Wouldn't the tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors at the southern border be a fine opportunity for a federalist experiment in the laboratory of the states?
Where are the pro-immigrant governors saying, "we'd love to welcome these children and make them productive citizens of our state"?
The governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, a Democrat, was asked about it the other day, and he said, according to the Boston Globe:
"My inclination is to remember what happened when a shipful of Jewish children tried to come to the United States in 1939 and the United States turned them away, and many of them went to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps," Patrick said when a reporter asked how he viewed the border crisis. "I think we are a bigger-hearted people than that as Americans, and certainly as residents of Massachusetts."
The governor of Maryland, Martin O'Malley, another Democrat, criticized the Obama administration for wanting to send the children out of the country. The Washington Post reports:
"We are Americans, and we do not return refugee kids who find themselves on our doorstep back into war-torn or famine-racked places where they will face certain death," O'Malley said. "I think we have to act like Americans."
The governor of traditionally immigrant-friendly New York, Andrew Cuomo, another Democrat, doesn't seem to have been quoted on the topic, but I may be missing something.
In other words, if there's no national consensus to welcome these children, why not just send them to states where they are welcome? Since one of the Republican concerns is that they will vote Democrat, sending them to states that are already heavily Democratic might be a way of alleviating those concerns. Massachusetts, New York, and Maryland all have two Democratic senators apiece already and aren't exactly battleground states in presidential years. I'd like to see some Republican governors taking a pro-immigrant approach as well — Mike Pence? — but alas there don't seem to be too many takers there.
