OPINION

By SILVIO CANTO, JR.

To be honest, I did not think that Texas Governor Gregg Abbott’s controversial decision to send undocumented migrants to New York City, Washington, D.C. and other northern cities would do much to change the surging migrant crisis along the U.S-Mexico border.

Well, I was wrong, and I happy to admit it.

Abbott’s much-publicized stunt has helped to expose the blatant hypocrisy of so-called sanctuary city mayors by letting them get a taste of what Texas have been putting up with for years.

Take the case of Chicago, where Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a supposed diehard support of illegal migrant rights, received a busload of 147 migrants on Wednesday, Sept. 7, and then promptly re-bussed nearly half of them off to the nearby Republic-led town of Burr Ridge and put them up in Hampton Inn hotel.

The rest were sent to a Holiday Inn in Countryside, another Chicago bedroom town.

According to local news reports, an estimated 300 undocumented migrants have been bused from Texas to Chicago in the past two weeks (a mere drop in the bucket compared to the 6,000 to 7,000 that make their way — illegally — into Texas each and every day).

And while Chicago and Cook Country, under which jurisdiction it falls, claim to be sanctuary havens for illegal migrants, the same cannot be said for the Burr Ridge (part of the more conservative DuPage Country) and the town of Countryside, which also belongs to Cook Country, but whose mayor has expressed mixed signals as to his sentiments regarding sanctuary cities.

There is no ambiguity, however, when it comes to Burr Ridge Mayor Garry Grasso, who has stated openly that he wants to secure the border and “defund sanctuary cities,” according to WGN-TV.

Meanwhile, Grasso has publicly said he is “frustrated” by the sudden influx of these migrants, a clear message to Ms. Lightfoot for dumping the problem on his doorstep.

We fully understand Grasso’s frustration.

Both Lightfoot and Grasso should call the mayor of Del Rio, Texas, for a little guidance.

Last year, he had 10,000 Haitians across the river waiting to come in.

The solution, of course, is rather simple:

Mayor Lightfoot and Illinois’ invisible governor, J.B. Pritzker, should call on President Joe Biden to get serious about the border.

The buses will stop showing up in Chicago if the migrants stop crossing the border illegally.

In the meantime, Lightfoot is driving everyone to the suburbs, including the fabled Chicago Bears, who are packing up and moving on.

SILVIO CANTO, JR. is a Cuban-born U.S. citizen who teaches English at a north Texas college. He is the author of the book “Cubanos in Wisconsin” and has a daily online radio program and blog dealing with U.S. and Latin American politics, as well as sports and historic events, and is a regular contributor to American Thinker.