Migrant Crisis Shows New York Is Becoming Ungovernable Again

T he migrant crisis that began in spring 2022 has restored New York’s reputation as “the ungovernable city.” It has also revived the tradition of mendicant urbanism. Back during the “bad old days,” New York mayors such as David Dinkins reflexively blamed all the city’s problems on inadequate state and federal aid. Current mayor Eric Adams, and other local Democrats, have insisted that New York’s greatest need in responding to the migrants is more funding and other assistance from state and federal government.

That New York is the victim of federal malfeasance is, in crucial respects, indisputable. New York’s homeless-shelter system, which city government has been awkwardly trying to repurpose into a network of refugee centers, is now host to a record-high census. No way would that be so were the southern border less porous.

But the city bears most of the blame. The only cities that have experienced migrant crises anything like New York’s are border cities. The important difference between border cities and New York is that the former are on the border. Only New York, among major cities in the U.S., confers a “right to shelter” on everyone: single adults and families, in all climate conditions, regardless of immigration status. That’s why New York has attracted so many more migrants than other major cities, and why city officials are now contemplating setting up tents in Central Park.

Traditionally, New York homeless advocates refused to acknowledge that the right to shelter incentivized homelessness. The migrant crisis has provided definitive evidence that human beings do, in fact, respond to incentives. Liberal press outlets now regularly concede that New York’s unusually generous shelter policy is at least partly responsible for the crisis’s magnitude.

Mayor Adams has, to his credit, sought relief from the right to shelter. He argues that a policy designed to meet the limited aim of moving unruly substance abusers off city streets is not well suited to handle a global migrant crisis. Advocates, though, will countenance no modification to the right to shelter. Their favorite recommendation is federal work authorization for the “asylum seekers” (that’s the catch-all term favored by the media and local Democrats). Though normally indifferent toward the workforce-participation rate, New York Democrats have, of late, made something of a panacea out of work authorization. Some have crafted grandiose arguments about how New York’s economic future hinges on getting as many migrants into on-the-books jobs as possible. Others have even claimed that the migrants offer city government its best hope for addressing its own workforce shortage. As for how everyone’s going to find an apartment, who knows. Whenever the question of getting the migrants out of shelter and into permanent housing comes up, New York Democrats change the subject back to work as quickly as possible. That tactic was traditionally associated with conservatives in homeless-policy debates.

Speaking of jobs, employment in New York City has not bounced back from Covid. When I looked at employment trends as of this past winter, I predicted the city’s job recovery would be complete by now. My prediction was off. The recovery has plateaued, and New York is still down about 40,000 jobs since the pandemic. The migrant surge may be a contributing factor. Tourism is not fully back; as some struggling small-business owners have pointed out, a hotel used to shelter migrants is not going to spin off as much economic activity as one used by tourists.

The political consequences of New York City’s migrant crisis will largely depend on how much conflict it sows within Democratic ranks. The crisis has strained previously smooth relations between Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul. Hochul, an accidental governor of ill-defined principles, has prioritized minimizing state government’s responsibility for the migrants. Her unwillingness to take a more forthrightly progressive stand lost her support from Attorney General Letitia James, who declined to defend Hochul in a lawsuit over whether the right to shelter extends statewide.

Mayor Adams is a centrist with many progressive rivals. In their ongoing machinations to replace him, some are no doubt studying Chicago progressives’ recent success in failing upward. Earlier this year, Chicago voters, apparently dissatisfied with Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s irresolute response to violent crime, turned her out and replaced her with Brandon Johnson, a defund proponent far to the left of Lightfoot.

Republicans across New York State believe that the migrants provide just the issue to use to reverse their party’s long-term decline. Locally, a test of that hypothesis will come soon with a handful of city-council races. Throughout the crisis, Adams and other Democrats have made desperate attempts to pin the city’s migrant woes on Republicans, most notably southern governors and their busing programs. That argument always seemed specious given how many migrants obviously wanted to come to New York; some even cited to reporters the city’s offer of shelter as the attraction. The argument lost all its force when Adams himself started busing migrants to points upstate and without the “coordination” that he earlier claimed southern governors denied him.

Not even the most imaginative right-wing operative could have dreamed up an example of left-wing governance failure so pure, so complete in every last detail, as the New York City migrant crisis. Sanctuary-city policy; mendicant urbanism; entitlement culture; loading more responsibilities onto already-strained government agencies; assuming that good intentions are all that ever matters; blaming Republican bogeymen when good intentions fail; criticizing Republicans for the same policies you yourself have embraced. It’s something of a masterpiece.