NYC Mayor Eric Adams' alarm over the city's migrant crisis

New York City Mayor Eric Adams is calling for city agencies to reduce spending by 15% in the coming months to make up for money being spent to accommodate a flood of 110,000 migrants seeking asylum, Politico reported. "Never in my life have I had a problem that I did not see an ending to — I don't see an ending to this," the mayor said at a Manhattan town hall. "This issue will destroy New York City."

Adams said the crisis started just over a year ago when a "madman" started bussing undocumented migrants into his city — a reference to Texas' Republican governor, Greg Abbott, who has sent busloads of asylum seekers from his state to New York, Chicago, and other cities run by Democrats to step up pressure on President Biden to clamp down on the southern border. But Adams also has criticized Biden, a fellow Democrat, saying, "We're getting no support on this national crisis" from the federal government, according to The New York Times. 

The White House is calling on Congress to address the crisis with immigration reform. New York Immigration Coalition Executive Director Murad Awawdeh, echoing complaints from other critics, said Adams' comments would only fuel prejudice and be "dangerous" to migrants, according to The Guardian. The clash is feeding into Republican criticism of Biden's handling of the border, and threatens to become a "major political problem" for Democrats heading toward the 2024 elections. Is this wave of asylum seekers really threatening to overwhelm New York, and, if so, whose job is it to fix the problem?

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'What took him so damn long?'

It's obvious that having to feed, clothe, house, and educate more than 100,000 newcomers could push New York to the breaking point, said Michael Goodwin in the New York Post. No fewer than 60,000 of these migrants are "living at taxpayer expense." Adams should have started sounding the alarm "the moment President Biden threw open the southern border and the first batches of illegal crossers landed in Manhattan." Inexplicably, he waited until now to act. "What took him so damn long?"

Adams and other liberals a thousand miles from the Mexican border now are "getting a taste of life along the southern border," said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. But instead of blaming Texas, which sent less than one-tenth of the migrants that have arrived in New York City in the last year, he should blame himself and his fellow Democrats. New York City has a legal "right to shelter" that puts the city on the hook for accommodating the newcomers. And "controlling the border is President Biden's duty."

It's not Biden's fault, but he can help

Adams isn't helping by "simply screaming (falsely) that New York is about to go under," said Errol Louis in New York magazine. Instead, he should be "inspiring confidence and building political support" to show how everyone can set aside "personal fears" and resolve a crisis together. "The city badly needs federal relief on the jobs front, preferably in the form of the Biden administration’s granting Temporary Protected Status to migrants fleeing violent chaos in Venezuela." That would let most of these migrants get work so they can support themselves. Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) can help, too, by issuing executive orders to "compel suburban and upstate counties to accept some of the migrants flooding into New York City."

Letting new arrivals work is a good start, said former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in The New York Times, but it will take more than that to defuse this crisis. "Our long-broken immigration system has now become a full-blown crisis with the collapse of the asylum process." Biden has "failed to address the steep price many cities are paying for a system they didn't create and borders the cities don't control." But the surge of asylum seekers at the southern border started rising under former President Donald Trump, and his "partial border wall has done nothing to slow the flow. Both parties created the problem, and both parties must work together to fix it."