Greg Abbott’s Cruel Moves on Immigration Were, Unfortunately, Genius

When Texas Gov. Greg Abbott first started busing migrants to Democrat-controlled cities in 2022, the policy was seen as little more than a cruel political stunt. Abbott seemed in search of any chance to antagonize President Joe Biden and Democratic mayors and churn up favorable conservative media hits for himself, no matter the human cost. Immigrant rights groups cried foul, and Democrats were outraged at a particularly inhumane display of political theater.

Two years since the policy was announced, Texas has bused more than 100,000 migrants to other cities, at the cost of $148 million. For Republicans, it’s been worth every penny.

Democrats have what in any other election year would be an overwhelmingly winning array of things to run on: a roaring economy with rising wages and rock-bottom unemployment; a wildly unpopular opponent facing a litany of criminal charges; the very real threat of a national abortion ban, a goal Republicans continue to ally themselves with despite its incredible potency as an electoral loser.

And yet, to Democrats’ total chagrin, Joe Biden is constantly being called upon to talk about immigration, one of the few things that voters prefer Republicans address, at least according to polls. And it’s not just a marginal issue: A recent Wall Street Journal survey found that immigration, somehow, is voters’ very top concern, despite the fact that most of them live nowhere near the border.

That’s thanks, in large part, to Abbott, whose cruel and histrionic impulses have turned out to be a diabolical act of political genius. It’s one of the few things keeping competitive an election year that should otherwise be a blowout, given economic factors alone, and national Republicans should be thanking their lucky stars that Abbott’s machinations have made a national issue out of one the few things they have a real edge on—and kept it in the news for almost two years—while every other Republican culture war cry (CRT! TikTok!) has fallen by the wayside. Far from looking out only for his own promotion, it seems Abbott may have been looking out for the entire beleaguered party’s political viability too.

As Abbott sent more and more migrants to cities like New York and Chicago, he got a huge assist from the unprepared and, arguably, unwitting mayors of those cities, who began to lend credence to the Abbott line. Nowhere was this more obvious than in New York City, where Mayor Eric Adams, fresh off winning an election on the back of a crime panic, facing plunging favorability numbers, and looking for an excuse to enact bone-deep budget cuts, began bellowing about the so-called migrant crisis, borrowing an Abbottism. Adams’ insistence on the Republican line on this caused a swift and bitter falling-out with the Biden administration.

Close behind him was New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, another Democrat who joined the chorus of those hawking the “border crisis.” Even progressive Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson heeded this call. Now it’s not just Republicans but a wide spectrum of Democrats calling on Biden to do something, legitimizing an issue borne of opportunism and making Biden, who didn’t have all that much room anyway to move without Congress, look ineffectual. (Though he does have some options.)

Migrant encounters at the border are indeed up, and the Biden administration has, since Day 1, ranked immigration very low on its list of policy priorities; it has largely tried to meet the matter with silence.

After absorbing a year of body blows on the issue and mounting pressure from Dems (aforementioned and others), the administration did finally work with Republicans in Congress on an immigration bill. But Donald Trump blew up the negotiations from a distance, despite the fact that the legislation included an overwhelming number of Republican priorities on immigration. Meanwhile, Abbott has continued to act as his very own accelerant, with his deployment of the Texas National Guard to the border, in clear violation of the Constitution, and with the passage of S.B. 4, the bill that banned sanctuary cities in Texas.

In some sense, it’s a marvel: Abbott, a Republican leading just one state, has established national agenda-setting power in a political environment with a Democratic president, a Democrat-controlled Senate, and a House with such a small and fractious Republican majority it doesn’t feel entirely accurate to refer to it as such. It’s a cautionary tale, too, as the shortsighted Democrats, who, unlike Abbott, were not thinking of the well-being of their national party, fell into his trap, subsequently dragging the whole party down with them. That $148 million Abbott spent on busing got more earned media and did more to move the needle than the hundreds of millions (billions, by November) that will be spent on advertising and organizing for Trump and Biden both.

But it also should be a model for Democrats going forward, about how governors can aid their presidents, and their national party, in steering the national dialogue.

Democrats happen to control a handful of very large states of their own: California and New York. They also run Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, New Jersey, more. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been willing to spar with Republican governors, like Florida’s Ron DeSantis, on television, a well-coiffed self-promotional fighting back that has certainly proved less advantageous to the party broadly than to Newsom’s personal political ambitions.

But Newsom could easily take a page from the Abbott playbook and use the massive, one-party state he runs to drive attention to any of the winning issues Democrats—and particularly Joe Biden—would like you to be hearing about. Here’s one for free: With Arizona’s conservative Supreme Court implementing a near-total abortion ban based on an 1860s law out of the blue on Tuesday, neighboring California could set up an abortion clinic for Arizonans fleeing their state’s authoritarian Republican rule, right across the border. Newsom could make a whole big show of it. He could send buses to pick up women in Florida, where a similarly draconian and unpopular six-week abortion ban goes into effect next month.

Hochul, instead of ripping off Abbott’s slogans on the “migrant crisis,” could use her position to grandstand on in vitro fertilization, a process that has become functionally illegal in Alabama. Offer to bus that state’s women to New York for treatment. The message? Don’t forget: It’s Democrats who are willing to put in the effort for your rights.

There are, as Abbott has showed, so many ways to do this. You don’t even need to abide by the Constitution! Democrats control the executive offices in Michigan, Illinois, and Minnesota; nestled all around them are states like Indiana with abortion bans. Set up free transit, put up billboards welcoming those in pursuit of reproductive freedom. The outcome, as Abbott has shown, matters less than the spectacle. (Tallied across multiple years nationwide, 100,000 migrants are a small percentage of the total number of asylum seekers awaiting processing in the U.S.)

Biden, for all his legislative successes, has not been especially strong on the stump, or as a salesman. His campaign has already leaned on the young, popular, and successful governors in a number of these states for messaging and campaign events. The administration, at the same time, has been frustrated that its successes aren’t breaking through.

Those problems are two sides of the same coin. Inviting Democratic governors to speak at rallies is a weak use of the agenda-setting, conversation-steering power that their offices have, as Abbott has unlocked. Political theater is an important part of winning elections. Abbott is willing to defy the Constitution to further the Republican political agenda and cover for the Trump campaign’s manifold weaknesses. State-level Democrats don’t even need a constitutional crisis of their own to make this point, nor do they need to match Abbott’s penchant for cruelty—just a little combativeness and a little showmanship, to prove that they’re all on the same page, and serious about their own popular political agenda.