House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her open-borders Democrats are yelling about recent reports that illegal migrants caught crossing our border and placing themselves in temporary U.S. detention lack soap and toothbrushes, which apparently Uncle Sam has an obligation to provide, free of charge. 

Officials confirmed Monday that hundreds of migrant children had been transferred out of a Border Patrol station in Clint, Tex., where they did not have soap, toothbrushes, clean clothes or enough food. 

I always rely on the host country of the places I go to provide me with free soap and toothbrushes, don't you?

Not even many lower-end hotels these days provide these things. But nothing's too good for illegal border crossers.

And guess what? These migrants do have money to buy these toiletries for their extended visa-free stays here in the states, at least a lot of them and quite possibly all of them. The Washington Examiner reports they are cleaning out the Western Unions in Texas based on their huge withdrawals:

SAN ANTONIO, Texas — People assisting the thousands of migrants who have arrived in San Antonio after being released from federal custody say Western Unions downtown are regularly running out of cash as a result of the high number of withdrawals being made by emigrants from Central American and African nations.

“Western Union has run out for the past two-and-a-half months," said Khalid Chini, a local resident and volunteer at the migrant resource center downtown. "All the surrounding area, the Western Unions, they run out of money.”

Withdrawals are running in the four and five-figure sums, according to the Examiner:

Chini said some of the people he has escorted wanted to withdraw a lot more money than the cost of a plane ticket.

“They’re getting money like you would not believe,” he said. “I went with a guy — he wants to withdraw $25,000.”

Chini said he usually escorts people to a Walgreens on East Houston Street, HEB grocery store on North New Braunfels Avenue, or a Walgreens on West Cypress Street. He said it is now normal to visit one of those three locations downtown and be told they are out of money by midday. Some stores now call the center to tell them when they are out, he said.

Western Union obviously didn't know what hit them. But as a result, many of these money outlets are now limiting withdrawals to $1,000 or $7,500 amounts.

The whole thing signals that the migrant surge is hardly a poverty matter, let alone asylum matter -- it's about jumping the queue ahead of the legal migrants and getting a better deal from Uncle Sam. The truly poor and persecuted do not travel to the U.S. border to get free stuff, they flee to any country they can land in.

What we see here is country-shopping from the third world's well-monied middle classes from multiple countries as word gets out that everybody gets to stay -- even if you are deported, you get to stay.

Nobody gets to the Mexican border without money - whether to pay cartels or in food and the bus tickets necessary for the rest of the journey. People always plan, especially if they are carrying children for the run. But only when the migrants make it to the U.S. are we to supposed to presume they've suddenly run out of money and Uncle Sam needs to pay the food, lodging, diapers and the cost of hotel hospitality items.  Would it be that outrageous to ask these monied migrants to pay for some of these hospitality items themselves, maybe allow some enterprising legal migrant to set up a kiosk in these centers for the purchase of these necessities? Someone's sending them money, someone's got a lot of it to send, whether it's their families in the states or someone in their home countries. The report didn't specify where these sent remittances were coming from - it might even be the migrants' own money. But we know they're getting it because the Examiner reports that migrants are being advised to get to these Western Unions early in the morning to make sure they can get cash before the big dollar amounts from others force the money transmission centers to shut their doors until the next day. 

Now there's a big brouhaha about forcing the U.S. to pay for the hotel hospitality items -- and bus tickets - for people who've very much planned the details of their journeys. Maybe the migrants, so long as they're going to stay, should be asked to pay for these items.

Image credit: Gijs Bolmeijer, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 4.0