President Joe Biden’s progressive deputies are spending $3 billion to help many poor migrants get into U.S. cities, even as other pro-migration groups complain that current illegal migrants are going homeless in those high-rent cities.
The New York Post reported May 7 on the commercial contracts, which help U.S. officials provide the migrants with aid and legal resources so they can stay in the United States:
The federal government has awarded about $3 billion in contracts to shelter unaccompanied illegal immigrant children since February, records show.
The Department of Health and Human Services awarded the three largest federal contracts, worth over $2 billion, to two private companies and one nonprofit — as record illegal immigration surges began overwhelming authorities at the southern border.
Meanwhile, the economic turmoil has pushed many Americans out of jobs, and sometimes, into opioids.
The disruption has had an outsize effect on the labor market for illegals, many of whom have been hired by low-wage employers in the very competitive food industry. “Activists and social workers in states like New York or California say more vulnerable immigrants, whom[sic] often don’t qualify for aid, are finding themselves without a home,” said a May 4 report May 4 by the Associated Press
The AP added:
In Los Angeles, The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights has seen a “significant increase” of calls to a hotline of assistance for immigrants over the last six months, said Jorge-Mario Cabrera, the spokesman for the organization. “We have seen an increase in calls from individuals living in the street, living in cars, living in garages or often living with friends in already overcrowded conditions,” said Cabrera.
“They don’t even have money to pay for their phone bills. This is why we are saying that one of the side effects of the COVID-19 (pandemic) is in fact a complete unraveling of the safety net for undocumented immigrants,” he added. “While other communities are receiving (financial) assistance, immigrants are receiving nothing, most of the time.”
More New York-based illegals are going homeless, AP added:
I have seen an increase of [the number of] encampments of immigrants experiencing homelessness in Queens. Each has five or six tents,” said Yessenia Benitez, a 30-year-old licensed clinical social worker who helps these groups.
DocumentedNY.com reported on homeless illegals on April 8:
Eduardo is surrounded by a pile of cans and the tent where he sleeps. He worked in a restaurant for five years before losing his job during the COVID-19 pandemic. “I still had money so I was able to last about two months in my apartment. Then the money finished,” Eduardo’s voice trailed off as the sun shone in his face, “I started living here and there.” As a homeless undocumented immigrant that originally came from Mexico, Eduardo did not receive any government assistance during the pandemic. After he was forced out of the room he was informally renting, he joined an encampment in Queens.
Eduardo, who declined to share his real name, is one of about thirty homeless people living in an encampment in a quiet alley in Elmhurst, Queens that’s dotted with tents.
The elites in many U.S. cities welcome illegal migrants as cheap labor for their service sectors, said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
The migration “makes life easier for the elites of cities and relieves them of the necessity of [economic] reform because when [American] people leave, other [migrant] people move in,” he said.
New York leaders rely heavily on foreign migrants to support the city’s low-wage service sector — but many of the migrants have fled their jobs and housing because of China’s coronavirus disease.
On April 1, Joseph Salvo, New York City’s chief demographer, told the New York Times why the city of eight million needs new bodies to replace the legal and illegal migrants who exited the city:
In the pandemic, [migrants] are trying to make a living and coming home and living in close proximity to other people. And they work the cash-only jobs, service jobs, services in buildings, home health aides, that we start to lose. Our growth is going to depend on giving support to these immigrants, many of whom suffered and lost family members.
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What we pray will happen is that the city will come back with a ferocity we have never seen in food, beverage, entertainment and hotels. All of that is going to come back. And hopefully the immigrant population will prosper because of that. That’s the key.
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The city is 37 percent foreign-born, and if you add the next generation, it’s more than 50 percent. We have more than three million immigrants. The largest groups are from China, Dominican Republic and Mexico.
If Biden does not supply the city with a new wave of needy low-wage migrants, the city’s business and government leaders will have to reform their local economy so that it can attract young Americans from interior states with offers of higher wages, cheaper real estate, and better law enforcement.
But the inflow of illegals ensures that the city’s big-government party does not have to undertake these painful reforms, Krikorian said:
One of the advantages for the left of mass immigration is that it exacerbates the social problems that the left purports to have the solutions for. So more homelessness in a sense, is good [for the left] because it means that we need more government programs, more interventions, more social workers.
In April, New York’s government allocated $2.1 billion to help preserve its population of poor migrants. The payout of up to $15,600 per migrant helps the city elites to extract wealth and political power from economically pressured blue-collar and white-collar Americans.
“The city will rise — It will rise through the power of [foreign] immigration,” Salvo said.
Overall, Biden’s open-borders policy helps elites and investors hire servile migrants instead of outspoken Americans from poor states and regions, such as Sen. Joe Manchin’s West Virginia or Sen. Mitch McConnell’s Kentucky.
GOP politicians have noticed the widening wealth gap. “For states like mine, frequently, the sharper young people go off to school in the East and find where they came from a little too slow after that,” McConnell told the Washington Examiner April 29.
But GOP leaders have done little or nothing to stop the nation’s migration system from shifting wealth from interior GOP-led states to the Democrat-run coastal states.
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