Staten Island is often an outlier among New York City’s five boroughs. It is the second largest geographically, but the least populated; it has the second highest median income among the boroughs, but its heavily suburban neighborhoods are disconnected from the city’s subway system and other amenities; where most of the city is awash in Democratic votes, Staten Island is a Republican enclave. For those reasons and more, it is unsurprising that there has been a major increase in anti-immigrant sentiment on the island as New York has seen an uptick in migrant arrivals over the past year.
Rather than providing leadership and support for these vulnerable newcomers, Democratic elected officials are instead either dithering or sounding a lot like Republicans themselves.
That surge and the associated protests would be easy to write off if they were limited to Staten Island or even if they were concentrated in more conservative areas upstate. But instead, we’re seeing similar distrust and dismay with the growing number of migrants in the city and beyond from New York Democrats too. And rather than providing leadership and support for these vulnerable newcomers, Democratic elected officials are instead either dithering or sounding a lot like Republicans themselves.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams provided a chilling example in his comments at a town hall on Wednesday. “Never in my life have I had a problem that I did not see an ending to. I don’t see an ending to this,” he told a crowd at a town hall on the Upper West Side. “I don’t see an ending to this. This issue will destroy New York City.”
Adams, a former Republican, has made similar comments before about the influx of migrants. He’s spent the last year railing against Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s policy of busing migrants from the border to northern, often Democratic-controlled cities. The mayor’s comments on Wednesday were no different on that front — he referred to Abbott as a “madman down in Texas.” But the idea that the newly arrived migrants mean that “city we knew we’re about to lose,” as he put it Wednesday, was a serious escalation of his rhetoric, both in terms of pessimism and xenophobia, and earned him deserved condemnation from the Legal Aid Society and the Coalition for the Homeless.
It’s true that the city’s resources have been stretched in providing shelter and support to more than 100,000 new arrivals, including more than 58,000 asylum seekers. Adams has repeatedly called for increased financial support from New York state and the White House in response, and issued flyers discouraging more migrants from coming to the city. He’s demanded that President Joe Biden should declare a state of emergency to deal with the “crisis” at the border, again repeating Republican talking points. And he’s sharply criticized New York Gov. Kathy Hochul for wanting to limit migrants leaving the city for other parts of the state.








