New York City Mayor Eric Adams said in April that “the President and the White House have failed this city.” Adams was referring to the surge of migrants landing in New York, which by law is forced to provide shelter and services for all new arrivals.
It’s an obligation that — while humanitarian and ethically sound — is placing a huge financial, social and political strain on a city already under pressure in a slow post-COVID recovery.
[Note: People with long memories hear echoes of the famous Daily News tabloid headline from 1975: Ford to City, Drop Dead. But that was Gerald Ford, a Republican in the White House being accused of neglecting the largely Democratic stronghold of metropolitan New York. Biden and Adams are supposed to be on the same team.]
Adams’s criticism is allegedly shared by other big city Dems who are reluctant to criticize the President for fear of giving MAGA Republicans fuel for their fire. (In January Biden met with 175 U.S. mayors who were all concerned about the migrant influx.)
Adams also blamed Republicans — he cited “the irresponsibility of the Republican Party in Washington for refusing to do real immigration reform” — but that is not as stinging or as resonant as the friendly fire aimed at his own party.
This weekend, we learned that Governor Abbott is once again deciding to play politics with people’s lives by resuming the busing of asylum seekers to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, and Washington, D.C.
— Mayor Eric Adams (@NYCMayor) May 1, 2023
Not only is this behavior morally bankrupt and devoid of any…
In May, outgoing Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot complained about migrants being bussed to the Windy City from Texas and other states with Republican governors, asking Texas Governor Greg Abbott to cease the practice.
Abbott predictably laid the issue on Biden alone, sending Lightfoot a letter that begins unequivocally with: “The ongoing border and humanitarian crisis that Texas and the entire United States are grappling with is a direct result of President Biden’s open-border policies.”
San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria has incisively described one of the key reasons for the immigration reform impasse in Washington, saying: “My fear is that the political benefits of pointing at the problem exceed the benefits of actually solving the problem.” Blaming is easier than fixing.
MAGA Republicans have quoted Mayor Adams as evidence that the current situation under Biden doesn’t work for anyone, even if the GOP has played a large role in creating the problem, and the NYC mayor’s comments have emboldened GOP attacks that had been easier to characterize as partisan.
The Biden administration’s problem with Adams’s criticism is not that immigration problems don’t exist, but that the administration is hamstrung by a recalcitrant Congress in fixing the issues, which predate Biden’s Oval Office tenure. The administration also faces challenges from farther left, with a liberal wing of congressional leaders demanding that Biden’s asylum policies be made less restrictive, rather than more so.
Democrats are losing patience with the status quo, whether they are in the ultra liberal camp with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or, like Adams, looking for practical help in an overwhelming situation.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says that Biden inherited a “fundamentally broken immigration system that hasn’t been fixed for more than two decades” and that Congress won’t provide the money to fix it. He reiterates that the border is not “open,” as Abbott and others assert.
Though some Republicans like to quote him, Mayor Adams faces criticism from New York State Republicans for plans to relocate migrants from the city to counties north of the five boroughs, including Rockland and Westchester. The idea that Adams is making a move that — on a smaller scale — matches what Gov. Abbott has done is illustrative of the size of the challenge.
