Tens of thousands of asylum seekers are inundating American cities far from our southern border. It’s a massive migration, seemingly without end.
New York City, for example, has already received around 80-thousand border crossers, bused here by a bipartisan bunch of governors. You should know, it’s not only the Republican governors that are sending their huddled masses northward.
Mayor Eric Adams has called out the ostriches in Washington that have flung open our southern border to this huge human wave. He says they haven’t done enough to help New York and other cities deal with a problem created and controlled, not by local government, but by the Feds.
Sure enough, Adams has been handed a sandwich from the Biden Administration that wasn’t full of, shall we say, New York’s tasty pastrami. He’s a Democrat put in a very tough position by his party-mates in Washington. But here’s what he and his fellow mayors need to do to fix this mess which Adams calls “the greatest challenge” he has faced in his two years in office.
For sure they need lots and lots of federal money to cope with lots and lots of migrants that have moved up from the border states.
New York, for example, is facing a more than four-billion dollar price tag through next spring to care for the children, women and men who’ve come to the Big Apple for a better life. That’s mostly local money, with a pittance promised from the federal government. Mayor Adams says if he doesn’t get the federal financial relief, it “will undermine the entire city.”
New York and other major American cities are clearly in peril. It’s not only the immigration issue that’s plaguing them, of course, but it is an unexpected and unfair burden for them to bear. Part of the onus has to fall on the elected leaders in those cities as well.
They must stop playing the political game and speak out about how the Biden Administration has completely screwed up the southern border. They need to make the White House realize that unless it fixes this situation, like right now, Biden will pay a price in the 2024 election with big city voters. He can squawk all he wants that Republicans have cynically blocked meaningful immigration reform, but perception is reality. And the perception right now is that our cities are being overrun by helpless immigrants because of what Biden has done, or more precisely, what he hasn’t done.
But here’s the rub. Eric Adams has been only mildly strident in his rebuke of the White House immigration policy. He’s said the leader of his party does “not (have) a real plan” and that he is “irresponsible”. Adams says he’s “been extremely patient” but that “The president and the White House have failed this city.”
I mean, haven’t you heard worse from the mouth of a guy from Brooklyn? But it has pissed off the Bidens to the point where they’ve dropped Adams from the president’s campaign advisory board. That’s quite a slap upside the head for the highest profile Black mayor in America, the leader of the nation’s largest and most important city. Biden punished Adams but he can’t do that to everyone who bucks him.
The Democrat mayors from around the nation should demand that until they can figure out how to accommodate and assimilate the new immigrants they already have, the wave must be substantially slowed.
Trump did it. Forget the wall nonsense. Trump sent the message that the immigrants were not welcome here. That didn’t stop them from coming, but it certainly slowed them down. The moment Biden became president, the situation changed and the results are obvious.
Biden shouldn’t be as crude and as crass as Trump. He doesn’t have to threaten to separate families at the border. But he has to find the strong language that the tens of thousands of migrants coming our way will understand. It’s not that we don’t want you, but you have to give us a chance to figure out how to make the situation right for everyone, before more of you can safely and responsibly come in.
What is it going to take for Joe Biden to wake up and open his eyes to the crisis he’s created?
The answer is, he won’t, until his fellow Democrats who are on the front lines get on his case a lot more. They have a responsibility to do that. They have a responsibility to the citizens who pay their salaries. They actually have a responsibility to the migrants themselves.
You mayors! Put aside your ideology and party loyalty and do something that’s out of your comfort zone but the right thing to do to save our cities!