HOW IT STARTED: Next mayor wants NYC to be even more of a ‘sanctuary’ for illegal immigrants.
Every single one of the eight Democrats running for mayor vowed to protect illegal immigrants from deportation, solidifying the Big Apple’s often infamous status as a “sanctuary city.”
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Entrepreneur Andrew Yang, the son of legal Taiwanese immigrants, said, “I appreciate anyone who comes to this country or New York City for a better life.”
And Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams said migrants were his neighbors growing up in Queens.
“My mother worked two jobs to provide for the six of us and we had a group of undocumented residents that lived in our community,” Adams said.
The other candidates — city comptroller Scott Stringer, former Obama housing secretary Shaun Donovan and nonprofit leader Dianne Morales — also voiced their support for the Big Apple as a sanctuary city.
—The New York Post, June 2nd, 2021.
How it’s going: City Hall bought $50K worth of plane tickets to ship migrants from NYC to Texas, Florida: report.
Mayor Eric Adams administration purchased plane tickets to send migrants back to Florida and Texas — the very states he has focused his ire on for shipping the asylum seekers here, records show.
The documents — obtained by Politico’s New York bureau — show that City Hall shelled out roughly $50,000 between April 2022 and April 2023 to resettle 114 of the recent arrivals outside of the five boroughs, including some who went back to South America and China.
The Post previously revealed that City Hall was paying companies to provide “re-ticketing” services to migrants, allowing them to leave New York and continue on to their final destination.
The two most common destinations for those resettlements were the Sunshine and Lone Star states.
Roughly a quarter of those resettled — 28 — opted for Florida; while another 14 picked Texas, according to Politico’s analysis. Several more opted to return back to South America, with four picking Colombia, two heading to Peru and one person opted for China, records show.
—The New York Post, yesterday.
This isn’t who we are. Adams clearly needs to reread the words on the Statue of Liberty — and his own promise that New York is a sanctuary city.
Earlier: Sanctuary Cities Seethe as Illegal Immigrants Actually Arrive.
The surest sign that public policies are simply virtue signals is when the messages don’t cost anything. The easiest way to tell when that signal starts to fail is to watch politicians flounder as the costs start to rise and voters demand relief.
It was free—and meaningless—for progressive churches to post banners calling themselves “nuclear free zones” during the Reagan era. Their dwindling congregations loved it. It was free, after George Floyd‘s murder, to post woke catechism signs on your front lawn, proclaiming “In this house, we believe: Black Lives Matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal” and so on. Maybe the neighbors gave you high-fives. And for years it has been free for deep-blue cities to proclaim themselves “sanctuaries” for illegal immigrants. That’s changing now that voters want some sanctuary for themselves.
Changes like this happen when voters realize the old virtue signals actually entail serious costs—and that they will have to pay them. That is exactly what’s happening in New York City and Washington D.C. now that Texas governor Greg Abbott is sending those cities a few busloads of illegal immigrants from his state.
These progressive bastions were silent when the Biden administration flew planeloads of illegal immigrants to suburban airports in the middle of the night. TV coverage was prohibited, and the arrivals were secretly dispersed. Abbott’s buses, by contrast, arrive downtown greeted by local TV crews. Now you can hear the politicians screech.
Why, it’s as if: Democrats Discover Only The Federal Government Can Solve The Border Crisis.