I’m not saying it. They are.
One April day in 2022, a bus pulled up near the U.S. Capitol. It was carrying 12 Venezuelans, four Colombians, four Cubans and four Nicaraguans — and the start of a new phase in the immigration debate.
The bus had been chartered by the Texas Division of Emergency Management. “By busing migrants to Washington, D.C., the Biden administration will be able to more immediately meet the needs of the people they are allowing to cross our border,” Greg Abbott, the state’s Republican governor, said in a statement at the time.
Initially, the buses all went to Washington, “to take the border to the president,” the officials said. In August, Mr. Abbott began sending busloads of migrants to New York City. A few weeks later, buses began heading to Chicago, then Philadelphia.
The Biden administration accused Mr. Abbott of a cruel stunt. But the campaign worked. Until then, the White House viewed the migration crisis mainly as a problem for border states, former aides said. When migrants began making headlines in places like New York, that view changed.
Many Biden officials came to view Mr. Abbott’s campaign as the point Democrats lost the debate.
“I don’t think we ever recovered,” said Deborah Fleischaker, then the assistant director for policy at ICE.
There’s a vital lesson here… thinking creatively and confrontationally works. Both are important.
Some red state governors had tried ‘confrontation’ before, yelling at Obama, trying to block inbound transport of migrants, only to realize that their power to physically block what open borders administrations were doing was limited.
Abbott and DeSantis figured out workarounds. They found ways to take a problem and make it into a problem for the other side.
Shipping illegals to D.C., NYC and Martha’s Vineyard changed the national conversation and the risk calculus.
There’s plenty to remember and learn from here.
A good tactic is
1. Creative
2. Confrontational
and, most importantly because so many miss this part,
3. Effective
4. Changes the conversation
Find one that hits all 4 and you may well have a winner. Find one that’s missing 3. and it may get attention, but will go nowhere.
