Why New York Is a Magnet for Migrants

New York

The thousand-room Roosevelt Hotel shut its doors in 2020 amid losses from the pandemic and reopened this May as a Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Center. It was the ninth such center in the city, which in June announced plans to open two more. But its location—in Midtown Manhattan, directly above the train tracks at Grand Central Terminal—has made it the symbol of the migrant crisis.

At the hotel’s East 45th Street entrance, migrants bustle in and out of the once-opulent lobby, which is closed to the public. City officials declined my request for a tour, so I interviewed migrants lingering outside. One mother tells me her family is seeking a travel itinerary to Texas for an immigration hearing. Jonny, a Colombian father who arrived in New York alone, says he is at the Roosevelt looking for better shelter after bouncing around different overcrowded facilities for a month: “There’s no space. We’re all on top of each other.”

More than 81,000 migrants have come to New York from the southern border since last spring. On May 13, Mayor Eric Adams deemed the Roosevelt an arrival center for migrants. Most of its occupants are families, but it functions mainly as an intake center for new arrivals. It delivers a “range of legal, medical, and reconnection services, as well as placement, if needed, in a shelter or humanitarian relief center,” according to a city press release.

The opening of the Roosevelt may signal that city officials won’t be demure in expressing their discontent with the results of the Biden administration’s lax border policies. Although border encounters have declined since May, New York is still dealing with the surge. The city’s generous welfare policies also contribute to the crisis.

New York is housing more than 50,000 migrants. Some 2,500 arrived in the week beginning June 19 alone. These numbers represent what Ann Williams-Isom, deputy mayor for health and human services, calls a “tipping point.” The administration for months has called the amount of immigration to the city unsustainable. There are now “more people in the city’s care that are seeking asylum than longtime unhoused New Yorkers in our shelter system,” Ms. Williams-Isoms said at a June 28 press conference. Gov. Kathy Hochul declared a statewide emergency on May 9.

The city has at least 176 emergency shelters in such places as school gyms and churches, and the number keeps growing. Mr. Adams has floated a program to house migrants in private homes, with the city paying the rent. Ms. Williams-Isom told me on June 7 that there are “a lot of different ideas on the table” and that using private residences is “something that we’ve talked about for a couple of months and we’re looking into.” That same day, the city announced it is suing more than 30 upstate counties for using “unlawful emergency executive orders” to resist city efforts to send “a small number of asylum seekers to stay in private hotels in their jurisdiction.”

Jonny, who is seeking asylum and hopes to bring his family to the U.S., says the city is doing a good job housing families, but he has a litany of complaints about his own experience. “The food is the same each day,” he says, and conditions are deteriorating. He’s stayed in four shelters in one month. “There’s too many people,” and he can’t find work. On this visit to the Roosevelt, he’s asking for a plane ticket to Utah. In New York, he says, “there’s no life.”

Since the crisis began, the city has pointed fingers at Washington and urged action, including work authorization, expedited processing at the southern border and more emergency funding. On June 7 the Federal Emergency Management Agency gave the city $105 million, but New York anticipates spending more than $4 billion on the migrant crisis by the end of fiscal 2024.

The country needs immigration reform, but federal failure isn’t sufficient to explain New York’s acute crisis. “Because Chicago, Philadelphia, etc. don’t have a right to shelter—anything like New York’s—New York has the much larger migrant crisis,” says Stephen Eide, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

On May 23 Mr. Adams petitioned a state judge to modify the city’s right-to-shelter obligations under the 1981 consent decree in Callahan v. Carey. He specifically asked for language that would ease the city’s obligations if it “lacks the resources and capacity to establish and maintain sufficient shelter sites, staffing, and security to provide safe and appropriate shelter.” Mr. Adams later said in a statement: “It is in the best interest of everyone, including those seeking to come to the United States, to be upfront that New York City cannot single-handedly provide care to everyone crossing our border.”

Aside from being a hefty financial and operational burden on the city, Mr. Eide argues that stringent right-to-shelter requirements hamstring the city’s efforts to respond to the crisis. “It’s a very undemocratic thing,” he says. “If you want to make just modest changes to the way you run the homeless shelter system, you have to ask the court.”

Mr. Adams has noted that when the Callahan consent decree was finalized, no one could have “even remotely imagined” the number of migrants now arriving to New York. With the city at its breaking point and little leadership from the White House, the mayor is left to confront the shortsightedness of his city’s past policies. It’s a step in the right direction, but until the Biden administration engages in more introspection of its own, this shift won’t solve New York’s crisis.

Ms. Hajjar is a former Joseph Rago Memorial Fellow at the Journal.