I Live in New York. Here’s How I See the City’s Escalating Illegal Immigration Crisis.
Jarrett Stepman /
NEW YORK—This city is buckling under the self-inflicted illegal immigration crisis it’s been handed by our derelict president.
City and state leaders in New York seemingly have no answers to the influx of illegal immigrants—nearly 100,000 in 2023—besides throwing money at the problem and cannibalizing other state-funded services.
This isn’t just an abstract number. The Big Apple is being transformed by the crisis.
I’ve personally witnessed the effects. A migrant center has been set up at St. Brigid School near Tompkins Square Park in the East Village. It’s about half a mile from where I live.
The Catholic school, which already had been shuttered, is being used as a holding area where asylum-seekers are housed and fed.
From what I’ve seen, almost all the illegal immigrants who pass through there are men in their 20s. They often gather in large bands in and around Tompkins. The southeast corner, next to the center, is now covered in trash.
New York has plenty of trash bags on sidewalks due to an inefficient waste management system, but that’s not what I’m talking about. There is literally trash strewn all over the ground, including a nearby area where children play.
Here are a few pictures of what it frequently looks like in the park.
The building for migrants is surrounded by fences and has a higher police presence than most other places in the city.
For good reason.
I recently woke up to a message on my Citizen crime app that a fight involving “300 people” broke out at the migrant center at East 7th Street.
According to the New York Post and other outlets, one man at the center attempted to cut into a long line of other migrants waiting for food. A brawl ensued.
NYPD officers broke up the melee, but two were injured while getting the situation under control.
Even with more police, I would be surprised if there weren’t more incidents like this. What do you expect when packs of young men loiter around the park all day?
The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that New York state will increase its spending on the illegal immigration situation by another $2.4 billion.
The cost of the crisis is projected to reach $10 billion by the summer of 2025, state officials say.
“Without real immigration reform and a decompression strategy at the border, there will be no end in sight,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams said.
New York City already is running a $7 billion deficit and has been forced to cut education and police budgets. Priorities.
Like a good Democrat, Adams dodges the reality that if you don’t build it—the border wall, that is—and refuse to deport millions of illegal aliens, more and more “asylum-seekers” will come to his sanctuary city.
Whether red state governors keep busing illegal migrants to New York or not, the migrants know that they can go to the city and get a handout from taxpayers. Adams’ insistence that the city is full isn’t going to deter them, any more than Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ saying that the border is “secure” did.
The result for New York is that the city’s obligations to illegal immigrants is trumping everything else.
This was highlighted recently when the Adams administration temporarily closed down James Madison High School in Brooklyn to house some of the migrants.
City officials said they have to use the school to shelter illegal immigrants because of a winter storm.
Given the escalating number of illegal immigrants and the likelihood of more rough winter weather, it seems other New York schools could be put in a similar state of limbo.
This is why so many parents left New York during the COVID-19 lockdowns. The city closed down schools, switched to remote learning, and generally left the lockdown regime in place to placate teachers unions.
The result was catastrophic learning loss.
Again, we see the priorities.
Of course, it’s not just a school or two that have been taken over. The city is transforming hotels and other public and private spaces.
Crime already has spiked around the Floyd Bennett Field shelter in Brooklyn (the same shelter that sent migrants to James Madison High School in the storm). The New York Post highlighted the problem in a recent report:
According to NYPD data, theft, robbery and petit larceny all increased in the 63rd Precinct, which includes the former federal airfield, between Nov. 27 and Jan. 7, the first several weeks of migrants being housed at the massive tent city. They said some migrants have taken to prostitution, while others try to scam motorists by claiming they were hit by their vehicles and trying to extort up to $500 from them to let it go.
The city’s answer to the crime spikes around migrant centers is to create a curfew. Better than nothing, I suppose, but that’s hardly a solution to the larger problem.
New York City already was dealing with escalating crime problems and a politicized, MIA district attorney, so I’d count on a lot of compounding crime and chaos in the years to come.
When you have millions of people breaking our laws and coming into the country practically unfiltered, it’s hardly a surprise that an elevated number engage in criminal activity.
New York is a perfect example of what you get when blue city governance comes into contact with President Joe Biden’s lawless border policies: barely contained social breakdown.
New York leaders are out of space, out of money, and out of ideas. But there’s no chance the flow of illegal immigrants into the city is going to stop, not with its “sanctuary” status and Biden in the White House.
So, for now, chaos and disintegration will continue in the Big Apple.
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