The massive inflow of President Joe Biden’s foreign migrants into New York City is causing a crisis in the city’s chaotic and expensive housing market.
Welcoming Democrats are trying to fix their self-inflicted problem by deporting some of the migrants to lower-wage employers in peripheral cities, and by holding other migrants in unused cruise liners.
Local and migrants are also competing for housing spaces, including at one 1,000-bed shelter, the New York Post reported on September 19, saying:
“We don’t want them here because, to be honest with you, to me they’re getting treated better than we do, and this is supposed to be ours,” said Darrell Pankey, a homeless resident for six months.
The report said:
The city’s Bellevue Men’s Shelter at 30th Street and First Avenue in Kips Bay has become a tinder box of newly arrived migrants, unhinged vagrants, and sex offenders – an explosive amalgam that’s wreaking havoc on the streets of the once-quiet residential neighborhood.
“In the last six months, it’s gotten really, really scary,” according to one terrified resident of the block who said police recently contacted him about an armed robbery and a carjacking in front of his house.
Many migrants go to New York because they can earn decent wages while also sharing apartments with many other migrants. That communal economic strategy is illegal. But it helps the migrants quickly pay their high-interest smuggling debts and it allows landlords to earn more money from several working migrants than that by renting a small apartment to one American family.
This communal strategy helps to raise rents city-wide, so it also pressures Americans to share their apartments or pay even higher rents. The resulting public anger threatens to spark a voter rejection of the Democrats’ cheap-labor migration policies.
For many years, the same mass migration process has been inflating housing in California, Texas, Florida, and many other states.
“Surging housing costs [nationwide] are the engine driving Tuesday’s worrisome [inflation] report — and it’s going to be tough to bring them down,” Axios reported on September 14. “Shelter costs were the single most important category driving core inflation up, as they are weighted heavily in CPI calculations,” Axios added.
The New York Post reported on September 19: “The influx is crippling the New York [housing] shelter system. Full-time facilities are being pushed to the brink and affecting the quality of life of the neighborhood and the city has opened 23 emergency shelters, but there are still not enough beds.”
Unused cruiser liner could be used for extra bed space, said the city’s mayor:
“We examined everything from the legality of using any type of cruise ship for temporary housing,” Hizzoner [Mayor Eric Adams] said during an interview on WCBS Sunday.
Officials are also considering changing the city’s shelter law, the New York Post reported on September 15:
City Hall’s top lawyer wants to change the way the city complies with the court-mandated guarantee of speedy access to a bed for the homeless as the recent wave of 11,000 migrant arrivals has pushed the social safety net to the breaking point.
The comments Thursday morning from Brendan McGuire, Mayor Eric Adams’ chief legal counsel, came hours after Hizzoner ignited a firestorm by saying “prior practices” must be “reassessed.”
Another safety valve suggested by Democrats is to deport some of the migrants to smaller inland cities north and west of New York.
Democratic “Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand wants to help solve the Big Apple’s shelter crisis by relocating newly arrived migrants to upstate cities,” said a September 16 report in the New York Post. The transfer would “use the population boost to qualify for pork-barrel federal funds as she seeks reelection,” the report added.
The report continued:
City Councilmember Gale Brewer (D-Manhattan) confirmed Gillibrand recently pitched the [migrant transfer] idea to her as well. “She told me that arrangements could be made for [migrants who transfer on] housing assistance, childcare, school assistance and working,” Brewer said. “She seemed to feel this is a solution for some who might want to go.”
Former New York Gov. David Paterson blasted fellow Democrats for not integrating the migrants into the housing and job market.
“It reminds me … of some criticisms that were often made during the integration movement, where there were people who were pro-integration,” the far-left Patterson told WABC Radio’s Cats Roundtable show. He continued:
They were liberals. But they didn’t want anybody moving into their neighborhoods. Someone else was going to have to live with the African-Americans and Hispanics who moved into those neighborhoods … You kind of have history repeating itself 50 years later.
That race-themed criticism is easy for Patterson because he does not need to maintain popular support. It is also easy because is avoid criticizing the city’s elite for using international migration to shift the city’s wealth and power into their corner.
Democrats have a long history of inflating New York’s economy and rents by importing foreign workers and renters. That Extraction Migration economic strategy is kept hidden under their 1950s-era claim that the United States has always been a “Nation of Immigrants.”
In contrast, GOP leaders are largely silent about the housing crisis and other economic distortions caused by the Biden migration.
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