Cohen: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is playing a cynical game on immigration

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PORTLAND, Maine — If you’re a southern politician who wants to be president, there’s nothing like taking on those sanctimonious hypocrites from the north. Even better if he can do it by persuading immigrants to be his supporters.

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So it was for Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, who chartered planes to fly newly arrived Venezuelans from Florida to Martha’s Vineyard, a thriving island community off the coast of Massachusetts. The point was to antagonize progressives who support liberal immigration.

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The islanders were friendly. Before the migrants were transferred to a nearby military base, people would bring clothing, provide food and offer advice on jobs. DeSantis would have preferred a smaller reception. So he could say, “Look! Watch! They don’t want them there any more than we do here!

DeSantis likes to be agent provocateur. It is true that tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants from Latin America cross the border and seek asylum. Southwestern states bear the burden, especially Texas. However, flying them north isn’t going to solve an annoying problem.

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But if you’re DeSantis, there’s nothing like sticking your finger in the eye of those who don’t have to deal with them. Interestingly, the anti-elitist DeSantis went to Harvard and Yale and it’s a good bet that if those Latino immigrants coming to Florida were from Cuba, which has a large community in Florida, they wouldn’t be on a plane to Massachusetts.

DeSantis wants to be the Republican presidential candidate in 2024, and this kind of getaway gives him publicity and plays to Donald Trump’s MAGA crowd.

He is exquisitely cynical. The playbook: Lying to vulnerable people. Don’t tell them where they’re going. Make empty promises of a better future. Exploit your misery.

This is not new. Southern segregationists did much the same thing in the early 1960s. They sold poor blacks on the idea of ​​going north, which millions had been doing for decades in the Great Migration. They were put on buses with the promise of jobs and homes. They were called “reverse freedom commuters,” a reference to the army of black and white activists who traveled south on buses to integrate interstate travel.

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Many were attacked and beaten by Klansmen as they arrived at segregated bus stations. The police looked and shrugged. One of the celebrated reverse freedom riders was Lela Mae Williams, who was given a one-way bus ticket for her and her nine younger children from rural Arkansas. They were among several dozen blacks sent to Hyannis on Cape Cod, near Martha’s Vineyard. This was not an accident; near Hyannis Port is the Kennedy summer home.

Williams was told that John F. Kennedy would meet her. Minutes from her destination, she asked the driver to stop to change for the president. She had dignity. So there she was, near the Kennedy compound, in a black dress, a white hat, and a triple pearl necklace, as if she were dressed for church.

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The president wasn’t there, but the cameras were, arranged by Amis Guthridge, the Little Rock segregationist attorney behind the plan. Of course, there was no work for any of them. As the Kennedy Library tweeted last week, the purpose was to “embarrass Northern Liberals and humiliate Black people.”

Instead of sending buses to Hyannis, as the segregationists did in 1962, his spiritual heirs charter planes to Martha’s Vineyard. (It’s not just there. Texas and Arizona have sent some 10,000 immigrants to Washington, where some ended up at Vice President Kamala Harris’ residence.)

The reverse freedom riders were the last gasp of a spent regime. They lived lives of hate, and that was how they operated.

But since they couldn’t stop integration, this won’t stop immigration. This time, however, it’s not just the Klan that’s behind it. it is the state. This is not a personal vendetta, it is institutional. The migrants are now suing DeSantis and Florida for misleading them.

This little late-summer play comes as no surprise in a country where nothing ever gets fixed, nothing is too much trouble, and cruelty has become the new political currency.

Andrew Cohen is a journalist, professor at Carleton University, and author of Two days in June: John F. Kennedy and the 48 hours that made history.