Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is up to it again, signing an unlawful new state law to make crossing into the country illegally a state misdemeanor. We don’t expect it to last much beyond when the ink has dried.
Regular readers might recall that, for well more than a year now, we’ve been warning that Abbott’s immigration demagoguery wouldn’t stop and in fact would only intensify as long as he faced few consequences for it. New Yorkers are probably most familiar with his busing of thousands of migrants north to the city, arguably the genesis of the broader wave of arrivals that has come to dominate political life here.
The stunt was done without any real coordination or notice because, from the start, the governor didn’t care one bit about the health and safety of the real human beings on those buses, including many families with children, instead seeing them as opportune tools for his posturing.
Yet that was far from Abbott’s first border antic, and this recent move to wrest away control of immigration away from the federal government — for many reasons the only level that legally has a policymaking and regulatory role — has plenty of precedent.
His insistence on inspecting commercial vehicles coming into the state from Mexico this April — in partial duplication of the inspections already done by federal customs personnel whose job it actually is to do so — snarled trade with our largest trade partner and almost triggered an international incident. Undeterred by the fiasco, he did it again a month later.