New York City Mayor Eric Adams is on a four-day trip south of the border. He says he will be discouraging migrants from traveling to the city after more than 120,000 have shown up in the Big Apple in the last year.
“We’re going to tell them that coming to New York doesn’t mean you’re going to stay in a five-star hotel,” Adams said at a news conference Tuesday, Oct. 3. “It doesn’t mean that the minute you get here, you’ll be allowed to work. We’re going to tell them what the real conditions are.”
Currently, New York City shelters are overwhelmed and migrants are sleeping on the streets. Adams says the migrant crisis will cost New York taxpayers upwards of $12 billion, and financial resources are strained.
According to NBC News, city hospitals and medical centers have seen 30,000 migrant patients seeking care, causing a strain on the hospital system.
Additionally, a taxpayer-funded legal clinic at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan is seeing clients from various backgrounds and helping those in need of legal services. Director Randye Retkin says the clinic is inundated with requests from migrants, and now, American citizens who are seeking legal assistance are waiting weeks, if not months, for the same services.
“If you ask me, ‘Do you need more resources for legal services?’ I would say, ‘Absolutely, yes!’” Retkin said in an interview with NBC News.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, D-N.Y., announced there are 18,000 open jobs at 400 companies across the state willing to hire migrants with legal work status.
Hochul appeared on CBS News Sunday, Oct. 1, criticizing the situation at the U.S. southern border.
“Well, we want them to have a limit on who can come across the border,” Hochul said. “It is too open right now. People coming from all over the world are finding their way through simply saying they need asylum.”
Right now, Mayor Adams is on the ground in Latin America, hoping to deter asylum-seekers from making their way to New York City.
“And I say to those pursuing the American dream, it should not turn into a nightmare,” Adams said while in Mexico. “And when you see children making the long trek through a jungle, and then have living conditions of trying to congregate in shelters, not having the real environment that they deserve, the inability to work, it just makes it extremely challenging.”
Before Adams left for his trip, the city filed a request late Tuesday, Oct. 3, asking the courts to suspend a decades-old “right to shelter” law, while the city is under a state of emergency. City officials say the city can no longer fulfill this obligation and find housing for every migrant seeking shelter.
