NYC ‘Re-Tickets’ Needy Migrants Back to Texas, Florida … Or Anywhere

While flogging Texas and Florida for sending migrants to his town, New York City Mayor Eric Adams has quietly embarked on a re-ticketing service to send them back, or anywhere else they want to go, including home countries as far away as China. Seems that the “poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free” aren’t so welcome after all.

Documents obtained by Politico show that City Hall spent roughly $50,000 between April 2022 and April 2023 to resettle migrants outside the five-borough region. That’s a paltry sum compared to the millions of dollars New York is spending to house and feed nearly 100,000 migrants who arrived since last year. But Adams’ outbound program is just getting started, and has only moved 114 migrants so far.

News of the mayor’s fly-away initiative came on the heels of his bizarre plan to place so-called “asylum seekers” in private residences. That hasn’t had many takers among beleaguered taxpayers shouldering the city’s ballooning room-and-board bills. Now faced with reductions in library hours and other standard services, New Yorkers are in no mood to convert their domiciles into flophouses.

Adams has massively expanded New York City’s accommodations for migrants, whose per-diem costs far outstrip assistance provided to local homeless. But the more the mayor spends, the more arrivals he gets. An estimated 60 percent of migrants continue to reside in the city’s ever-expanding shelter system. And why not? Lodging includes some of New York’s top hotels.

Beyond the immediate crisis, studies by FAIR and others show migrants impose significant and unsustainable downstream costs on host communities. Immigrants – both legal and illegal – tend to have more school-age children than households headed by native-born residents, and larger shares of immigrant pupils come from low-income, non-English-speaking families, putting added strain on limited school resources.

The New York Times recently highlighted soaring poverty rates among immigrants nationally. Of course, the Times’ reflexive response – like Adams’ — is to extend generous social welfare benefits to all immigrants irrespective of legal status.

The folly of such thinking may, at last, be dawning on Adams. With migrants on the city dole doubling since last year, Hizzoner might find wisdom in the adage: When you’re in a hole, stop digging. Thus, the trains, planes, and buses moving migrants out of his city.

Yet shuttling lightly vetted migrants around the country isn’t even a prophylactic solution. The only sensible answer is for the federal government to enforce standing immigration laws and to stop the mass release of migrants at our nation’s borders.