[...] More than a hundred and ten thousand have arrived in the city in recent months, and more than half are currently staying at shelters and other emergency sites. Although some of the most high-profile arrivals have been sent on buses by Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, as part of a Republican plan to shift the burden of migrant crossings onto blue states, nearly ninety per cent of the migrants who have come to New York since last spring have arrived in other ways. Meanwhile, Adams has denounced the Biden Administration for not providing enough resources for the city to resolve what he describes as a dire crisis. [...]
[...] I recently spoke by phone with Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, and an expert on how immigration policies at the federal, state, and local levels intersect. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why so many migrants have chosen to come to New York City specifically, why the Biden Administration cannot necessarily fulfill the Mayor’s requests, and how congressional inaction on immigration policy has exacerbated the problems that immigration hawks say they care about most.
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"A hundred thousand people in a city of eight million is not a big number. If they had come organically, gradually, you and I would not have been having this conversation. What made it different, first of all, was its visibility [...]"
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"We have a right to shelter in our state constitution. But why do people not go to Sullivan County or any upstate county? In the late nineteen-seventies, housing advocates brought a lawsuit that got a settlement in which New York City agreed to provide housing for every man who seeks it, which was subsequently extended to women and families with children. That was a legal directive based on a reading of the state constitution, but it applied only to the city. To do the same thing today in Sullivan County, someone would have to file a lawsuit against Sullivan County."
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"News of the welcome mat certainly spread among immigrant circles through social media very quickly. The idea was: If you get to the border, tell people you want to take a bus to New York City. We should have just kept the old practice that people will just find their own way when they come to the city. Most people would have found some family. Instead, there was an incentive for people to choose to come to New York, even though it was started with a punitive impulse by Abbott."
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"In the asylum system, the border applications go to an immigration judge, and those cases are backlogged for four to five years. During those years, you can get work authorization, so the backlog becomes the magnet. What I and the Migration Policy Institute have argued is that we should take border asylum cases out of the immigration courts. It’s just become this big mammoth backlog. At least for the short term, we should have asylum officers determine asylum cases that come to the border. That process will take months, as opposed to years."
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"The thing people forget is that the migrant social networks are very potent. They’re smart people. They know everything that’s happening in the U.S. When New York City started taking people in, within three days the Venezuelan social networks were abuzz with 'If you come to Texas, tell them you want to go to New York City.' If we change the policy, people will begin to say that there’s no guarantee now [...]"
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