President Biden has failed on immigration, so he’s looking for any reason he can find to blame Mayor Adams for the ensuing mess in New York City.
But Adams keeps giving the White House reasons to blame him.
Just because Biden has failed doesn’t let Adams off the hook for his own blunders over the past year.
It’s worth repeating that the White House created this problem. At least 3 million people have crossed the border on Biden’s watch.
Yet the president has offered no proposal to the G20 or Congress for how the West should treat asylum seekers when hundreds of millions of people across the world are potentially asylum-seekers.
Nor has he offered thoughts to Congress on whether the nation should admit a higher number of lawful economic migrants.
But Adams has made this national problem into a local crisis.
Biden’s Department of Homeland Security was correct to note, in a leaked document, that Adams has “no exit strategy” for migrants in city-paid shelters.
An Adams spokesperson called the White House’s criticism “a slap in the face.”
But more than a year ago, when Texas started busing migrants to New York, Adams was sanguine.
He went to the Port Authority Bus Terminal to greet migrants, declaring loftily, “I don’t weigh into immigration issues. I have to provide services.”
Those services included shelter for all comers — and so Adams began opening hotel after hotel.
Adams was warned this was a bad idea. As my colleague Stephen Eide wrote in August 2022, “shelter exit strategies center around affordable housing, a chronically scarce resource. . . . Migrants’ shelter exit strategy will be even more complicated.” Most migrants don’t qualify for federal housing assistance and can’t legally work.
Back then, the number of migrants in city-paid shelter was 6,000; now, it is 60,000.
It can’t be said enough: New York City’s supposed “right to shelter” cannot withstand an open-ended influx of asylum seekers and economic migrants.
This is not an opinion. It is a fact, borne out by a year of evidence.
Yet Adams still hasn’t said it.
He has not done the obvious: argue in state court that the city’s “right to shelter” does not exist, certainly not on a universal basis. It’s nowhere in the state constitution.
It was made up 40 years ago by a long-dead mayor and governor.
Only when Adams takes this step will the city gain the autonomy it needs to put a cap on the number of documented asylum seekers — that is, people who have actually applied for asylum — it can realistically help with its finite municipal resources.
Beyond this strategic error, Adams blunders on the small things.
He’s spent two weeks arguing that the latest answer is for the federal government to allow migrants to work the day they get here, instead of having to wait six months after applying for asylum.
Problem: Many migrants are already past their six months. The crisis started more than a year ago.
But the city has only just started asking people whether they’ve applied for asylum or work permits. And it has helped only 3,800 people apply for asylum.
“Last week, the city began conducting in-depth, in-person surveys with the nearly 40,000 asylum seekers over the age of 18 years old in the city’s care to identify individuals who are eligible to apply for work authorization,” the mayor’s office said Wednesday.
So Adams’ bid to push Biden on faster work permits is irrelevant. Tens of thousands of people who can apply for asylum and work permits under existing federal law haven’t even done so.
The city would boost its credibility if it were to launch a public dashboard, updated daily:
How many asylum seekers are in city shelter any given night?
How long has each person or family been in city shelter?
What percentage have applied for asylum?
What percentage of asylum applicants have applied for work permits?
What percentage have received work permits?
Adams has invited tens of thousands of migrants to check into city shelter, even as he was repeatedly warned that he has no way to check them out. Yet he keeps on inviting new people to check in — 3,200 just last week. This isn’t the White House’s Hotel California — it’s Mayor Adams’.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
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