Eric Adams’ migrant endgame

This week, Mayor Eric Adams ordered city agencies to cut a combined £1.1 billion a year[1] over the next four years to help deal with the costs of caring for the illegal migrants who have flooded into the city since October, even as the city moves to add yet more hotels to "temporarily" shelter them, on top of the 110 shelters already running. For all the fat in city government, eventually this is going to cost serious muscle mass. Yet no endgame is anywhere in sight.

The migrant total is 55,000 and rising. Absent an also-nowhere-in-sight radical Biden administration shift at the border, we could see double that by year's end. Adams' "decompression strategy[2]," trying to relocate handfuls of migrants to upstate communities, out-of-state and Canada, shows few signs of major success (and Canada's already screaming[3]).

Legal work permits for the migrants won't come soon (the queues to even start the paperwork stretch years into the future), and state plans to further goose the minimum wage will leave few employers looking to hire them anyway. Which means that few are leaving the "shelter" hotels; how long before the city can't find any more takers except by paying even more absurd rates and pricing tourists out of the market?

MigrantsNew York City is already planning to add more hotels to "temporarily" shelter migrants.J. Messerschmidt/NY Post

The cost is already over £4.3 billion and growing with every bus arriving at the Port Authority.

One possible solution is to at long last reopen the decades-old "right to shelter" consent decree, which obliges City Hall to house every comer. But that would put Adams at war with much of the city's left, something he's shown pretty limited appetite for. Yet the alternative is service cuts that the left (and regular citizens) will hate even more.

Does the city close firehouses, libraries, schools, police stations? As Queens City Councilman Robert Holden notes[4], "While a New Yorker's love is infinite, our money and infrastructure are finite[5]." Gov.

Kathy Hochul has offered £1 billion in emergency state aid, called out the National Guard to help process the newcomers and joined the drive for more assistance from the feds.

MigrantsThere are currently 110 shelters already running in the city.Robert Miller

But even most Democrats in Washington don't seem to care. The White House plainly doesn't. If a situation can't continue, then it won't.

At some point, the crisis will force something to break or at least bend. We'd rather it wasn't deep service cuts, but that's where the city's headed. But it's not just the city's resources that are limited.

So is New Yorkers' patience with their elected officials.

References

  1. ^ to cut a combined £1.1 billion a year (nypost.com)
  2. ^ decompression strategy (nypost.com)
  3. ^ already screaming (nypost.com)
  4. ^ Robert Holden notes (nypost.com)
  5. ^ our money and infrastructure are finite (nypost.com)

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