NY Times: “We talked about how Democrats run against a politician, his or her policies and the Republican Party as a whole, while Republicans create enemies of classes of people: women, racial and ethnic minorities, L.G.B.T.Q. people, immigrants. This time it’s immigrants and immigration, a charged issue in Texas.
O’Rourke said that Abbott’s plan to bus immigrants to liberal cities was obviously an attempt to distract from his failure to shore up the state’s fragile electrical grids, prevent school violence and reduce inflation, but he also framed it as “an effort to incite fear and hatred and connect with people at a very base, emotional level,” an “effort to dehumanize people,” and that is precisely what it is. Abbott is not only trying to dehumanize immigrants, but to strip them of their individuality and create an ominous class.
In that way, immigrants can be converted from throngs of individuals with individual lives, stories and feelings into an amorphous wave, overwhelming and unrelenting, crashing into the country.
Abbott is using these human beings as a weapon and a tool for the shallow purpose of retaining power. For O’Rourke, this is obscene. As he put it:
“There is no way that I would ever, in a million years, resort to that kind of fearmongering and demagogy and vilifying, demonizing people, because, as an El Pasoan, I saw exactly what that results in: Twenty-three of my neighbors were murdered in a matter of minutes there.”