Trump may be right to highlight the problem, but his own efforts to respond to it are at every step motivated by racism and bad faith (his real goal is to end all immigration from countries to our south). The combination of his xenophobic malice with outright ineptitude leads those efforts to backfire in multiple ways, making a bad situation vastly worse. His polarizing insistence on building a wall along the border would do nothing to improve the situation, since most arrivals are showing up at official entry points. His government shutdown over funding the wall led immigration judges to be furloughed, which only increased the backlog on asylum claims. His attempt to cut foreign aid to the migrants' countries of origins will likely increase the number of people heading north. His threats to close the southern border entirely have produced a spike in those seeking asylum. And his repeated denigration of Mexicans has made the government of Mexico reluctant to collaborate with efforts to address the problem.

That's why a solution will need to come from the left, even though it will cut against the shift in Democratic public opinion over the past decade in the direction of greater immigration liberalization.

I'm willing to be wrong about this, but my reaction to Gargamel's move to dump refugees in sanctuary cities was "...okay."

Sanctuary cities are liberal. Because they are cities, they already have overloaded social services... and while historically any tax increases have been regressive sales or sin taxes, there are plenty of cities with income tax and your average houseless millennial isn't going to squeak too loudly about a property tax increase.

Property taxes and income taxes invariably have the effect of driving down property values and forcing the wealthy out of any community. This tends to push the wealthier into satellite communities... but a liberal state and a liberal city could (in theory) reach a tax-swap structure for any community willing to take on "sanctuary city" status.

If shrinking communities are a problem for demographers and tax rolls, give 'em a boost if they declare themselves "sanctuary cities." Yeah - the Gas'n'Sip is run by Guatemalans but at least it isn't empty.

How terrible an idea is this? What am I missing?