Lucas: Maura Healey should send immigrants from Massachusetts to New Hampshire

Gov. Maura Healey ought to begin busing immigrants to New Hampshire.

That is one way she could help cope with the endless invasion of immigrants — both legal and illegal — that has overwhelmed the state’s ability to house and feed them, not to mention the cost to taxpayers.

New Hampshire will not like it, of course, just the way the residents of Martha’s Vineyard did not like it when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis flew in a couple of planeloads of Venezuelan immigrants to the toney island in 2022.

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu will not like it either. Sununu, who recently announced the creation of a Northern Border Alliance Task Force to go after illegal immigrants crossing into New Hampshire from Canada, may now have to worry about his border with Massachusetts as well.

While Joe Biden’s open southern border with Mexico gets all the attention — with an additional army of 5,000 immigrants loudly marching toward it today — the U.S border with Canada is open as well.

But New Hampshire could learn to live with the immigrant invasion, just as Massachusetts has, although the progressives on Martha’s Vineyard could not get rid of them fast enough and had them shipped to the mainland.

But the busing could be done as sort of a trade off with New Hampshire to make up for the thousands of Massachusetts residents it lured to the Granite State who are now living and paying taxes there while still working in Massachusetts.

Also, as the immigrants arrive in Nashua and Manchester, an additional deal in the name of equity could be worked out that for every taxpaying Massachusetts family that moves to New Hampshire, the Granite State would take in one illegal immigrant family.

Some 110,000 Massachusetts residents have fled to New Hampshire between 2020 and 2022, mainly from crowded Suffolk and Middlesex Counties, according to the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. The reasons cited for their abandonment of Massachusetts include high taxes, high rent, lack of housing, rising crime, traffic, a broken MBTA and dreams of a better quality of life.

And New Hampshire, with a population of only 1.4 million people — compared to 7 million for Massachusetts — has plenty of room for a few thousand more newcomers.

If the deal works, Massachusetts could also begin busing immigrants to Vermont, which has a population of a mere 650,000 people with plenty of open space for housing construction.

As in New Hampshire the new Americans living in open space Vermont, pending work permits, could be taught to hunt deer during the hunting season, for instance, to provide food for their families and the shelters where the food would come in handy.

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It is a sad situation that the states are forced to deal with a problem that the federal government created by opening borders to allow the poor of the world to just walk in.

So, a little attention should be paid to a local special election Tuesday for the New Hampshire House of Representatives for a seat that borders Massachusetts. There, conservative Republican David Narkunas of Nashua is running against liberal Democrat Paige Beauchemin.

While too much could be made of the contest, it is interesting to note that illegal immigration, which Narkunas opposes, is the main issue. He said, “The increase in migrants has had a domino effect on virtually everything” and that the Biden administration talk about the border being secure was “a lie.”

As far as New Hampshire is concerned, Narkunas said, “It is only a matter of time before a progression (of immigrants) will move north of the Massachusetts/New Hampshire border and into Nashua,” which is not prepared to manage it. He cited Lowell as a place where the immigrates were coming from. He called for an increased and trained police presence.

In a Fox interview, Narkunas said the flooding of undocumented immigrants into the U.S. was “allowed to happen by design.” He may have a point, otherwise there is no way to account for the 600,000 illegal getaways, who crashed into the country in fiscal year 2022 alone.

Progressive Democrats like to accuse Republicans of being a “threat to democracy.” Yet it is one man, Joe Biden, a Democrat, who opened the border and let seven to ten million unvetted immigrants in and destabilized the country.

That’s the threat to democracy.

Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.

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