“Critics condemn New York mayor for saying migration crisis will ‘destroy’ city” (The Guardian):
The mayor of New York, Eric Adams, has said an increase in migration would “destroy” the city, seemingly blaming the Biden administration for failing to provide federal support as much as the Republican governors who have sent asylum seekers north.
“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. “This issue will destroy New York City.”
More than 110,000 migrants have arrived in New York since last year, Adams said, adding that governors of Republican states had bussed asylum seekers to the city without coordinating with New York officials. Adams seemed to specifically refer to the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, who bussed immigrants to Democratic-led cities including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
“We’ve turned this city around in 20 months,” Adams said. “And then what happened? Started with a madman down in Texas, decided he wanted to bus people up to New York City: 110,000 migrants.”
Are the above statements logically consistent? The presence of a handful of migrants (out of the tens of millions that have enriched the U.S. in recent years; note that Yale estimated 22 million undocumented migrants in the U.S. as of 2016) will “destroy New York City,” according to the mayor. At the same time, a Texan who sought to send these purported city-destroyers away from Texas is an irrational “madman”.
Separately, why can’t New York City easily find room for 110,000 migrants? The population fell by 468,000 from April 2020 through July 2022, according to “NYC lost 5.3% of its population — nearly a half-million people — since COVID, with most heading South” (New York Post). Still plenty of space inside Grand Central Station (photo from last month):
The NYC Mayor spent most of his career as a transit cop, which means that he spent at least two decades underground mostly poking vagrants with his nightstick to get them to move along. That does not seem like the right training for managing a city with a population of around 8.5 million and a budget of $107 bil. He was elected primarily because of his race with the support of the municipal workers’ unions who saw him as an easy mark who would fork over money and “benefits” in return for political support and labor peace. So the fact that he is not entirely coherent on the migrant issue is not exactly surprising.
Is it not fair to refer to Adams as an “affirmative action” mayor?
I think Adams is probably not a bad guy. He just doesn’t have the skills for the job. NYC has had this before with David Dinkins, another nice guy, black, dressed well, totally incompetent who was replaced by Giuliani. NYC’s politics is ethnic and in the past the ethnicities were Irish, Italian and Jewish. That is not longer the case so a new group is new group cons their people in order to take the spoils. When the City really goes to ruin the municipal workers start to worry about their pensions & competence replaces ethnicity. There is also always the possibility of a federal bail out, especially if the Dems are in power. The last time around it was Gerald Ford a Republican in power and he told the city to drop dead and thereafter for a while the city had a period of good governance. We will see how it plays out this time.
> Adams said, adding that governors of Republican states had bussed asylum seekers to the city without *coordinating* with New York officials.
Is Adams suggesting that illegal migrants/asylum seekers who cross into Texas are “coordinating” with the Texas governor before crossing into Texas?! Is this Adams’s chief complaint about Texas bussing illegals to NYC, with no coordination? And if NYC cannot handle 110,000 illegal migrants/asylum seekers, why does Adams think Texas can handle over 2.7 million migrants that cross into Texas?
Not mentioned: de Blasio was at least as incompetent and unfit for office as Adams.
NYC is still hanging on from a governance perspective mainly due to the systems put in place under Bloomberg.
His team built the closest thing we will see in our lifetime to a technocratic US government org with merit based appointments and data driven decisions.
Despite an enormous amount of inherited dead weight, union opposition, etc. they succeeded well enough over 12 years to change the institution.
Institutional inertia is a powerful force, and good ones can function despite incompetent or malicious leadership for quite some time.
Each of these “asylum seeking migrant” families is receiving free housing+food+medical+$2200/month. But a “family” is defined as 1 parent + 1 child, so many of them are double-dipping with the mother and father each claiming to be a separate family so they can get $4400/month.
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