New York’s Migrant Crisis Is About to Get Worse Covid-era restrictions on entry expire May 11. Mayor Adams says Washington ‘has turned its back.’ By Carine Hajjar
If you want proof that there’s a crisis at the southern border, enter New York City’s subway system and listen for the calls of “chocolate, chicle, y agua.” On my daily commute, I see many Central and South American women pacing across platforms peddling chocolate, gum and water. Many hold young children, some even breastfeeding.
Lucia, a young mother from Ecuador, has her sleeping 3-year-old son, Danny, swaddled against her back. In Spanish she tells me they crossed the border into El Paso, Texas, and were put on a flight to New York in November. Now she lives in a cramped room in Queens with her cousin and two sons—the other, 5, is in school as we speak. Her husband and two other children, 9 and 10, are still in Ecuador. What’s her plan in New York? “Like everyone who comes here—work. And to give my children a better future.”
But lawful work is hard to find. Lucia doesn’t have a permit. “I don’t know where to go,” she says. “I don’t know the city well.” If she did know where to go, she’d encounter bewildering applications and long delays.
The influx of jobless migrants strains New York, which guarantees sanctuary and shelter. At a City Hall press conference last week, Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isoms said the city has experienced its “largest humanitarian crisis in recent memory” over the past year. Mayor Eric Adams said the city receives “close to 200” migrants a day and that “the national government has turned its back on New York City.” The city anticipates spending $1.4 billion on “costs related to housing and caring for the asylum seeker population” in fiscal 2023 (which ends June 30) and $2.9 billion in fiscal 2024.
The crisis is about to become more acute. On May 11, the Covid-19 public-health emergency will expire at long last—and with it a policy called Title 42 that allowed the expulsion of migrants on public-health grounds. In March, U.S. Customs and Border Protection had a daily average of more than 6,000 daily encounters with migrants at the southern border. Last week Acting Commissioner Troy Miller testified to a House subcommittee that the agency expects a “surge of migrants” after May 11 and that daily encounters could reach 10,000. The city of El Paso declared a state of emergency on Monday, and on Tuesday the White House approved sending 1,500 troops to the border.
In New York, Mr. Adams warned at last week’s press conference that thousands of migrants are “waiting to come across the border and potentially end up in New York City.” The mayor urged the federal government to expand access to work permits through legal pathways and by increasing processing manpower at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
To deal with the influx, the city has already had to open 107 emergency shelters, mostly by leasing hotels, as well as eight Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers. The mayor’s office tells me that 35,300 migrants were in the city’s care as of April 23, and that doesn’t count those who stay with family or friends.
Organizations like La Colmena in Staten Island help train migrants for jobs, providing free Occupational Safety and Health Administration certifications and apprenticeships in anything from welding to child care. The organization matches migrants with trustworthy employers. Yesenia Mata, La Colmena’s executive director, says that when Title 42 is lifted the organization will be “prepared to support and empower immigrant workers” as it always has. “This is work that requires partnerships,” she adds, and La Colmena will “keep advocating to the federal government that it is important to provide these work permits.”
In anticipation of Title 42’s expiration, the Biden administration last week issued a “fact sheet” that announced “sweeping new measures to further reduce unlawful migration across the Western Hemisphere, significantly expand lawful pathways for protection, and facilitate the safe, orderly, and humane processing of migrants.” The measures include the creation of regional processing centers in Colombia and Guatemala to process migrants for “lawful pathways to the United States, Canada, and Spain.” To screen asylum claims more quickly, the Department of Homeland Security is “increasing its holding capacity, expanding capabilities and technologies, installing hundreds of phone lines and privacy booths to conduct credible fear interviews.”
While these measures could decrease illegal immigration in the long term, they won’t mitigate the post-Title 42 surge. Ariel Ruiz, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, says that “even after the implementation of this plan from DHS,” there likely will be “an increase in migrants being relocated to New York City but also other cities across the U.S.”
Even the Biden administration concedes that the “days following the end of [the] Title 42 public health order will be challenging and that encounters will increase for a time.” Smugglers are also gearing up. The Journal reports they’re telling migrants that “the end of Title 42 represents a prime opportunity to migrate.”
With such uncertainty ahead, Mr. Adams is right to call for more work permits, which would enable migrants to get on their feet in New York. Lucia says she sells candy because she “can’t find work.” On a good day she takes in around $80 a day, for 10 hours’ work—not a lot on which to survive, much less raise children.
Yet migrants keep coming, ready to work hard for the American dream. “To come here you go through a lot—kidnapping, violation,” Lucia says. “Thank God it didn’t happen to me.” She says the trek through the jungle was “horrible, but it’s worth it, to protect my children.” Others will follow.
Ms. Hajjar is the Journal’s Joseph Rago Memorial Fellow.
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