Been there, deported that  

What do we have in common with the governor of Florida? You would think that would be a tough question, but it’s not. Friends, I give you the mayor of Manila.

No, I speak not of the current mayor, the gracious doctor that is Honey Lacuna. Instead, I refer to the mayor of Manila more than a hundred years ago, Mayor Justo Lukban, who I guess, in his capacity for evil, was a century ahead of Ron de Santis, current Florida governor.

So this “leader” of the Floridians gets it into his head to teach Democrats a lesson about their stance on migration into the US borders. What he does is he spends more than $12 million in taxpayers’ money to transport illegal migrants, undesirable aliens, or whatever other moniker you wish to call them, all the way from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard in Boston.

The story is, these Texan migrants thought they were being brought somewhere else. Maybe to a safe house. Maybe a shelter. Maybe a processing center. But certainly, they didn’t think they were going to end up in the posh millionaire haven that is Martha’s Vineyard.

Not that they wanted to be there. Some guy from Florida just thought it would be fun to mislead them, plus score some political points with voters sick of migrants getting the jobs that were beneath them anyway. Money taxed from the Florida populace, being spent on migrants currently in Texas? There is a disconnect there. And wouldn’t that money have been better spent in social services or kabuhayan packages?

In any case, that’s what De Santis did. Does that sound familiar to you?

Law students would find this question easy. This was the 1917 constitutional law case of Villavicencio v. Lukban, where Manila Mayor Lukban then had the brainwave of gathering 170 women of “ill-repute”, dumping them on to chartered boats, and then ferrying them to Duterte-country, where they would end up as instant employees of some haciendero named Feliciano Ynigo.

The prostitutes (the Philippine Supreme Court label, not mine) didn’t sign up for the inter-island tour. Their bordellos had been padlocked, they had waited for a week while they were on lockdown, and then, thinking they were just going to the police station, forcibly hustled onto waiting steamers. They woke up in Davao, met by Governor Francisco Sales and their new “employer”, Ynigo.

Sorry, Governor de Santis. We beat you to it. Of course, human trafficking has existed since time immemorial, what with the institution of slavery and all, but coming from a duly-elected politician of a democratic system? That was Manila.

And while the American legal system and the pundits are trying to think about what legal repercussions there could be to what you did, the Philippine Supreme Court was way ahead of your system on this.

Good thing our Supreme Court then was made of firmer backbones, taking quick action by ordering the women to be brought before them. While the respondents from Manila and Davao were quick to wash their hands of culpability, explaining to the court that some of the women had already returned to Manila while the others had signed waivers saying they didn’t want to be repatriated, and that the others had (conveniently) disappeared, the justices were stern enough to opine that there would have been both civil and criminal legal liability for what the women had endured.

In the end, faced with a united front of powerful men not wishing to take accountability, the court just imposed a small fine for contempt of court. But the lessons were clear --there are constitutional rights being violated. Liberty and all that. Lessons we learned, ironically, from those who first dreamed of the Bill of Rights.

As we know so well by now, democracy is fragile. Rights not only have to be enshrined, they have to be constantly fought for. Hence, budgets greater than one single peso, if you please.