The wrong cut
Announcements that City Hall is reversing widespread municipal budget cuts have overshadowed the flip side of the coin, which is that Mayor Adams and Budget Director Jacques Jiha are moving to trim spending 10% from migrant services, long blamed for threatening the city’s coffers in the first place.
There’s nothing wrong with the city moving to find efficiencies in what have been massive and often profligate expenditures, but it’s a mistake to include on the chopping block literacy and legal services assistance for migrants.
If there’s one consistency of much of the criticism about the Adams administration’s approach in these nearly two years of contending with migrant arrivals, it’s a certain reactivity that gets in the way of a long-term approach. It’s understandable for the government to be playing catch-up; existing systems weren’t really set up to address this specific circumstance, and so it’s been making up a playbook as it goes along.
That doesn’t mean we should lose sight of what the best outcome looks like here: migrants integrating into the labor force, finding stability and becoming another layer of the immigration-driven economic and cultural primacy that has for so long characterized this city. How quickly and smoothly we reach that objective depends on thinking about more than immediate costs and going with what works.
The prolonged emergency contracts with significant waste and insufficient oversight; the opening, shuttering, and reopening of a tent shelter on Randalls Island; the shoddily rolled out efforts to place migrants in upstate counties; the stalled efforts to house migrants in houses of worship. All are efforts to contend with what has undeniably been an intractable issue — one which the city has been all but forced to handle creatively on its own after the state has proved a wishy-washy partner and the federal government has been practically MIA — whose impact was limited by the execution.
Cutting literacy, workforce, case management and legal assistance programs for migrants will be looked back on as perhaps an even more short-sighted move, saving some pennies on the front end while missing out on significant benefits in the long run.
City Hall might see these as just additional line items, but these costs can produce significant returns and better outcomes as migrants go through the legal processes to obtain work authorizations, learn how to navigate government systems and the job market and move towards the self-sufficiency that both they and the city so desperately want.
While Adams has been resorting to administrative steps like the 30- and 60-day shelter limits to encourage migrants to move on, the other way to get people out on their own is to help them get a legal job. So, by all means, the city can and should cut spending on migrant services, starting with the bloated contracts that seem to be mainly delivering results for private executives at the Texas-based SLSCO and other companies.
There’s no reason we should be paying astronomical rates for shelters and food, especially when there are so many local nonprofits, community groups and faith institutions willing to do similar work at fractions of the cost. But don’t cut spending on the services that will actually help asylum seekers land on their feet and exit the city’s charity care.