NYC Mayor Goes to El Paso to Rail Against Illegal Immigration
Eric Adams is begging for the Federal Government for relief.
I was somewhat taken aback by the Reuters headline “New York Mayor says ‘no room’ in his city for migrants.” The report didn’t change my reaction:
The mayor of New York traveled to the Mexican border city of El Paso on Sunday and declared that “there is no room in New York” for busloads of migrants being sent to America’s most populous city.
Eric Adams, a Democrat, was also critical of the administration of Democratic U.S. President Joe Biden, saying “now is the time for the national government to do its job” about the immigrant crisis at America’s southern border.
The visit of a New York mayor to a southern border city about the issue of immigrants is unprecedented.
Busloads of migrants have been shipped north to New York and other cities by Republican run states. That has exacerbated a housing crisis in New York and a worsening homeless crisis in the city.
Adams’s trip to El Paso comes after he said the migrant influx into New York could cost the city as much as $2 billion, at a time when the city is already facing a major budget shortfall.
NYT (“Adams Visits the Border to Step Up Pressure on Biden for Migrant Funds“) adds some useful nuance:
More than 2,000 miles from New York City, Mayor Eric Adams stood outside a church in Texas on Sunday and told a group of migrants that he would fight for them to be able to work and to “experience the American dream.”
As the mayor’s words were translated into Spanish, the crowd began to clap and cheer.
But the mayor’s positive message contrasted with his difficult mission on his trip to the southern border — he is trying to increase pressure on President Biden to provide federal help to New York City, which is dealing with an influx of migrants. He is showing compassion for people whose lives have been upended while also insisting that they stop coming to his city.
The migrant crisis has become one of Mr. Adams’s greatest challenges as mayor. More than 40,000 people have arrived unexpectedly in New York City over the past year, straining the city’s budget as well as its system for sheltering homeless people.
After weeks of calling for more help from the federal government, Mr. Adams decided to visit the border. His trip came one week after Mr. Biden visited El Paso after announcing a new crackdown on border crossings.
The number of migrants apprehended while trying to illegally cross the border has hit record highs. The Border Patrol encountered 1.7 million migrants trying to cross illegally in the 12 months leading up to October 2021, the most since 1960.
Mr. Adams, a Democrat entering his second year in office, kept a busy schedule on his 24-hour trip to El Paso and sought to keep most of it out of the public eye. Only one event was open to reporters: a news conference on Sunday during which Mr. Adams called for help from federal officials for the places that are welcoming migrants.
“Our cities are being undermined — we don’t deserve this,” he said, before adding: “We expect more from our national leaders to address this in a real way.”
Mr. Adams said he would travel to Washington this week to continue his campaign, and he called on Mr. Biden to appoint a leader at the Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate a national response to the crisis.
POLITICO (“From Texas border, New York mayor vows to pressure U.S. government over migrants“) adds:
New York City Mayor Eric Adams visited El Paso, Texas, over the weekend, where he said he and fellow municipal leaders around the country would be teaming up to pressure the federal government for assistance handling the migrant crisis.
Adams touched down Saturday evening for what was billed as a 24-hour fact-finding mission, hosted by El Paso Mayor Oscar Leseer, a fellow Democrat. More than 40,000 migrants who have arrived in border towns like El Paso have subsequently traveled to New York City in the last year, an influx Adams has warned is overwhelming his administration’s ability to provide services.
During a press briefing Sunday, he pledged to form a coalition with mayors facing similar situations.
“I knew it was time for me, not to try to handle this problem from the city, but to come in to interact with the mayors across the country,” Adams said. “This has fallen on our cities. And I am now going to coordinate my mayors across the entire country to say: How do we respond to this directly?”
[…]
The city spent $366 million on services for asylum seekers last year, and Adams expects that sum to rise to $2 billion through June. Thus far, New York City has received just $8 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and $2 million from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
“This is a national crisis. FEMA deals with national crises. FEMA must step up, and there should be one coordinator to coordinate everything that is happening dealing with migrants and asylum seekers in our country,” Adams said.
The mayor’s first stop Saturday night was at a chain-link fence topped with razor wire frequently used as a border crossing point. Leeser then took Adams through a part of the city where asylum seekers often sleep on the streets. The following day, Adams met with the mayor and other El Paso officials before visiting a church that provides services to migrants. Outside, Adams and his Immigrant Affairs commissioner, Manuel Castro, talked with asylum seekers before visiting a county office that connects migrants with various programs and a processing facility run by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency.
The mayor said misinformation has led many migrants to the five boroughs.
“There are websites that are advertising that [in] New York City basically streets are paved with gold, that there is automatic employment, that you are automatically going to be living in a hotel,” Adams said. “There’s a conversation among those who are … asylum seekers and migrants who are given the false impression that, if you come to New York City, everything is fine.”
[…]
The reality, which Adams said El Paso organizations are telling new arrivals, is far different.
“They are truly explaining to people that this is what’s happening in New York right now,” Adams said. “In New York you go there, you’re going to be living in congregate settings, that there is no more room in New York.”
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who together with Adams recently criticized Colorado Gov. Jared Polis for his migrant busing policy, praised Adams’s trip to the border.
“Yesterday, @NYCMayor traveled to the border to draw attention to how the migrant crisis is impacting cities like New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and others,” Lightfoot tweeted Sunday. “I agree wholeheartedly with Mayor Adams that this is a national crisis that demands a national solution,” she wrote.
Progressives back in New York City, however, panned the visit.
“There are many ways to demand the help we need from Washington & Albany. But the mayor’s trip to Texas does little to deliver the $$ NYC needs to provide shelter & services,” City Comptroller Brad Lander tweeted. “Instead, it risks reinforcing a harmful narrative that new immigrants themselves are a problem.”
I’m not the biggest Adams fan. He comes across as self-aggrandizing, even by politician standards, and the combination of standard Democratic politics with the attitudes of a career cop is somewhat jarring. But I’m actually sympathetic to him here.
My initial reaction to the visit, based only on the Reuters report, was that he was playing into the hands of DeSantis and Abbot in rewarding their cynical and immoral treatment of migrants as objects. But, ironically, the handful that are being bussed to his city are a drop in the bucket to those traveling there on their own because they see it as the shining beacon of American opportunity.
Traveling to El Paso to lobby Joe Biden is a weird stunt and I don’t love the optics of it. But I get it: one of the key functions that only the Federal Government can handle, both by law and as a matter of resources, is controlling our borders. And it has failed, miserably, for decades.
While the actions of border state leaders, mostly Republicans, have been shameful, it’s also true that they’re bearing the brunt of the costs of the problem. But, it turns out, so are the majors of our biggest cities, even ones two thousand miles away.
You do realize that Adams is really a Republican who just pretended to be a Democrat because that’s the only way to win in New York City, right?
@Stormy Dragon: People made the same argument about Trump in 2016. It doesn’t matter: he’s the Democratic major of NYC.
@Stormy Dragon:
Despite your pigeon holing Adams, he won the Dem primary in NY and the general election. His performance as mayor has been consistent with the platform he ran on, which must have appealed to decent cross section of NY voters.
It seems that you are confusing progressive positions with the broader Dem party.
It should be noted that other wise Dem California voters rejected several initiatives that were strongly backed by progressive Dems, including, ending the ban on affirmative action, ending cash bail and changes to the state’s property tax laws.
Regarding Adams. There is a good argument that the pressures of immigration shouldn’t fall only on the border states, unfortunately R governors in those states are only interested in performative cruelty rather than solutions. And Adams in correct that cities receiving immigrant, regardless as to their geography should be receiving assistance.
I’m not sure that Biden has ability to send money without the consent of the congress.
Shorter version of James’ critique…Eric Adams is a nut-job.
If he really believes this;
then lobbying Biden is barking up the wrong tree.
First off, let’s dispel the notion of a crisis. The word crisis implies an immediate time-frame. As James points out, the immigration problem is decades old. Older, even. Last week I posted, on the daily open forum, Reagan and Bush41 talking about immigration in one of their debates. They come off as two compassionate human beings interested in solving a complex problem.
Which raises my second point. Today’s Republican party has no interest in solving the god-damned problem. It is one of their strongest wedge issues, perhaps their most powerful means of raising the anger and fear in their base…truly the only thing Republicans have to sell today is anger and fear. So, no, they are not the least bit interested in solving this issue. Not when they can fleece the rubes with it.
Instead of Biden, Eric Adams should be going to Abbott and DeSantis and McCarthy and McConnell and saying to them…
Good luck with that.
Biden, just before he visited the border;
“It’s clear that immigration is a political issue that extreme Republicans are always going to run on…But now they have a choice: They can keep using immigration to try to score political points or they can help solve the problem. They can help solve the problem and come together to fix the broken system.”
Not directly relevant but I just want to repeat my prediction: Adams is going to end up in jail. He is flagrantly corrupt and there is something quite odd about how he flaunts it.
@Sleeping Dog: ” His performance as mayor has been consistent with the platform he ran on”
Although he was never my choice for mayor, I don’t recall him running on a platform of defunding the library system to shovel more money at the cops.
@wr:
Not being a citizen of NY, the items in his platform that jumped out were around cops, crime and budget reductions.
@Sleeping Dog:
Indeed! Democrats, in aggregate, are probably nowhere near as liberal as progressives are. They may not even be as liberal as liberals are.
@daryl and his brother darryl:
Indeed (again)! And I can guess which choice Republicans, extreme or otherwise,* will choose, too!
*But in regard to Republicans, are there really multiple types in the context of national issues?
I will just state again what I’ve been stating for a long time, which is that the federal government should federalize the bussing/transportation program.
And the feds need a long-term plan for how to deal with the huge influx of asylum seekers, once they’ve been allowed to stay. Currently, the feds literally dump people in the streets of border cities to fend for themselves, a fact that gets ignored in all the performative outrage about bussing.
We could always send the Marines in to take over Salvador, Guatemala and Venezuela. Because that always worked in the past.
More seriously the core of the problem is shitty governments in central and South America. And a shitty government in Mexico that just acts like, ‘Hey, not my problem, North is thataway.’
Source? I’ve been involved with a private charity that provided relocation and shelter to some asylum seeking immigrants and it was very much coordinated with the Feds down to the last detail. So, yes, the Feds were not actually providing the transportation and assistance but no, absolutely no, the immigrants were not getting dumped onto the streets.
@Michael Reynolds: Technically, anyone seeking asylum should stop at the first country they arrive at. Almost all of these immigrants crossing the border went through all of Central America before arriving at the US border. Every single one of those countries is just as obligated to provide asylum as we are.
Wait…wut?!? You are saying the right-wing talking points are untrue? Well, heavens to murgatroyd.
@Andy:
Probably because the Republican states sued in federal court to block the program that was moving them to other parts of the country.
Denver has seen a spike in immigrants arriving. As best I can piece together the story, these are people who crossed in the El Paso area and are self-organizing buses going north to Denver.
@MarkedMan:
There are many news reports of this that are easy to find. Here’s the first result that came up for me in Google. When the local charities are over capacity – which has happened many times over the last year, ICE drops migrants off at bus stations or other places. When there is space at a shelter or facility, ICE will usually drop them off there.
And the irony is that this would be an even worse problem if state and local governments weren’t paying for transportation to move people to other parts of the country so that room could be made for new arrivals.
The reality of the situation on the ground is that there isn’t room to keep all these people in border communities. They have to go elsewhere, and most of them want to go elsewhere, and the responsibility for making that happen should be with the feds, not the state and local government.
But I’d certainly be willing to consider other alternatives, but the only ones I can think of are deporting them all, or building huge camps to house them near the border.
@Sleeping Dog: “Not being a citizen of NY, the items in his platform that jumped out were around cops, crime and budget reductions.”
Well, he does seem to be in favor of all three of them… as long as the crimes end up benefitting him and his cronies.
@Andy: I’m mostly in agreement with you here. The US cannot accept everyone that wants to come , and the easier we make it to come here and claim asylum the more people will make the journey.
When I was in Peace Corps in West Africa a half a lifetime ago, if I had walked into my classroom one morning and said “A bus will be here in the next two minutes and if you get on it you will end up in the United States”, I bet 50-75% of my students would have gotten on board. If I gave them 24 hours so they could say goodbye to their families I’m pretty sure all but one would have gotten on the bus. I would guess there are at least a billion people like this and wouldn’t be surprised if it was 3 billion.
@Andy: Why do the camps need to be near the border?
@Andy:
A friend of mine was spitballing how to handle the homeless problem in Seattle, and eventually got to concentration camps. More of internment camps than concentration camps, but…
Anyway, I share your reluctance to consider alternatives like “huge camps to house them near the border.”
(Friend was appropriately horrified, and then spend time working backwards to try to see where it all went off the rails, as each step was small and seemed reasonable.)
Fun Fact: we’ve had 32,000 Russians crossing the southern border seeking asylum since the Ukraine invasion.
Just something that surprised me. The immigration and asylum process is far more complicated and surprising than nearly anyone realizes (which should be obvious… but often isn’t, as estimating what you don’t know is hard)
I still think the medium term goal has to be to help Mexico become a place immigrants want to stay in rather than just a waypoint to the US, rather than just make the US less hospitable. Mexico is a lovely country, they have tacos!
And then work downwards through Central and South America.
@wr: Dude’s a cop, what did people expect? There’s a reason ACAB starts with an A. It’s all of them.
We need cops (our thugs in blue keep other thugs at bay), but we should remember that they are cops. Expecting a cop to be mayor is like expecting a “reality” tv star to be president. It’s not going to go well, and it should be obvious from the onset.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Never understood this logic. I’m sure many of the Democratic Party’s new Trump orphans take issue with parts of the party platform, but among traditional Democrats, the so-called “progressives” and the so-called “moderates” vote together almost all the time. Is there even a single line in the pretty long Democratic Party platform that would prompt furious disagreement in either cohort?
These labels started as media horserace and blogosogere labels, and unfortunately too many Democrats have played into this. And then you get articles that are shocked Biden worked so well with The Squad. Shocked for what? They agree almost all the time!
@Gustopher:
Mexico has many of the same drug gang problems as Central America, plus the standards of living aren’t as high as in America. Those who leave family behind and want to send them money, would do far better in the US than in Mexico.
@Gustopher:
American Dream propaganda and all that. The myth of America is still powerful. I don’t know what to think when many of my peers are desperate to expat, while so many are desperate to get here. I have friends that have movied to Puerto Vallarta and Ciudad De Mexico. Is it easier to be an American immigrant to Mexico than a Central American immigrant to Mexico?
Also, do we actually know how many migrants come here just to work, seasonally or otherwise, but not to stay permanently?
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
They don’t, but I’m not in favor of putting tens of thousands of people into camps waiting for years for a court date in the first place. That is the worst option of the three.
@DK:
That’s true at the federal level, where there are pretty strong incentives to vote with the group.
If you drill down to the state and local level, the policy disagreements between Democrats are much more obvious.
Addressing the immigration issue will require new laws that deal with the dreamers, expedited asylum reviews, work visas, more agents and border controls, more judges, more resources including detention centers, expanding e-verify, and so on. It requires a concerted effort that will cost many billions; however, it is clear that Republicans prefer the issue than to address the problem, thus I don’t see the any solutions for an indefinite amount of time.