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: New York to distribute flyers telling migrants at U.S.-Mexico border to ‘consider another city.’
New York City will distribute flyers at the U.S.-Mexico border telling newly arrived migrants to “consider another city” and limit shelter stays for adult asylum seekers to 60 days as the city’s Democratic mayor says it is straining to house them.
In an announcement on Wednesday, the office of Mayor Eric Adams said the flyers would seek to “combat misinformation at the border” and that the city would help migrants find other housing and “take the next step in their journey.”
New York City says that it has provided services to 90,000 migrants since last spring and that nearly 55,000 remain in its care. Thousands of those migrants arrived on buses sent by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican who has tried to shift the burden of receiving them to Democratic strongholds.
New York is bound by a decades-old consent decree in a class-action lawsuit to provide shelter for those without homes. As more migrants have arrived, Adams has tried a range of approaches to housing them, from tents to relocating them to other parts of the state.
—Reuters, today.
Mayor Adams' office is actively discouraging asylum-seekers from coming to New York City – releasing these flyers today. pic.twitter.com/xegNfGeacf
— Jeff Coltin (@JCColtin) July 19, 2023
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.
Saul Alinsky smiles.