On Monday’s broadcast of Bloomberg’s “The Close,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) stated that the city can’t afford the costs of the migrant influx to the city, but he also wants to ensure illegal immigrants “have the right to use the services” their tax dollars pay for.

Co-host Romaine Bostick asked, “[A]lmost $7 billion spent just since mid-2022 on shelters, tens of thousands — or hundreds of thousands of migrants still in this city using city services, can New York City afford that?”

Adams responded, “No, they cannot. Like you indicated, $6.5 billion. You know what I could have done with $200 million of that? I could have gone after those chronically absent young people, hundreds of millions of dollars we could put into our older adults. These were taxpayers’ dollars that were used for a national problem. The White House only gave us roughly a little over $200 million out of the $6.5 billion, and we can’t. Look at what’s happened to Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, all of these big cities that had to take on this crisis. It was wrong, and we need to make sure that it doesn’t continue to happen.”

Later, Adams said, “When an undocumented person walks in a store and buy[s] a loaf of bread, those taxes, he’s paying if he’s documented or not. So, you should have the right to use the services that your tax dollars are [paying] for. What I am saying [is] those who are committing repeated violent acts, they should not be in our city to be released on our streets to continue to carry out those violent acts against longstanding New Yorkers and migrants and asylum seekers.”

After Adams stated that he wants people in the country illegally but aren’t a danger to society to get needed services, co-host Alix Steel then asked, “But we can’t afford it, right? But you just said we can’t afford those things.”

Adams responded, “No, we want to give them the services they [need] and show them the next step on the American journey like other immigrants. Immigrants have come to this city for hundreds and hundreds of years. I don’t care if it’s the early Irish that built our subway system, the early Italians, the early Caribbeans. Immigrants have always come to this city, but they found their way. And that’s what we did to 170,000 migrants and asylum seekers. The city cannot pick up their tab. We need to put them on a pathway to find their way to pursue the American Dream.”

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