Offering no alternative solutions of their own, a few dozen advocates yesterday protested Gov. Healey’s new rule that limits migrant stays at emergency shelters to five days, saying the limit is cruel and (of course) “shameful.”

Here’s a compromise: lengthen the stay rule for those migrants who arrived here by a certain date (say August 1), due to their effectively being lured to Massachusetts by false promises that they’d be provided housing for an unspecified length of time. And who made those open-ended, financially untenable shelter promises in the first place? Among them: migrant advocates themselves. Even though they’d never admit it, they helped create the problem of migrant families wandering our streets without homes.

Anyway, back to the compromise: Today’s homeless migrant families are ultimately victims of both overpromises and broken promises by the state – so let’s help them moving forward by providing temporary shelters beyond five days. It’s the humane thing to do. But migrants arriving in Massachusetts from this point onward? The Healey rules apply.

P.S. – The Globe’s Yvonne Abraham is one of the few progressives I’ve seen who’s actually grappled with the “awful choice” of providing shelters to migrants or, as she notes, effectively blowing out the state budget. Of course, she doesn’t offer solutions, saying only there are “no good answers.”  She’s right. There are no good answers. But at least the Healey administration is trying to come up with answers.