Major cities that unexpectedly have thousands of migrants to care for are feeling the financial squeeze. More and more, the mostly Democratic mayors are directing their ire away from Republican governors like Texas’ Gov. Gregg Abbott, and toward President Joe Biden.
At the U.S. Conference of Mayors 91st Winter Meeting, held in Washington, D.C., Biden got an earful from disgruntled municipal leaders. Those mayors, both Republican and Democrat, whose cities have received busloads of migrants sent from the Southwest border, pleaded for financial assistance from a deaf Biden.
New York Mayor Eric Adams declared that the steady migrant flow has pushed his city to the brink, strained resources and filled homeless shelters to capacity. In August, Adams, in a Tweet, implored the feds “for money, technical assistance, and more.” At the mayors’ conference, Adams emphasized New York’s migrant plight: “no more room.” Francis X. Suarez, Miami’s mayor, said that unchecked immigration has placed a tremendous burden on the nation’s cities. Suarez is a Republican, but the Miami mayor’s office is a nonpartisan position. U.S. taxpayers fully fund migrants’ travel from the border to the interior, a reality that many critics point to as being irrefutable evidence that citizens have been forced to finance their own displacement.
Adams has a legitimate gripe. He estimates that the bill for providing food, shelter, education and other services might add $2 billion to his budget deficit, projected pre-migrant invasion at $6 billion. To offset the mounting migrant expenses, Adams announced cuts in the fire and police departments, and public education. U.S. jobs are lost, and lifesaving services are slashed to provide for unlawfully present migrants. Ignored in the migrant outreach are 1.5 million living in poverty of New York City’s 8.6 million, 8.6 percent higher than the national average. Millions more struggle to survive. They’ll be adversely affected by migrant-induced budget cuts.
For the besieged mayors, no end to Biden’s willful disregard for established immigration law is on the horizon. As Biden said during his “Three Amigos” trip to Mexico: “We’re trying to make it easier for people to get here, and opening up the capacity to get here.”
Biden has a two-pronged approach to “opening up the capacity to get here.” First, Biden and his Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas continue to lay out the red carpet at the border. In December, Customs and Border Protection reported an all-time high 251,487 Southwest border encounters. Since Biden’s inauguration, border encounters at some entry points have increased between 300 and 600 percent. Included in December’s record total were, measured against 2021, 24-times the number of illegal aliens from Ecuador, 14-times the Chinese, ten-times the Columbians, nine-times the Peruvians, and three-times the Indians and Turks. During fiscal 2022, 856 migrants perished attempting to illegally enter the U.S.
Second, Biden has illegally initiated a program to parole as many as 360,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans annually, along with thousands of others from 190 nations who have entered through the CBP One Mobile App. Parole is designed to be granted on a case-by-case basis, not issued to thousands of people at once.
Biden’s immigration lawlessness has spawned countless human tragedies. Fentanyl deaths, sex slavery and human trafficking have thrived, enabling cartels to become a $13 billion industry. But overlooked are the real-life consequences of the administration’s sanction of smuggling the world’s poorest into the U.S. Some naïve migrants, lured to the U.S. with visions of streets paved with gold, are reduced to selling $2 candy bars in the dangerous New York subways, some with infants strapped to their backs. As distraught mother Alexandra from Ecuador told the New York Post, “Some days we have no food to eat, no money to buy food.” Another Ecuadoran mother of three, Patricia, also trying to scrape by with subway M&M and Kit-Kat sales, said her family is overwhelmed, and she’s “fighting to feed my children.”
New York is broke; the shelters are overcrowded, and the subway is a treacherous place to eke out a living. Since 2020 and through October 2021, 21 murders have occurred along with a whopping 42 percent spike in random, felonious crime compared to the same period in 2021.
Alexandra and Patricia represent easy prey for wanton criminals, and they are examples of why the most compassionate border policy is vigorous enforcement of U.S. immigration laws.
