Missouri taxpayers are providing more than $2 million for a Republican Party campaign stunt.
That is, transparently, the whole point of having Missouri National Guard and Highway Patrol troops stationed at America’s southern border in Texas. There’s no rational explanation for that scenario outside the context of an election year in which one party has designated border policy as a top wedge issue.
More than 200 Missouri troops have been rotating to southern Texas since early March in support of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s continuing challenge of the Biden administration’s border policies. Last week, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson formally signed off on spending $2.2 million to back-fund their deployment.
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Parson signed the supplemental appropriation at an outdoor ceremony in Eagle Pass, Texas — almost 1,000 miles from his Jefferson City office.
Lest anyone mistake this expenditure of Missouri public funds for anything resembling legitimate, nonpartisan state services, Parson dispelled that notion bluntly as he released the money: “The reason we are down here is the total failure of the Biden administration.”
Your tax dollars at work, Missouri.
No one can seriously deny that President Joe Biden’s handling of the immigration issue has been inadequate, though the GOP’s histrionics on the topic leave out much of the story. U.S. border policy has been a mess under presidents of both parties for decades because Congress refuses to do anything but politicize the issue.
They had a chance to finally usher in landmark immigration reform in February, when Biden cut a deal with Senate Republicans that essentially offered virtually everything they had been demanding in terms of border security, asylum and funding.
But the Republican-controlled House killed the agreement on orders from former President Donald Trump, because alleviating the border crisis would deprive him of a top campaign issue. That little exercise in self-sabotage alone should negate the GOP’s border-hawk status.
Yet Republican officials throughout red-state America continue pushing the narrative that only they can be trusted to solve the issue they have already refused to solve. As part of that project, they are cynically conflating legal and illegal immigration, falsely implying that migrants are more prone to commit violent crimes, and dishing all of it out with generous sides of xenophobia.
Missouri is one of more than a dozen Republican-controlled states that have joined in on Abbott’s “Operation Lone Star,” under which Texas presumes to patrol the border itself to demonstrate that the federal government is failing to do it.
The legally fraught program undermines the federalism that conservatives claim to cherish. Border control is, without question, the job of the federal government; for individual states to take it over invites abuse and chaos.
For example, Texas has erected life-threatening razor wire along the Mexico border, preventing migrants from their legal right to surrender to U.S. border officials and seek asylum. At one point, Texas even put razor wire along the state border with New Mexico, on the argument that some migrants were coming in that way.
What’s next, landmines along the Mississippi to keep brown-skinned Illinoisans out of Missouri?
Every state is a border state, goes the currently popular trope. It’s as politically clever as it is factually inaccurate.
Not only isn’t illegal immigration a major issue in Missouri, but cities like St. Louis and Kansas City could use more immigration to increase and energize their populations and bolster the workforce.
There are a great many ways Missouri could spend $2.2 million to better the lives of residents and solve actual problems here. Using it on a constitutionally questionable political stunt in a distant part of the country isn’t one of them.
