Customs and Border Protection reported 181,522 apprehensions at the US southwest border for the month of July. This was by a large margin the second highest in the record, with the previous record set by the Biden administration in July of last year.
SW border apprehensions were the lowest since March, but nevertheless came in above our forecast. Ordinarily, apprehensions peak in the spring and decline during the course of the summer. This pattern is visible this year as well, but the decline was less than expected based on seasonal factors. Our July forecast, at 166,000, fell 15,500 below the reported number.
Martha's Vineyard, Hypocrisy and Cynicism
In a cheeky move, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis flew four dozen migrants to Martha's Vineyard last week. This has created quite the brouhaha up here in Cape Cod, but it highlights the hypocrisy of the 'enlightened' left, as well as showing DeSantis capable of cynically deploying undocumented immigrants to make a political point.
Hypocrisy means acting in a manner inconsistent with one's stated beliefs. A prohibition -- including one in migrant labor -- creates such hypocrisy by pitting one's self interest against his social interest. That is, the elites of Martha's Vineyard claim to be all for poor, undocumented migrants, but not in their town. DeSantis, by shipping migrants to the Vineyard, has exposed this hypocrisy, but in a cynical way. DeSantis was not principally motivated by the ostensible goal of providing jobs for migrants, but rather intended damage the reputation of the left by exposing their hypocrisy in the matter.
Thus, hypocrisy implies actions contradicting stated beliefs, and cynicism implies looking for hidden motivations behind those ostensibly motivating action. In both cases, self-interest is divorced from social interest. The individual is motivated to act in contraction of his stated goals or beliefs.
To attribute hypocrisy to the left or cynicism to DeSantis misses the point. Such anti-social behavior arises from US government policy, which sets the price of a work visa close to zero and consequently provides very few visas for those who desire them. The predictable result is a black market in migrant labor where all the participants have an incentive to behave in a manner inconsistent with their stated goals and beliefs. Hypocrisy and cynicism are but side effects of trying to enforce a prohibition, and this applies to all prohibitions and black markets. For example, the EU's embargo on Russian oil -- another prohibition -- exhibits the same traits in an even more pronounced fashion..
Solving the problem does not require moral rectitude. Instead, in the case of migrant labor, H2 visa issuance has to change from a volume-based approach to a market-price based approach. If visas were available at their true market value, migrant-related cynicism and hypocrisy would disappear, not in years, but in days.