It’s not only the liberal mainstream media that screws up through parochial ignorance; sometimes the establishment conservative media does as well.
Today’s headline example from National Review: “Massive Weekend Migrant Caravan Overwhelms Texas Border Town.”
The name of that border “town”? El Paso.
You know, the 24th largest city in the United States.
The story is otherwise solid:
Over the weekend, a massive caravan of thousands of illegal migrants, mostly from Nicaragua, crossed the border into West Texas in a stunning surge that shocked immigration agents, neighboring towns, and state officials.
By Monday, over 5,000 illegal immigrants had arrived at the Border Patrol’s central processing center in El Paso, Texas, officials told the New York Times. They estimated that about 2,000 people came to the U.S. each day, with the largest influx reaching 800 to 1,000 migrants on Sunday night.
State Senator César J. Blanco, who represents the region, argued that the situation is untenable, with El Paso, a community with limited capacity, being forced to accommodate scores of migrants regularly.
“We’re feeling it. It’s straining resources,” he told the publication, noting that El Paso has functioned as an Ellis Island but for illegal immigration. “Whether we want it or not, it is.”
El Paso’s predicament, which included 53,000 apprehensions in October alone, is the worst among U.S.-Mexico border towns, although all are bearing the brunt of the raging border crisis. So far in 2022, there have been 2,378,944 migrant encounters along the southern border, according to immigration data.
Homeless shelters in El Paso are flooded, as is the processing center, which typically releases the migrants into the interior with instruction to return for a future court date, which many do not oblige.
It’s obvious that the Biden Administration wants to cram as many illegal aliens as possible into America to amnesty them as future Democratic Party voters.
But how parochial do you have to be to call El Paso a “town”? I’m pretty sure nobody on the NRO staff would call Yonkers, NY or Worcester, MA (both considerably smaller municipalities) a “town.”
Maybe they just listened to Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” (“Out in the West Texas town of El Paso/I fell in love with a Mexican girl”) and didn’t realize how much it had grown since the cowboy heydays…
Tags: Border Controls, El Paso, Media Watch, National Review, Texas
If I were in a charitable mood, I’d grant that “border town” is kind of a set phrase. It’s use might have been meant as a category, not a comment on the size of El Paso.
“My kind of town,
Chicago is,
My kind of town,
Chicago is,
[etc.]”
-H/t “The Chairman of the Board”
Per Wikipedia, it’s the twenty-third largest city as of 2020, and second only to Phoenix in the southwest United States.
The people at NR is as provincial as people come.
To these people, if it’s not New York, L.A. or D.C. it’s a “town”. You know – flyover country.
A Border Town is a municipality located on or near the border. It doesn’t say anything about the size of the municipality. So El Paso IS a border town, AND a relatively large city.