Ordinary Americans should pay the $2 billion cost of housing and feeding the economic migrants that New York City leaders are putting into Americans’ jobs and apartments, according to Mayor Eric Adams.
“We expect more from our national leaders to address this in a real way,” Adams told a group of Venezuelan economic migrants during a brief Sunday trip to the border town of El Paso, Texas.
“Our price tag could be anywhere from $1.5 to $2 billion,” Adams told told a radio interviewer on January 13.
On Sunday, job seeking migrants cheered when Adams — a Democrat — told migrants he would fight to ensure that they “experience the American dream.”
In December 2022, a city report declared that one in seven New Yorkers already live in poverty: “Under the Official Poverty Measure (OPM), 13.9 percent of New Yorkers — or nearly 2.7 million people — lived in poverty in 2021, compared to 12.8 percent of all Americans. ‘
Yet Adams also complained about the cost of accepting the additional poor migrants that he is welcoming. “New York cannot take more — we can’t,” Adams told the press conference.
He added, “Our cities are being undermined — we don’t deserve this,” the New York Times reported on Sunday.
Adams’ $2 billion demand is twice his October demand for $1 billion, and it comes after President Joe Biden invited many more thousands of low-wage, apartment-sharing migrants to seek jobs in the United States. “We’re trying to make it easier for people to get here,” Biden declared in a January 10 summit meeting in Mexico.
Nearly all of the migrants are seeking work, partly because many have to repay loans and mortgages which they took out to fund their trek to Biden’s border welcome. Many also bring their children, hoping for free schooling in the schools needed by American kids.
However, New York City comptroller Brad Lander tweeted his support for labor migration in the city:
But the Mayor’s trip to Texas does little to deliver the $$ NYC needs to provide shelter & services. Instead, it risks reinforcing a harmful narrative that new immigrants themselves are a problem.
Far from “undermining” our city, immigrants have been the driving force for NYC’s success for centuries …
But he also said the city’s elite should help pay for the migration with higher taxes:
To be clear: We must also do more for low-income & working class New Yorkers. So in addition to rightly demanding more from DC & Albany, we’ve urged the mayor to raise revenues from the wealthiest NYers, to help struggling families afford the rising cost of housing & child care.
The New York Times reported on Adams’ visit to the border, but downplayed the local economic damage caused to Americans by the government’s welcome for low-wage migrant workers:
Mr. Adams has struggled to respond to the flood of migrants arriving on buses in New York City, constantly shifting his strategy and his rhetoric. The city has provided shelter, food, clothing and schooling to thousands of migrants and their children, and Mr. Adams has argued that migrants should be able to work legally in the city more quickly.
But the mayor has also struck a harsh tone at times, calling on Mr. Biden to slow the flow of migrants at the border and saying shortly after Christmas that there was “no more room at the inn” in New York for additional migrants. As the city faces growing budget challenges, Mr. Adams has said that the migrant crisis may require cuts to basic city services.
Overall, the Biden migrants being welcomed by Adams because they allow the city’s Democratic leaders to preserve their high/low economy.
The divided economy allows a small number of wealthy landlords and investors keep political power amid a fractured city of divided, diverse, distracted, and poor voters.
Between the 1940s and about 1990, the city’s wage gap was much smaller because tight curbs on international immigration from roughly 1925 to 1990. During those decades, nearly all newcomers to the city were outspoken, equality-minded Americans from nearby U.S. states, such as Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
If the supply of post-1990s imported labor was ended by Congress, the city’s investors otherwise would be forced to again offer middle-class wages to help recruit Americans from upstate New York cities, or from other states such as New Jersey, Maine, New Hampshire, and West Virginia.
City leaders hide their post-1990s exploitation of migrants behind the 1950s “Nation of Immigrants” narrative. That elite-imposed narrative repurposes the Statue of Liberty from a celebration of Americans’ constitution into a “Golden Door” invite for foreign economic migrants.
Adams’ welcome for migrants also generates many customers for the city’s welfare, aid, housing, education, and medical agencies.
For example, the city is providing overnight shelters to more than 60,000 homeless people each night, and is adding at least 5,500 migrant children to the overcrowded and failing schools needed by the city’s non-wealthy American families. City employees provide a critical slice of votes to Democrats in the city’s elections.
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