At NY airport, a migrant camp isolated from city
Gusts of wind lash the runways of a former airfield in New York as migrant families with children slowly walk across, eyeing the city’s world-famous skyline off in the distance. The field, described by aid workers as in the “middle of nowhere,” is providing emergency shelter for 1,800 migrants, a potent symbol of the immigration crisis facing the American metropolis.
Asylum seekers flanked by hangars and runways tell AFP they want to “start over from scratch.” Many of the migrants at Floyd Bennett Field come from Latin America and Africa, but some are from China and Russia. In large tents, with additional shared areas for eating and doing paperwork, up to 500 families sleep side-by-side in cramped, subdivided spaces.
“It’s a bit difficult,” says David Fernandez, 32, from Ecuador, describing cold, noisy conditions and the site’s distance from the city. Manhattan’s skyscrapers are visible from the runways, but still more than an hour away on public transport. There are no shops or other services in the immediate vicinity.
“We can’t complain, because they’re helping
us... We have a roof over our heads to rest under, and blankets,” Fernandez says stoically, happy that his son, 11, and daughter, seven, got into a Brooklyn school.
In November the Fernandez family left their home in Ecuador, which has been gripped by drug violence. After almost two weeks journeying through Central America and a two-and-a-half day bus ride from Texas, they finally arrived in New York. “I have to stay in the camp until I can find a house and a job,” says Fernandez, one of the 2.4 million to have illegally crossed from Mexico into the United States in 2023, creating a political divide between Democrats and Republicans in a presidential election year. — AFP