Migrant burden or benefit?

At a town hall meeting this past week, Mayor Adams did not mince words in outlining an apocalyptic vision for the city, driven dripby-drip by buses arriving to Port Authority carrying thousands of migrants into what has long been called an immigrant city. After bragging that he had “turned this city around in 20 months,” he practically laid every financial problem of his administration at the feet of migrants, saying “this issue will destroy New York City.” It was of a piece with previous similar statements, including once comparing migrant arrivals to 9/11 and COVID-19.

Let’s get down to brass tacks here: immigration has not and will not destroy New York City. A lack of immigration certainly would. Everything that this city is is linked absolutely to its immigration legacy, without which we would be nothing — a middling, mid-size port, perhaps, certainly not one of the global capitals of culture and commerce.

Most New Yorkers know this abstractly, but to put it in comparative terms, during Ellis Island’s heyday a century ago, as many as 10,000 immigrants were arriving by ship daily, most of them passing through in a matter of hours. That was at a time when NYC’s population was about half what it is today, meaning the city was receiving roughly the contemporary equivalent of as many as 20,000 people per day, and some 10,000 on average. Today, we are getting 10,000 newcomers a month.

They were largely quite poor and had levels of educational attainment far below contemporary migrant arrivals; many were outright illiterate. The stream of arrivals doubled the city’s population between 1900 and 1930, surging it by more than 3.5 million. Was the city destroyed? No. This immigration powered its development into the sort of city that stands as a global icon of opportunity, a self-perpetuating truism that has so many asylum seekers choosing here as the place to try to start over.

Now, it’s obvious that the realities of immigration a century ago aren’t exactly parallel to today. Yesteryear’s immigrants were mostly left to fend for themselves, and there was certainly no equivalent to the city’s current shelter mandate, which compels it to provide at minimum a place to live for the tens of thousands of new arrivals.

Pre-1921, arrivals generally didn’t even need visas, let alone work authorization. They were basically expected to arrive, settle in as best they could and work to sustain themselves immediately, in housing that, even adjusted for inflation, cost a small fraction of what it does today.

The current situation — a product of a cascade of failures at all levels of government stretching back decades, from GOP legislators blocking every single attempt to shift immigration laws for years to President Biden’s hands-off approach on financial assistance and logistical coordination to Albany’s willingness to let Adams handle it alone — is undoubtedly unsustainable.

Yet the juxtaposition to our past immigrant experience only highlights the fact that this so-called crisis is only so as a result of choices made or not made, choices like policy roadblocks against migrants’ ability to quickly start working; like the federal government’s almost insultingly paltry financial disbursements; like Gov. Hochul’s discomfort with signaling that other counties must be part of the solution.

The problem with all the buck-passing and politicking of the past year is that it assumes inherently that the migrants are a burden, where the predominant question is who exactly should shoulder that burden and how. This framing is already a failure of imagination and an abdication of a leadership vision.

When immigrants have historically been this country’s greatest asset, a rational approach would be for the federal government to take point in providing support like faster work authorizations and basic housing and employment assistance, as they already do for refugees. Then states, localities and local nonprofits could divvy up guarantees of certain supports like getting driver’s licenses, health insurance and navigating employment law and work training.

Municipalities shouldn’t be fighting over who has to shoulder support for migrants, they should be fighting over who gets to take them in and have them help with the post-COVID economic revitalization and the current labor crunch. With cases still playing out for years, the majority of these folks are likely going to be around at least through Adams’ first term, and some large portion will win their cases and remain indefinitely.

Before the mayor and other detractors launch into more diatribes about how the city’s full, they should keep in mind that the city’s population nosedived by an estimated 468,000 people between mid-2020 and mid-2022, or some eight times the number of migrants currently in the city’s care; some of them have returned, many haven’t.

The retort that the city wasn’t responsible for taking care of those people in the same way only emphasizes the fact that this is far from the type of influx that would actually overwhelm the city’s capability to absorb if we just had a better approach.

That’s not something that can fundamentally be laid at the mayor’s feet — as we’ve long maintained, the person most dropping the ball here is the president, who will never be sadistic enough to satisfy the hardcore border restrictionists but also seems politically allergic to be seen providing too much help, despite the fact that he’s going to be made to own this issue anyway — but the mayor needs to understand that he’s setting the tone here.

Pronouncements that migrants are a destructive force can and do have repercussions, from chipping away at public support for humanitarian immigration to pouring gasoline on an already spreading fire of white nationalist hate and terrorism, whether or not the mayor intends them to. This July, a Texas man was sentenced to life in prison for having driven 700 miles specifically to murder Hispanic people he accused of invading the U.S., eventually killing 23 people in the 2019 El Paso Walmart shooting.

It’s good for Adams to hedge his words later, as he did in a PBS interview on Friday, that the burden is financial (and yesterday he ordered city agencies to cut their budgets 5%) but he should simply avoid making those types of statements in the first place.

Instead, be more precise in pointing out, for example, that this could be an extraordinary boon to New York if only the feds were more willing to work collaboratively with him, and more directly call out showmen like Curtis Sliwa, who have decided to seize on this issue politically in the least helpful manner possible. Political opponents are gleefully using the migrants as an attack vector but don’t often themselves have any better ideas beyond pointless cruelty.

These Democratic executives — Adams, Hochul and Biden — have a golden opportunity here to present and then implement a different vision, one in which these migrants can help us as much as we can help them. So far, they’re missing the boat.