Thread: New York City is quietly pulling up the drawbridge for illegals

May 22, 2023


New York City is quietly pulling up the drawbridge for illegals



By Monica Showalter


Despite its wealth, New York City's leaders seem to recognize that their own money is not bottomless. As migrants keep pouring into the city and Joe Biden fails to deliver any money to pay for them, they're quietly pulling back the city's welcome mat.

Here are a couple of local news reports, from local paper The City, starting with the actual welcome mat:

City officials moved to close down the welcome center inside the Port Authority bus terminal where a bustling network of volunteers have greeted arriving migrants for the past nine months, advocates said Thursday.

The midtown site had grown into a vibrant outpost for new arrivals seeking hot food and clothing, along with earlier asylum-seekers looking for legal help, housing assistance and other aid.

Community organizer Power Malu with the group Artists Athletes Activists, which has been based out of the Port Authority since August, said the group got word Thursday morning that the state’s National Guard would be closing down the greeting area at 1 p.m. that afternoon.


THE CITY witnessed members of the state National Guard, which has been manning the volunteer area since last fall, turning away people who walked into the terminal seeking help just after 1 p.m.

That welcome center, which hosted about a dozen volunteers from three named NGOs in a recent glowing New York Times report, handed out a host of goodies to incoming migrants from Texas coming in by bus:

While the city has provided shelter, meals and medical services, its response has been at times halting or chaotic.

A number of charities and aid groups have stepped in to fill the gaps, distributing badly needed items like winter coats, baby formula and cellphones. Some volunteers are even opening up their homes.

At the Port Authority Bus Terminal, about a dozen volunteers have arrived before dawn every day to greet people getting off buses from Texas with sandwiches, fruit and donated clothes.

They even hand out plane tickets, according to the website of one of the NGOs, Artists-Athletes-Activists:

...we are on the ground to welcome them and assist with food, clothing, shelter and information regarding their upcoming immigration hearings. ...

We reunite families in other cities which means we have to purchase flights and buses to their final destination.

Well, somehow, the city decided to shut them down, at least at the Port Authority where the migrants are arriving.

Adams's office put out this prissy-sounding press release:

“The city will be transitioning services offered to newly arriving asylum seekers from the Port Authority Bus Terminal to the new Arrival Center at Roosevelt Hotel this week — streamlining the intake process for asylum-seekers,” [spokesman Fabien] Levy said.

But Levy let the cat out of the bag as to what Adams thought was really going on, in a different statement here:

"A network of activists are organizing large-scale arrivals of asylum seekers to New York City via plane, bus, and other modes of transportation — taking advantage of city and state laws and luring them here with false promises,” Fabien Levy, a spokesperson for Adams, said in a statement on Monday.

The NGOs, of course, are mad. They said that Adams invited them to do the handouts to the migrants, then complained about them doing it, pooh-poohing the idea that the handouts amounted to a migrant incentive to come to New York. At least one group cited in The City report said it would defy Adams' order to shut down the Port Authority 'welcome center' and go welcome the migrants with their welcome packets anyway, seeing if the cops would haul them off.

The pattern is obvious -- New York City is full and the city is running out of money and hotel space and even income from tourists to take any more. Each migrant displaces a tourist who might have rented that hotel space and brought in income for the city.

Some 700-plus of them are arriving daily, and according to the New York Times:

More than 67,000 migrants have arrived in New York City since the crisis began. Of those, 41,500 people are currently being cared for by the city, Anne Williams-Isom, the deputy mayor for health and human services, said at a news conference Wednesday. She said 4,300 people had arrived in just the past week.

Adams is obviously hearing from the public, as the report notes. Besides hotels, of which the migrants occupy 40% of the existing stock, he's been trying to house them in school gyms and parents are protesting. He's also been trying to ship them to other cities, playing 'pass the migrant' as those cities have protested and shut doors on.

Here's another illegal-alien benefit that Adams looks set to shut down, according to The City:

... Angela discovered a new city pilot program called Promise NYC, which in January began covering up to $700 a week in child care for low-income, undocumented immigrant families. In late March, Angela’s son, just shy of 2 years old, became one of about 600 children who received vouchers to enroll in subsidized day care or after-school programs that are otherwise unavailable to those without legal immigration status.

Angela has since started a part-time job cleaning, is taking courses that would allow her to work in construction, and is figuring out how to obtain legal immigration status. But that could all end on July 1, if the City Council approves Mayor Eric Adams’ proposed budget, which slashes the pilot program for next fiscal year.

Adams himself has tried to frame the issue as one of not receiving the federal aid he asked for. After all, he's spent $1 billion on the so-called "asylum-seekers" and the state has spent $3.3 billion. But he needs more. Joe Biden's pro-offered $30 billion for migrants apparently is going to all the other places that are inundated by migrants. What New York is enduring is nothing compared to border cities, but nobody has the lavish benefit package that New York does. That's where the problem actually is.

Adams wants unlimited benefits for the illegally present foreigners but has headed up against the wall of Economics 101 and now wants other people to pay for these unlimited benefits, simply because New York has absurd laws about handing out housing to anyone who asks for it. He wants the feds or anyone else to pay, anyone other than the aliens themselves, who, if they were here legally, would have to pay for their own food, housing, medical care and the like.

Why, exactly, should illegally present foreigners, who've never put a dime into the public fisc through taxes, be getting free housing and child care?

The preponderance of evidence out there suggests that they have plenty of money to pay, given that they certainly had enough to make an arduous journey, and pay smugglers to get across the U.S. border illegally.

It never occurs to Adams that maybe there's a problem with the New York City migrant sanctuary city model of unlimited benefits itself.

Now he's being forced to cut the benefits and make the NGOs angry but the idea of a free ride for illegally present migrants still stands unmodified. It's not even Adams' idea, it's ultimately Joe Biden. Adams is just learning the hard way that providing free-everything for certain newcomers is the problem itself.


https://www.americanthinker.com/blog..._illegals.html

I "identify" as an illegal alien. I demand I be transported to Key West for a month. Where is MY free taxpayer funded airline ticket, food, hotel, bathing suit, sunscreen, and spending money?

We are not these parasites free travel agent. Give them nothing but a walk back over the border and they can never come back.