“‘This issue will destroy New York City … destroy New York City. We’re getting 10,000 migrants a month. Now again, people from all over the globe have made their minds up that they’re going to come through the southern part of the border and come into New York City.’”
That was New York City Mayor Eric Adams discussing the inflow of asylum seekers entering the city during a town hall event on the Upper West Side on Wednesday.
Adams, a Democrat, cited these migrants as a financial burden and a factor for several rounds of budget cuts to agencies under his watch.
“Never in my life have I had a problem that I did not see an ending to. I don’t see an ending to this,” Adams said.
“All of us are going to be impacted by this,” he added.
City officials say the number of migrants arriving in New York since the spring of 2022 has topped 112,000, overwhelming a shelter system designed to hold tens of thousands fewer people.
“The city we knew, we’re about to lose, and we are all in this together, all of us,” Adams later said. “Staten Island is saying send them out to Manhattan, Manhattan is saying send them out to Queens, Queens is saying send them out to Brooklyn.”
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Adams has publicly called on New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and President Joe Biden for assistance. Hochul said in Albany on Thursday that New York cannot “house the entire world,” while adding her office is looking to secure a legal pathway for over 60,000 migrants in the state to enter the workforce and fill the nearly half-million job vacancies statewide.
Hochul also said New York City’s 1981 landmark “right-to-shelter” law, which in part gives protections to some people seeking beds and bathrooms, may need to be updated.
“I don’t think in a million years it was anticipated to be an unlimited, universal right to have shelter provided to the entire world at cost to taxpayers with no end in sight,” Hochul said. “So there needs to be a conversation now about what that looks like.”
Some groups have criticized Adams’s comments, including The Legal Aid Society and the Coalition for the Homeless. The groups railed against the mayor’s “dystopian comments” for being “reckless and unproductive fear mongering.”
“Mayor Adams’ remarks that the influx of new arrivals ‘will destroy New York City’ are reckless and unproductive fear-mongering,” the groups said in a joint statement. “His dystopian comments dehumanize and villainize people who fled unimaginable situations in their home countries merely for an opportunity to provide for their families and secure a better life. This dangerous rhetoric is something you’d expect from fringe politicians on the far-right of the political spectrum, not from the mayor of a city that has always welcomed and celebrated its diverse and critically important immigrant community.”
Mayor Adams’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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