You might have seen the video clip of New York Mayor Eric Adams speaking at a Town Hall meeting on the Upper West Side on Wednesday evening, warning that the steady influx of illegal immigrants would “destroy New York City,” and that every part of the city will be affected.
He’s right. Unregulated mass illegal immigration is inherently destructive. It destroys not just cities but entire nations. The Biden administration’s willful, ongoing abdication of its duty to secure the southern border has allowed record-breaking numbers of illegal immigrants into the country, month after month, year over year.
The kind of mass illegal immigration Biden’s policies have unleashed will destroy not just New York City, but every major city in America. They will eventually destroy America itself for the simple reason that a country that cannot maintain its borders ceases to be a sovereign country. In our case, it’s not a foreign army invading us but a betrayal of the American people by our ruling elites, who actively want more illegal immigration for reasons of their own.
In any case, it’s nice that Adams is starting to understand this, or at least grasp that when you throw open the U.S.-Mexico border, what soon follows is chaos, violence, human trafficking, and a global stampede to the Rio Grande.
But it shouldn’t have taken a crisis of this magnitude in his own city for Adams to wake up to the reality of lax border enforcement and the kind of destruction and misery it always unleashes.
The evidence has been right in front of his face (and everyone else’s) for quite some time now. For example, Adams is upset that more than 110,000 migrants have arrived in New York since last spring, with the city now absorbing “10,000 migrants a month” from every corner of the globe.
That sounds pretty bad — and it is. But consider that from last March to July of this year (the last month for which data has been published) more than 3.5 million illegal immigrants were arrested at the southern border. Most months, the arrest total has been well over 200,000 — between 6,000 and 7,000 thousand arrests every single day. Most of these arrests occur in small cities and towns that have nowhere near the ability of New York to house and monitor these new arrivals.
But often they’re stuck with the impossible task because there’s no way federal border authorities can detain or even process that many illegal immigrants. That’s why so many of them are simply being released — not with a court date but merely with an order to report to the nearest ICE office wherever they happen to be headed in America. Those who do get court dates (to contest their deportation and pursue asylum) often will be waiting years for their first hearing.
And it’s no use blaming the situation in New York on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who last year began sending illegal immigrants released from federal custody to New York and other sanctuary cities. That was a political stunt to raise awareness of the burden that Biden’s border policies were placing on Texas and other border states. But the migrants Abbott sent count for a mere fraction of the total number that have since arrived — and continue to arrive — in places like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
What’s really driving the crisis is an acute awareness on the part of would-be migrants in their countries of origin that if they can just get across the Rio Grande, they’ll be allowed to stay. At the very least, they’ll be detained for a few days and then released, allowed to remain for years with no consequences, wherever in the vastness of America they choose to go.
Not surprisingly, a significant number of them are choosing to go to New York City, one of dozens of so-called “sanctuary cities” that once boasted of their openness to migrants and asylum-seekers, and passed policies making it more difficult for federal immigration officials to arrest and deport illegal immigrants there. Often, border-crossers are asking specifically to be sent to New York, which is why the deep-blue border city of El Paso, Texas, began bussing migrants there last fall (and eventually sent more people to New York than Abbott did).
Now the city faces a real crisis. You’ll no longer hear Adams bragging about New York’s status as a sanctuary city for migrants, because his city is overwhelmed with asylum-seekers and illegal border-crossers. Instead, he’s sounding an alarm: “The city we knew, we’re about to lose.”
Again, he’s right. Ordinary people instinctively understand this. Witness the footage of a recent meeting of predominantly black Chicago residents, outraged that they’re being sent to the back of the line for public assistance in favor of newly arrived migrants.
As scenes like this proliferate in major Democrat-run cities across the country, it’s going to become a political problem for the Biden administration. Maybe that’s why administration officials are floating the idea of forcing illegal immigrants to remain in Texas after they’re released from federal custody, limiting their ability to travel while they pursue asylum claims. It won’t solve the underlying problem, but it might prevent urban voters from turning on the Democrat Party ahead of 2024.
Of course, if the Biden administration really wanted to solve the crisis, they’d extend their logic a step further. Instead of limiting the ability of illegal immigrants to travel once they’ve crossed the border, do what every other developed country in the world does: limit their ability to cross the border in the first place.
Give it a week or two and even Mayor Adams might get behind the idea.
