I sat in a silent room full of people doing homework, and said out loud, “oh my God, I love this graphic.”

Being a data journalist, I can’t help it when I see a graphic that so elegantly presents information like the migrant movement graphic in the New York Times’s “Bus by Bus” piece. It is such a great illustration of the movement of migrants and why the influx of people is such an issue – the different-colored dots literally bleed into each other. Put together with the rest of the readings, it shows how flooded the system is. I also appreciated the graphs in the Wall Street Journal article about the economic impact of the migrants.

In my opinion, the bussing situation is a (somewhat) shocking display of interstate rivalries and bitterness. We are supposed to be a united country, with states that help each other. What Gov. Abbott did was make his problem other states’ and city’s problems – states and cities that he disagrees with politically. There are much better and safer ways of dealing with the migrant crisis rather than reportedly tricking migrants to get on a bus and ship them to huge cities (that already have homeless crises). And the Wired article about people livestreaming “hunting” migrants is equally troubling – especially the quote from one of the men saying, “I say we shoot ’em all.”

The timeline of how New York City has handled the migrant crisis was also useful in laying out the crisis the city is facing. I’m more surprised that Governor Hochul didn’t step in sooner – especially to help spread out the migrants to different New York counties. And I’m always disappointed when counties fight against being humane and taking some of the burden. The pieces about New York reminded me of an article I read from The Atlantic about how, while the homeless shelters are full, many luxury apartments are vacant; and another more recent from Bloomberg about how more office buildings are vacant with the rise in working from home. I found the discrepancy fascinating.

The story of the Ukrainian refugees is a somewhat hopeful one, but I couldn’t help but wonder why their situation was so different from the migrants from Central and South America. Then Camilo answered it for me: geopolitics and policy – and potentially race. That reminded me of a story I worked on at CBS News: a migrant child died after being denied medical care in a Texas migrant camp. This isn’t necessarily a story about bussing, but it is about the failure of the system – the girl died after a week in the camp, but migrants are supposed to be processed and let out within 72 hours – and the parents told CBS that they suspected racial profiling due to their darker skin. Another interesting statistic that I found: according to a University of Texas/Texas Political Project poll in April 2022, 60 percent of Texans believed that Texas should take in Ukrainian refugees while 22 percent say they should not. The same poll found that 46 percent of Texans believe the state should take in hispanic refugees while 40 percent say they should not.