President Joe Biden’s deputies have targeted six poor communities in New York and New Jersey as locations to resettle the foreign migrants now overflowing government-funded shelters in New York City.
The list of sites was sent to state officials, and promptly leaked to Bloomberg, which reported:
Most of the sites are outside of the city, including Stewart International Airport, a small Hudson Valley facility frequently used by private jet owners. The Atlantic City location is even in another state, New Jersey.
One recommended site, Massena International Airport, is 365 miles (588 kilometers) from the city, in remote St. Lawrence County on New York’s Canadian border. It serves as a US Customs port of entry from Canada.
There are two sites in Schenectady, one near Bear Mountain State Park, one near Newburgh; and one site in New Jersey at Atlantic City Airport.
“The burden put on our citizens would be overwhelming and the effect on the school system, roads and resources to accommodate them would be devastating,” responded Laura Pfrommer, the Republican Mayor of Egg Harbor Township in New Jersey. She added:
The humanitarian crisis created by the federal government is not appropriately dealing with the issues of immigration has unfairly resulted in small communities having to bear the brunt of this inaction … We strongly urge the federal government to actually deal with the situation at the border and not shift the responsibility to communities.
The list names also five sites in New York City, including Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, which has been approved by New York officials.
The state’s Democrat politicians know the resettlements are unpopular, and that prior efforts have prompted protests and reversals. So they are reluctant to let the city’s Democrats shove their city-made migrant problem outside the city before the 2024 elections.
“We cannot and will not force other parts of our state to shelter migrants,” Governor Kathy Hochel said in an August 24 speech. “Nor are we going to be asking these migrants to move to other parts of the state against their will,” she added.
Hochul’s proposed fix is to let the illegal migrants get federal work permits so they can compete for jobs once they get over the border. That policy would cut wages for working Americans — but allow politicians to declare that the migrants are not on welfare.
The policy would also provide the Democrats’ wealthy donors with a huge supply of cheap and compliant workers, renters, and consumers.
A group of those wealthy New York City donors are now asking the federal government — and the nation’s taxpayers — for a $12 billion bailout of the city. The bailout is sought because the flood of cheap migrants has far exceeded the city’s planned welcome.
New Yorkers outside the city do not want the city’s migrants to move into their counties.
Any new migrants force down wages, push up housing costs, and burden local governments. For example, officials in Rockland County, just north of New York City, are dealing with housing squalor and rising school costs caused by the arrival of the kids and families of migrants who work in New York.
A majority of political independents in New York say international migration has been a burden to the state over the last 20 years, according to an August poll by the New York Times and Siena College. Fifty-one percent of independent voters and 67 percent of Republican voters said immigration was a burden when they were asked, “Looking back over the past 20 years or so, do you think that migrants resettling in New York has been more of a benefit or more of a burden to the state?”
Many of the federal migrant sites are in poor areas where many Americans struggle to survive. But the planned arrival of young, healthy, and desperate migrants will likely allow U.S. employers to discard old, sick, and alienated Americans. For example, City-Data.com reports:
21.4% of Newburgh, NY residents had an income below the poverty level in 2021, which was 34.9% greater than the poverty level of 13.9% across the entire state of New York. Taking into account residents not living in families, 24.3% of high school graduates and 43.6% of non high school graduates live in poverty. The poverty rate was 22.5% among disabled males and 31.5% among disabled females. The renting rate among poor residents was 93.3%. For comparison, it was 61.8% among residents with income above the poverty level.
However, few migrants want to leave New York City, where they can earn the higher wages that they need to pay back their high-interest smuggling loans.
The migrants also know they minimize their city housing costs by crowding into shared apartments or by occupying the city’s free shelters created for poor Americans.
Also, the sites targeted by the federal government are far from the government services needed by the penniless migrant families who are being welcomed by Biden’s border deputies. Bloomberg noted:
“At these sites, it seems unlikely that anyone would be able to have access to any place where they could work,” said Josh Goldfein, a staff attorney at Legal Aid. “It’s far from legal services, from access to medical care.”
Biden has already imported at least six million migrants for economic purposes in less than three years. That strategy has helped investors by inflating real estate prices and reducing Americans’ wages. Many of the migrants are dropped off in poor cities to help boost revenues for city governments, government unions, retailers, and landlords.
Biden’s huge inflow includes roughly two million legal migrants, 3.5 million illegal and quasi-legal migrants allowed through the southern border, roughly 1.6 million “gotaways” who sneaked over the border, plus hundreds of thousands of migrants who have refused to go home when their legal visas expire.
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