Gov. Greg Abbott is a genius. His devious plot to school the smug liberals to the north about the migrant crisis on our Southern border is working beautifully.
When the Texas governor sent another charter bus full of migrants to Manhattan in August 2022, New York City Mayor Eric Adams waited at the Port Authority bus terminal to extend a welcoming hand to the new arrivals.
“We’ve always welcomed them, and this governor is not doing that in Texas,” Adams said at the time. “But we are going to set the right tone of being here for these families.” Part of that tone-setting included establishing a welcome center inside the bus terminal, where migrants were given clothes and a hot meal, as well as guidance for navigating their new life in a vast, overwhelming metropolis.
Nine months later, the Adams administration shuttered the welcome center with little notice. An administration spokesman assigned blame to activist volunteers who worked at the center for luring migrants to the city “with false promises.” Adams would later declare that the migrant issue was, in fact, a burden that would “destroy” his city. He exaggerated the extent to which the new migrants were straining the city budget. He sought to unravel a 42-year-old consent decree establishing the city’s legal obligation to provide housing for anyone who needed it, which has forced the city to pay for additional shelter space and hotels to temporarily house migrants.
Recently, Adams limited new bus arrivals to a single location and threatened criminal charges for bus companies that ran afoul of the new rules. Last Thursday, he announced a lawsuit seeking $700 million in damages from 17 bus companies he asserted were transporting migrants from Texas with “evil intentions” of forcing the city to care for them.
Back at the governor’s mansion in Austin, Abbott is likely delighting in New York’s winter of discontent. Adams’ flailing and overheated rhetoric have reinforced the potency of Abbott’s political gambit. By callously dumping Texas’ migrant problem onto a major blue city — nearly 34,000 migrants have been bused to New York since August 2022 — Abbott has goaded Adams, a high-profile Democratic politician, into bucking his party’s orthodoxy that supporting and protecting immigrants should never be questioned, even for immigrants who cross our borders illegally.
In doing so, Abbott is not only sowing chaos in New York; he’s attempting to erode support for critical legal protections such as migrants’ right to seek asylum and New York’s right-to-shelter law. He has effectively put President Joe Biden in the uncomfortable position of having to confront the fact that the massive wave of migrants arriving at our border is, indeed, a “crisis,” despite administration officials’ preference to call it anything but that.
After all, if New York, a well-resourced megacity, can’t handle thousands of migrants arriving each week, how can we expect smaller border cities such as El Paso and Laredo to do the same? And let’s not forget that New York prides itself on welcoming immigrants. From 1886 through 1924, the Statue of Liberty greeted some 14 million immigrants arriving at Ellis Island. As City Comptroller Brad Lander noted in a September op-ed, these immigrants “built the Erie Canal, the railroads, the Empire State Building, the garment industry, and the city’s status as a global financial center.” It’s not just a catchy tune from “Hamilton” — New York City immigrants really do get the job done. They make up 36% of the city’s population and close to half of its workforce.
Even so, this latest migrant influx is testing New York City’s noble commitments to ensuring shelter for all and welcoming newcomers with open arms.
More than 60,000 migrants live in city shelters, leading to a massive shortage of beds for a homeless population that has ballooned to more than 90,000 people. While the Adams administration has imposed 60-day limits on shelter stays for migrant families with children, they can simply reapply for another 60 days if they can’t find permanent housing. St. Brigid, a former Catholic School in Manhattan’s East Village, has been converted into a “reticketing center,” a shelter that will also provide free one-way tickets to migrants who want to leave town. Every day hundreds of migrants line up in the bitter cold, waiting to hear whether they’ve been granted another shelter stay. Some sleep on the street so they don’t lose their place in line. It’s especially expensive to shelter and feed migrants in this high-rent city: nearly $400 per person each day. Over the next two years, the total cost is expected to reach $3.1 billion.
While Abbott’s cruel, opportunistic busing program bears much of the blame for straining New York’s resources, the city’s right-to-shelter law also exerts a singular pull for migrants. Migrants with no connection to the city are showing up at its doorstep, with word of mouth spreading across the globe that the city can provide free shelter and a gateway to a better life.
Adams’ rhetoric, which can be read as vilifying migrants, is dangerous and irresponsible. He is, however, correct on one point: the federal government must finally take responsibility for this problem. So far, Biden’s solutions have been mostly half-measures. He has attempted to ease the burden on cities dealing with the migrant surge by authorizing temporary legal status to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who are already in the country, which, in theory, will allow them to find work and pay rent. He has worked with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to set aside federally owned land in the city for shelter space. He’s allocated $50 million to New York to shoulder the costs of housing and caring for migrants, with another $100 million supposedly on the way.
Perhaps the most impactful thing Biden could do to help New York immediately is heed Adams’ call to expedite work permits. Many of the new migrants have myriad skills and yearn to work and contribute to the city. Allowing them to find work will free up shelter space and, eventually, benefit the city economically. Biden could do more on the U.S.-Mexico border, too. Thousands more asylum officers are needed to screen migrants. And to stem the wave of migrants at the points of entry, Biden should direct those officers to process migrants on a “last in, first out” basis, with new arrivals getting priority for asylum screenings. Doing so would help clear the backlog of 1.6 million pending asylum cases.
Abbott, meanwhile, should really find something more constructive to do with his creative genius. He was right that busing migrants to so-called sanctuary cities would draw needed attention to the border crisis and cause dissent among Democrats who otherwise support Biden. But what now? Where does the stunt end and the solution begin?
It’s tempting to imagine a reality in which Abbott, Adams and Biden step out of their political silos and work together. If Abbott and Adams were less interested in grandstanding, they would organize a joint meeting with Biden and fashion a bipartisan appeal for the comprehensive immigration reform that everybody — even those who work against it these days — knows that we desperately need. At the very least, Abbott and Adams could rise to this moment and urge congressional leaders to work together on the border security compromise that’s reportedly been in the works for weeks.
But that would take real leadership — something that, for all Abbott’s genius and Adams’ moral outrage — neither can seem to muster.
Houston Chronicle
