help to reunite with their loved ones from the Democratic states that received them. Florida’s large Venezuelan community reacted with confusion and horror to people from the same background as them being piled onto buses and planes, reportedly without even being told where they were headed, and offloaded into unfamiliar areas as if they were cargo rather than human beings.

In other words, DeSantis and Abbott have made a huge gamble. Presumably, both have eyes on the presidential prize at some point in the future and want to make their names with midwestern, Republican-voting, white Americans for whom immigration has supposedly “gone too far”. They have done this at the potential expense of popularity in their own states. Yes, there are many in Texas and Florida who will cheer for what they’ve done – but still more who will be bewildered by the move. After reports that a Venezuelan migrant was paid a fee to recruit refugees for the flights from a resource centre in San Antonio, a Texas sheriff has announced that he’s opening an investigation into how that was allowed to happen.

Meanwhile, the chaos continues elsewhere. Delaware is reportedly preparing for the possible arrival of a planeload of migrants after hearing rumours that DeSantis and Abbott are sending people there next. It seems to me that the stunt has not yet run its course – and its ramifications remain unclear.