Migrants’ Gain, Locals’ Pain
Yet again, hard data proves progressive madness is smashing New York’s most vulnerable: Three of the Zip codes with the highest concentration of migrant shelters are among the city’s poorest areas. Places like Jamaica, Queens and East New York, Brooklyn — with median incomes below $37,300 — are getting slammed.
The arrivals (more than 200,000 so far) are not only an increasing drain on city services (nearly $5 billion through May 31 and set to soar these next two years), they also eviscerate neighborhood quality of life.
Take Long Island City, now home to 12% of the 193 shelters hosting the 65,000-plus illegal migrants in city care — shelters clustered around two public-housing projects.
Residents don’t dare take kids to parks that migrants use as electric-scooter racetracks and public sex dens. As one local put it, “This is not a third-world country. We can’t just let anyone come into our neighborhood and do whatever the f - - - they want!”
In the 114th Precinct, which covers LIC, major crime is up 12.3% through the first half of the year over 2022, even as that figure dropped slightly citywide.
Turns out importing gang members en masse to beat up cops and ride scooters hellfor-leather as they snatch purses is ruinous of public safety. Who’d’a’thunk?
And the people who live in these economically hurting areas have to put up with the increased crime and disorder.
Most migrants are here for a better life, but it doesn’t take many members of Venezuela’s notorious Tren de Aragua gang to make a neighborhood intolerable. Worse, they get free rooms, free food and debit cards as a reward for breaking immigration law.
Let’s be totally clear: New York City shouldn’t be doing any of this at all. Yes, we’re a city of immigrants, but past arrivals had to find their own way — and they did.
Remaking New York’s welfare apparatus into a migrant-caring machine not only stops this from happening. It attracts ever more border-jumpers and risks putting the city in a socioeconomic death spiral.
Doing it at the expense of the city’s poorest only adds insult to injury as it sends a loud and clear message to the vulnerable.