City Hall’s Worst Excuse Yet

Residents are still fleeing New York City’s high crime and high taxes in massive numbers, but City Hall pretends that’s OK — because they’re being replaced by illegal migrants. Seriously?

Per new census data, some 78,000 New Yorkers got out of Dodge last year, shrinking the city’s population to 8.26 million.

But wait! urged mayoral flack Casey Berkovitz: That doesn’t account for the 64,600 migrants who flooded in; the Department of City Planning’s “analysis indicates that the city’s population was essentially unchanged between July 2022 and 2023.”

So hardworking, taxpaying residents, the ones who spend money at New York businesses and keep revenue flowing into government coffers, are fleeing — but migrants, now costing the public about $387 per day per household, are keeping the overall numbers about the same.

Nothing to see here, folks! Except that people who have lived here — rich, poor and middle class — keep leaving, voting with their feet. The migrants are only voting against wherever they came from; that New York beats, say, gangster-socialism-ravaged Venezuela is hardly a vote of confidence.

State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli has raised the alarm on population loss, warning that Personal Income Tax filers, the kind who are leaving for greener pastures, account for “the largest state tax revenue.”

Worse: New York’s population has been plummeting since the pandemic. Some 545,498 residents left in 2022, heading for safer, cheaper, lower-tax states.

Democrats can’t afford to keep ignoring what is driving people away: crime-ridden streets and subways, schools that don’t teach, the ever-rising cost of living.

And City Hall pretending the migrant flood changes that picture in any way for the better only adds insult to the injury.