Migrant influx will cost New York City a staggering $16b over 3 years: Mayor

NEW YORK – For a year now, Mayor Eric Adams has been sounding the alarm about a humanitarian crisis like few New York City has seen before, as tens of thousands of migrants arrive from the southern border.

On Wednesday, he made yet another plea for federal help and cited a staggering new cost estimate: US$12 billion (S$16.16 billion) to house and care for the newcomers over three years.

This fiscal year, Mr Adams said, the city has estimated that it will spend about US$5 billion on migrants, as much as the annual budgets of the Fire, Parks and Sanitation departments combined.

Officials said they had raised the estimate as migrants continued to arrive in the city by the thousands.

By 2025, Mr Adams added, the city could have more than 100,000 migrants in homeless shelters, about twice the number currently in the facilities, including people who have arrived since the spring of 2022.

New York is not alone in its struggles to accommodate migrants,

most of whom entered the country along the southern border.

Mr Adams said he had coordinated with other cities facing a similar influx of migrants, such as Los Angeles.

The Biden administration has tried to slow the influx with new rules, making it more difficult to apply for asylum, and has sent funds to cities that are receiving migrants.

But Mr Adams said it is not enough.

“If we don’t get the support we need, New Yorkers could be left with a US$12 billion bill,” he said in a speech from City Hall. “While New York City will continue to lead, it is time the state and federal government step up.”

With the new cost estimate, he said the city was examining the services provided to migrants to look for savings, possibly by reducing the cost of meals or laundry.

“Some things we were doing, we are not going to be able to do,” he said.

Mr Adams repeated a call he has made many times over the past year: Asking the federal government to declare a state of emergency, provide emergency aid and create a “decompression” strategy that would slow the flow of migrants.

He also called on President Joe Biden to give migrants work authorisations.

The 62-year-old added that Governor Kathy Hochul should develop a plan to help distribute arriving migrants throughout the state, to ease the burden on the city’s shelter system.

“We need additional resources now,” Mr Adams said, adding that the city was running out of “money, appropriate space and personnel” to properly care for the migrants.

Speaking at an unrelated news conference in Brooklyn on Wednesday, Ms Hochul said she would ask the legislature to allocate US$1 billion in next year’s budget to help the city.

The governor said the state had already given US$1 billion to help with housing and legal services and had helped find and prepare locations to house the asylum seekers. The state will pay for the cost of a new tent shelter on Randall’s Island.

Ms Hochul said she was also in communication with the Biden administration and repeated a call for the asylum seekers to receive work authorisation, adding that she had “brought enormous resources to the table”.

Many of the migrants are coming from Latin America, particularly Venezuela, where the country’s economic collapse has caused millions of people to flee.

Other migrants say they are fleeing extortion from violent drug gangs or persecution because of their sexuality.

And recently, more and more migrants have been arriving from countries in Africa.

For nearly a year, Mr Adams has been saying that the shelter system is at its breaking point, and he has made concerted efforts to stop migrants from coming to New York.

Three weeks ago, New York began distributing fliers at the southern border telling migrants that living in the city is expensive and that there is no guarantee they will receive help should they come, even though the city is required to house those who ask.

Mr Adams also instituted a rule requiring single adult migrants to reapply for shelter every 60 days. And he asked a judge to relieve the city of some of its legal obligations to guarantee people shelter.

Of the 96,000 new arrivals, more than 57,000 are staying in homeless shelters, according to Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Anne Williams-Isom. In total, there are 107,900 people staying in homeless shelters, she said – by far the most ever recorded.

The arrival of migrants, including a recent influx of families with children, has overwhelmed the shelter system, Ms Williams-Isom said. Between July 30 and Aug 6, more than 2,900 migrants arrived in the city, she added.

In an effort to house the newcomers, the city has opened 194 sites, including 13 humanitarian relief centres, which are operated by the public hospital system. Officials said they reviewed 3,000 sites as potential places to house migrants.

“We are past our breaking point,” Mr Adams said.

“New Yorkers’ compassion may be limitless, but our resources are not.”

Mr Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission, said his organisation was still analysing the city’s projections but that he would not be surprised if the cost of caring for the migrants was higher than what was accounted for in the budget.

“What people need to understand is that the city already has huge future budget gaps,” he said in an interview.

The city’s response to the migrants has faltered in the past.

In 2022, some homeless families were forced to stay in an intake office overnight, instead of being immediately moved into shelters. But it broke down completely last week after the city’s main intake centre, operated by a company that used to provide Covid-19 testing, began turning people away.

About 200 migrants, mostly men, many from Africa, slept on the sidewalk outside the Roosevelt Hotel, around the corner from Grand Central Terminal.

Last Thursday, after the Legal Aid Society wrote to the judge who is hearing the city’s request to waive the shelter guarantee, notifying her that the city was violating the migrants’ right to shelter, the city found beds for all of them.

Critics of the city’s migrant response have called on the mayor to focus more on finding permanent housing for people.

Mr Murad Awawdeh, the executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, said the city was too focused on expensive “continual emergency expansion” of the shelter system, rather than investing in policies that quickly move people out of shelters.

On Wednesday, Mr Adams bristled at the suggestion that his team was struggling to handle the crisis, saying that he had taken all the proper steps.

Two weeks ago, the mayor joined the New York Democratic Congressional delegation in a meeting with Mr Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and Mr Tom Perez, a senior adviser to Mr Biden, in Washington.

The New York officials asked the Biden administration to consider a potential emergency declaration for New York state that might free up more resources; the extension of “temporary protected status” to migrants, which would allow more of them to work legally; and the use of federal venues in which to house them, according to a person who was in attendance.

The Department of Homeland Security has responded by assembling a team to assess the region’s ability to handle the migrant influx. The team is expected to report back to Mr Mayorkas with recommendations for the next step, said a spokesman for the department.

On Tuesday, Ms Hochul said she had asked the administration for the use of Floyd Bennett Field, a defunct airport in Brooklyn controlled by the federal government.

According to the Homeland Security spokesman, the federal government has sent more than US$140 million in funding to New York City – more than it has sent to any other city, not including those on the border.

But that federal aid “falls catastrophically short” of the US$3 billion to US$4 billion gap that the migrant crisis has left in the city’s budget, Representative Ritchie Torres, who attended the meeting in Washington two weeks ago, said in a recent interview. NYTIMES