(With apologies to the late Jimmy Buffett, RIP)
It’s funny how being confronted by a crisis in person — as opposed to crises of the remote, virtual kind — can change people’s minds. True-blue New York state was migrant friendly as long as the migrants were down South. Now that the state is feeling some of the pain from illegal migrants that Southern states such as Arizona and Texas have been feeling for a long time, a definite change in attitude can be detected among the locals.
It was, in fact, detected just this week by a poll from Sienna College (Loudonville, New York), which found that 41 percent of New Yorkers now support the border wall that former President Trump championed and current President Biden scorned. Even in New York City, the original “immigrant city” as all its boosters insist, 38 percent of residents support building a wall. Thirty-five percent of Latinos do as well.
As the migrants have made their way northward, some on Texas-supplied buses and some under their own steam, the change in their lattitude has evidently sparked a change in New Yorkers’ attitude.
Could sanity be returning to the Empire State?
Not entirely. The poll also found the following, as reported by the New York Post:
Other statements showed that New Yorkers are strongly pro-immigrant: 85% agreed that the U.S was built by immigrants, 84% said most migrants coming here want to build a better life, 78% said assimilation has made America great, 72% said immigrants bring a new vitality to the country, 69% said America should continue to live by…`Give me your tired, your poor,’” and 60% said businesses need new immigrants to take entry level jobs in order to be successful.
But those are ideological positions, easy and cheap to affirm. The real question has to do with reality, and reality has gotten to at least a large minority of the Empire State’s citizens.
For more, see the NY Post.