Adams is making Dems look incompetent and foolish. With Mayor Eric Adams warning that the migrant crisis “will destroy New York City,” we again have to ask: Where is Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer?
Or, for that matter, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries? Heck, what about Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand? The mayor is openly furious with President Joe Biden; Gov. Kathy Hochul couldn’t even get face time with the Big Guy when she went to DC to ask for help. And all Washington’s sent Gotham (or the state) is a drop-in-the-bucket FEMA handout plus nasty kibbitzing from Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas about how we’re doing it all wrong.
More than 110,000 migrants have arrived in the city in the past year; it’s shouldering almost entirely on its own the cost of housing, feeding and educating them. The fiscal strain will reach some $12 billion by the end of fiscal 2025, assuming inflows level off — which they won’t if Biden and Mayorkas are still running the show: Open borders are their policy, and all they offer when it comes to slowing the tide is more lies.
Biden is the author of this crisis. Since Day 1 of his administration, he’s pursued an erase-the-border policy. And its ugly results are visible from El Paso to Chicago to our own Randall’s Island: overburdened social services and American citizens denied access to resources their tax dollars paid for. Schumer and Jeffries are positioned like no other New York electeds to take the fight to Biden on this; Schumer’s an elder statesman, the victor in countless legislative knife fights, and Jeffries is a talented up-and-comer and a likely future House speaker.
(Gillibrand, meanwhile, can’t even plead leadership duties as an excuse for being AWOL.) Hard, public questions from them — like how much more is the Big Apple supposed to take? and what is the plan to tamp down inflows? — would carry real weight. But they’re going along with the president and the Twitter cadres that set policy direction for national Democrats. It’s pure political cowardice. Something sadly par for the course from national Democrats on immigration. Don’t Brooklyn boys Jeffries and Schumer care about what happens to their town? Or the interests of the voters who send them to DC over and over and over again?