"What better pathway for cultural progress than to have university communities interact with recent immigrant arrivals through housing, socializing, and schooling immigrants?"

Victor Davis Hanson writes in National Review,

College campuses have lots of empty housing during the summer. Proudly progressive institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Stanford should welcome illegal immigrants.

...if Ocasio-Cortez is worried about maltreatment, illness, and hunger of the poor, she would find a half-million in dire need on the streets of America’s major cities, almost all of which are currently controlled by progressive mayors and city councils, whose zoning and gentrification and green regulatory polices ensure an absence of low-cost housing.

To walk in the downtown areas of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Fresno, or San Jose is to witness many of California’s 130,000 homeless living on the sidewalks and streets among fifth, refuse, feces, needles, lice, fleas, and rats — history’s traditional ingredients for plague and death, with our era’s addition of drug paraphernalia. Juxtaposed to these medieval scenes are soap-box lectures about caring, intoned by progressive elites such as Mark Zuckerberg, Gavin Newsome, and Nancy Pelosi, who live in splendor in Bay Area keeps, their private neighborhood security details ensuring that their constituent peasantry keep their trash, illnesses, and defecation lower down the hill and outside the walls.

Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford, to take just a few examples, might each volunteer to house and feed 1,000 detainees each. Think of the advantages that would accrue to everyone involved in the present tragedy. Immigrants would find safe and sanitary 90-day quarters, almost all of them in university towns that are proud sanctuary cities. Many universities have top-ranked medical schools. Hundreds of resident interns might offer their medical expertise pro bono, especially about hard-to-treat resistant tuberculosis or bouts of little-seen whooping cough. Yale and Harvard law schools are famous for their legal expertise and could offer immigrants top-flight counsel about ensuring refugee status. Schools would have incentives to expedite repatriation before the September commencement of classes.

Our universities are, of course, loci of progressive caring and are praised for their sharp opposition to what they think are archaic ideas of sovereignty, border security, and legal-only immigration. And yet so often our social-justice warriors are distant from the concrete recipients of their own often loud advocacy. What better pathway for cultural progress than to have university communities interact with recent immigrant arrivals through housing, socializing, and schooling immigrants? A kid from Atherton, Cambridge, or Chevy Chase might learn a lot by living among arrivals from Oaxaca and vice versa.

At least such first-hand association would ground urban progressives’ abstract advocacy in real-life caring. Immigrants would, at last, be able to socialize with and appreciate their progressive advocates.

In short, the summer-time use of underutilized university campuses — many of the smaller ones are financially strapped and in dire need of revenue — as contracting agencies with the federal government is an ideal solution to those who are worried about the supposed callous treatment in overcrowded and underfunded federal immigration centers.

Read much more here, especially Hanson's discussion of World War II's concentration camps.