Mayor Adams Finally Says It: “We Need To Control The Border”
FAIR Take | August 2023
Frustrated by the mounting pressure illegal immigration is having on the City of New York, Mayor Eric Adams last week finally called out the Administration for its failure to act on the border crisis. “We need to control the border,” he urged. “We need to call a state of emergency, and we need to properly fund this national crisis.”
The immediate catalyst for Adams’ words, said during a July 31 press conference, was the fact that hundreds of illegal migrants were sitting or sleeping in the streets right outside of the luxurious Roosevelt Hotel, which ran out of rooms to house them (at taxpayers’ expense). He described a dire situation. “We need help,” he said. “And it’s not going to get any better. From this moment on, it’s downhill. There is no more room. I was at the Roosevelt on Saturday, and I went there on Sunday. They lined up around the block, hurting the businesses there; this is not going to get better. We put buses there for cooling systems, but it is just not sustainable. And I’m just real.”
As New York City’s own migrant crisis continues to unfold, Mayor Eric Adams is finding himself increasingly torn between a utopian sanctuary liberalism and a pragmatic, but reluctant, recognition that the illegal migration crisis is unsustainable. Since the spring of 2022, more than 90,000 illegal migrants have arrived in the city.
The mayor also repeatedly stressed that he wishes to “localize” the migrant crisis and to keep NYC from becoming filled with tent encampments like San Francisco and other large, left-wing sanctuary cities. Of course, this was a misnomer on Adams’ part because the “localizing” of something means to keep it limited to a specific area, whereas the mayor has recently tried to do just the opposite by housing them in hotels in counties throughout the state.
FAIR has been following the NYC crisis since the first migrant buses from border states, especially Texas, began arriving in the Big Apple, as well as Mayor Adams’ actions and statements. These included spending millions on an asylum application help center, putting up migrants at expensive hotels (while over 100,000 New Yorkers remain homeless), proposing housing migrants in private homes, and suing over half of New York state’s counties for refusing the mayor’s attempts to dump the illegal migrants onto their shoulders. Predictably, none of this is working precisely because it merely addresses the symptoms rather than the causes.
While it is encouraging to hear an acknowledgement of the need to “control the border” – both because it is true, and because Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas continues to claim that all is well – many of the mayor’s other thoughts and solutions are squarely within the pro-mass-migration box. Adams once again called for more funding and, along with New York Governor Kathy Hochul, also criticized the federal government for failing to take action on his request to grant the illegal migrants expedited work authorization. At the same time, Mayor Adams has been under fire from his party’s left, which complains that not enough is being done to accommodate the migrants.
So far, President Biden has been callously ignoring the pleas for help and relief coming from the likes of Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas. In fact, he has even sued the Lone Star state and sided Mexico’s demands that Abbott remove a floating buoy barrier on the Rio Grande. To date, he has also looked the other way as a member of his own party, and the mayor of the largest city in the country, Eric Adams, has continued to ask for assistance and called into question the sustainability of the mass migrant influx. The realization seems to be dawning on Mayor Adams that open borders policies don’t work, but will President Biden or Secretary Mayorkas ever acknowledge it?