New York’s Migrant Influx Tests the Sanctuary City’s Limits Already Mayor Eric Adams is asking a judge to excuse the city from its court-approved ‘right to shelter.’ Jason Riley
When Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began busing illegal immigrants to Northern cities last year, he said he wanted to call out progressive sanctuary-city elitism and draw more attention to a humanitarian crisis with which border states have been struggling for decades. Mr. Abbott has succeeded and then some.
Big-city Democrats who once dismissed the complaints of Republican officials such as Mr. Abbott are now begging for mercy. Chicago declared a state of emergency in the wake of its migrant influx, and the District of Columbia was compelled to establish an Office of Migrant Services. Earlier this month in New York, which has seen the arrival of more than 70,000 undocumented migrants since last spring, Mayor Eric Adams asked a judge to allow the city to suspend its longstanding “right to shelter” rule.
“It is in the best interest of everyone, including those seeking to come to the United States, to be upfront that New York City cannot single-handedly provide care to everyone crossing our border,” Mr. Adams said in a statement. “Being dishonest about this will only result in our system collapsing, and we need our government partners to know the truth and do their share.”
New York is spending an estimated $5 million a day to house and feed these new arrivals. It tried placing them in homeless shelters, which quickly filled to capacity. Next, they were sent to hotels, dormitories and even unused jail cells. Mr. Adams tried persuading upstate counties to accept some of the migrants, but he lacks jurisdiction to force the issue and pushback has been stiff. The courts may be his last option.
New York’s right-to-shelter rule is the product of a 1979 lawsuit brought by homeless advocates. In a subsequent settlement, the city agreed to provide universal housing to men, and later to women and families. Because of the settlement, the state’s top court never issued a ruling on the matter. “One presumes that the city settled the case to avoid the inflexibility that a final high court ruling would have created,” the Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas wrote in City Journal recently. “But in the current crisis, the city has done nothing with the flexibility that it retains.”
Migrant advocates will challenge any deviation from New York’s novel policy of guaranteeing shelter to anyone from anywhere with no questions asked. But given the unprecedented levels of illegal immigration in recent years, and Congress’s epic negligence, the courts may be inclined to allow the city to impose some limits.
To wit: “It would be reasonable for the city to restrict eligibility to people, of any citizenship or nationality, who have had a fixed address in New York City at some point in the past five years,” Ms. Gelinas wrote. “The mayor could also restrict shelter eligibility to migrants already approved for asylum, putting pressure on the federal government to process applicants quickly.”
Polling suggests that Americans have grown more tolerant of immigration in recent decades. “Support for more immigration has tripled from the mid‐1990s when about 10% of the public supported more immigration and two‐thirds wanted less,” according to a 2021 Cato Institute report. “Today 29% of Americans want more, 38% want to maintain current levels, and 33% want less.”
Majorities of Democratic, Republican and independent voters also back granting legal status to some undocumented residents—including agriculture workers and people brought here as children—so long as such a move is paired with better security at the southern border and other conditions.
One interpretation of these results is that, while we remain a welcoming nation, we also take national sovereignty seriously. Control over who enters the country is a fundamental expression of that sovereignty. The Biden administration is pretending otherwise, but the country’s current openness to strangers isn’t a foregone conclusion, as anyone familiar with U.S. immigration history well knows. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 effectively ended open immigration. Congress passed even broader restrictions in the Immigration Act of 1924, which targeted migrants from Southern and Eastern Europe by imposing severe national-origin quotas that remained in place for the next 40 years. At the time, both bills won large majorities of support.
The country’s ability to admit migrants on their terms instead of ours isn’t inexhaustible, and the current bedlam being showcased night after night on cable news is trying the patience of otherwise sympathetic voters. New York isn’t just another sanctuary city that has prided itself on flouting immigration law. Lady Liberty stands tall in New York Harbor, where she has come to symbolize the entire country’s openness to foreigners. If even deep-blue New York has reached a tipping point, Democrats had better pay heed.
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