Why So Many Migrants Are Coming to New York

Last week, Mayor Eric Adams told a roomful of people that the recent influx of migrants “will destroy New York City.” More than a hundred and ten thousand have arrived in the city in recent months, and more than half are currently staying at shelters and other emergency sites. Although some of the most high-profile arrivals have been sent on buses by Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, as part of a Republican plan to shift the burden of migrant crossings onto blue states, nearly ninety per cent of the migrants who have come to New York since last spring have arrived in other ways. Meanwhile, Adams has denounced the Biden Administration for not providing enough resources for the city to resolve what he describes as a dire crisis. (According to Adams, it will cost twelve billion dollars to house the migrants over the next three years.) I recently spoke by phone with Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, and an expert on how immigration policies at the federal, state, and local levels intersect. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why so many migrants have chosen to come to New York City specifically, why the Biden Administration cannot necessarily fulfill the Mayor’s requests, and how congressional inaction on immigration policy has exacerbated the problems that immigration hawks say they care about most. Sign up for the daily newsletter. Receive the best of The New Yorker, every day, in your in-box. E-mail address E-mail address Sign up By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. How exactly has New York reached a point where the Mayor is framing the arrival of these migrants as something that could “destroy” the city? What factors contributed to it? In many ways, the natural question most people are asking—and certainly most New Yorkers who have a basic pro-immigrant instinct are asking—is, Why are we freaking out? How is this chapter different from any other chapter in the long, welcoming history of New York City? We have been taking in immigrants for centuries. Economists of all stripes have generally concluded that immigrants are a net benefit to the country, to the city, to the state. That’s mostly because the government is out of their way. Strangely, the magic of capitalism and the magic of free enterprise work very well in the immigration analysis: People come, they contribute their labor or their talent or their expertise, there are willing employers who may not pay them as much they should but pay them enough to get by, and they go up the ladders of our economy and society, and their position improves over time, and it is basically all benefit and no cost. The huge fundamental difference in this is that it became a direct fiscal cost for the city of New York and for other municipalities which have had to deal with this, such as Chicago, Washington, D.C., and, to a lesser extent, Boston and Philadelphia. It’s a very strange quirk of politics and law. A hundred thousand people in a city of eight million is not a big number. If they had come organically, gradually, you and I would not have been having this conversation. What made it different, first of all, was its visibility, with Governor Abbott obviously making a very potent political statement: “I’m going to bus people. I’m going to teach you what we face in the border states, so you get a taste of it.” And guess what? Initially all the politicians, certainly on the left and most immigrant advocates, were calling out Abbott’s cruelty. Initially, the Mayor went and welcomed them personally at Port Authority. We have a right to shelter in our state constitution. But why do people not go to Sullivan County or any upstate county? In the late nineteen-seventies, housing advocates brought a lawsuit that got a settlement in which New York City agreed to provide housing for every man who seeks it, which was subsequently extended to women and families with children. That was a legal directive based on a reading of the state constitution, but it applied only to the city. To do the same thing today in Sullivan County, someone would have to file a lawsuit against Sullivan County. New immigrants had not used this settlement before at this magnitude. Most people involved in that litigation never thought it would apply to people who have been in the country for three days. But advocates quickly realized that if you are coming to New York, the city must provide you shelter. “They Didn’t Know That We Were Here” Eric Lach on a Harlem nonprofit that works on behalf of African migrants. Why wasn’t the law used this way in the past? It was just not how it was used in practice. It was understood that immigrants would come, and they would meet with their families or village connections, or employers, or whatever networks they had. It was never conceived that that particular legal settlement would apply to foreign nationals. Just as a point of both information and straight equity, all the advocates who are saying that the migrants have a right to get shelter and work authorization should think about this claim in the context of the eleven million unauthorized people in the country. Many of them have been here for decades—certainly years—many of them with deep roots, and very few of them have claimed shelter. But this new group suddenly became visible because it was used as a political weapon by Abbott, and the Mayor walked into it. He received them openly because he was trying to be the anti-Abbott. He thought it was very good for the Mayor of New York to look like “We are the welcoming Statue-of-Liberty city.” Are you saying he should have done something differently? It’s hard to say in retrospect. In the early stages, we should probably not have actively encouraged shelter. News of the welcome mat certainly spread among immigrant circles through social media very quickly. The idea was: If you get to the border, tell people you want to take a bus to New York City. We should have just kept the old practice that people will just find their own way when they come to the city. Most people would have found some family. Instead, there was an incentive for people to choose to come to New York, even though it was started with a punitive impulse by Abbott. The federal government plays no role except to admit or expel people. The only exception to this are refugees; the federal government initially provides them with financial assistance and helps with their employment and getting access to schools and all that. But we choose the refugees we take before they come to the country, and then we decide where to send them. In addition to being reunited with other family members, they get sent to where it’s easy to resettle, given housing costs and job opportunities. Nebraska is typically high on the list, and Kentucky is high on the list. Other than for refugees, the U.S. government never directly spent taxpayer money to provide housing to recent immigrants, so this is a first. What is Adams specifically asking of the federal government, and do you think it’s something the federal government can give? The general two asks are, first, that you should compensate us for what we are spending on these people. The Mayor first started saying a billion dollars, then he suddenly changed it to four billion, and now it is twelve billion. There should be some transparency about numbers, but he wants the federal government to compensate him for that. Governor Kathy Hochul also wants compensation, for both the state and the city. On that, I think they’re united. They’re probably united with other governors and mayors. The second thing they’re asking is that the federal government should quickly grant all these people work authorization. Their argument is that, if they get work authorization, they would not be likely to stay in shelters. They will join the formal sector of the economy and be employed and be on their way. How feasible is speeding up the work authorization? There are statutory limits to work authorization, and there are regulatory limits. Of course, regulatory is more administrative, but even to change a regulation takes time. The governor of Massachusetts made a big statement that the federal government should issue a regulation changing the timeline for work authorization. But changing the regulation takes longer than granting work authorization. This just gets completely lost in the picture. ADVERTISEMENT Let’s take asylum seekers. By definition, to be an asylum seeker you have to have an asylum application in. The same lawmakers who are busy saying, “Why aren’t you using work authorization?” are not doing much to provide legal resources for getting people to prepare their asylum applications. You are not able to apply for work authorization until you have an asylum application pending, and usually you need someone to help you prepare that. All the legal-service providers in New York—and this is the world’s best legally resourced city—are stretched too thin. The last time I checked with legal-service providers, there was almost no room. Tell that to people who just say that migrants should get work authorization. Many legal-service providers, the legitimate ones, will not do some of these asylum cases because they think many of them are just not eligible. To be eligible for asylum, you can’t just say, “Hi, I’m seeking asylum.” You have to meet the statutory criteria, and those are pretty limited. Just to say that you are running from economic deprivation is not grounds for asylum. So many lawyers say, “Look, they don’t have a legitimate asylum claim. I cannot put my name to an application”—there’s that problem. Then the federal statute says that no applicant for asylum can get a work authorization at least until their application is pending for a hundred and eighty days. Only Congress can change that, and good luck with that. To say that we should issue work authorization as if it were like snapping your fingers is obviously understanding neither law nor practice. The second thing is that a large number of people ahead of the recent migrants are in the backlog of work-authorization applications. Some people are waiting for twenty months. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services hasn’t even had the bandwidth to clear the backlog. So to say that these applicants who are recent asylum seekers should get preference over everyone else is just a hard argument to make. Not to mention that U.S.C.I.S. has been directed by Congress to work within its means. It’s a fee-based agency to which Congress does not appropriate money to process cases. It must generate fees. That means the head of U.S.C.I.S. cannot suddenly appoint five thousand people to do work authorizations. Her hands are tied. Then that gets us to the other complaint Adams and Hochul have, which is that there’s not enough money being given to the city, but I assume that Congress won’t do that. Exactly. It sounds as though you don’t think the specific complaints made by Adams and Hochul have much merit, but what could the federal government be doing? I think one mistake the President made is how he defined the problem—every politician defines the problem their way, and there’s no consensus on what the problem is. President Biden decided to define the problem as one of optics of disorder at the border. This is back in 2021? You’re saying that, with the images of people at the border, the Biden Administration got concerned? Exactly. So they decided, “We want to get rid of the disorder.” What they have done is create orderly entry pathways for people: We’ll give you parole; we’ll give you a notice to appear before a judge; we’ll give you a notice to report to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ice). We have admitted a record number of people in the past two years with what I call twilight statuses, because it got the problem off the border, but it suddenly became a problem for cities and states, which is now what is manifesting itself. Hochul and Adams define their problem as one of shelter. No one is looking at the whole picture and asking, How do we stop so many people from coming? That’s just lost in this whole debate. Why does this happen? Isn’t that because nobody has an idea of how to stop so many people from coming? Yes. The reason is that our asylum system is broken. So many of these people seek asylum because there are actually no legal avenues for people to come, which separately we do need in the country. But legal pathways can be created only by Congress, and we know why that’s not happening. In the absence of legal pathways, people are using asylum as a way to enter the country. In the asylum system, the border applications go to an immigration judge, and those cases are backlogged for four to five years. During those years, you can get work authorization, so the backlog becomes the magnet. What I and the Migration Policy Institute have argued is that we should take border asylum cases out of the immigration courts. It’s just become this big mammoth backlog. At least for the short term, we should have asylum officers determine asylum cases that come to the border. That process will take months, as opposed to years. These are non-adversarial hearings, and those can be finished, including appeals, in months. So you have an asylum case and a determination within a year; only those who have meritorious claims get approved, and the ones who don’t are deported. Then the message will get sent out that just saying you’re here for asylum doesn’t guarantee your prolonged stay in the United States. We have to remove the magnet. The thing people forget is that the migrant social networks are very potent. They’re smart people. They know everything that’s happening in the U.S. When New York City started taking people in, within three days the Venezuelan social networks were abuzz with “If you come to Texas, tell them you want to go to New York City.” If we change the policy, people will begin to say that there’s no guarantee now that you’re going to be in a backlog of several years, during which you can work lawfully in the U.S. That message will get through networks very quickly, and in our view, it will affect the flow of people to the border. ADVERTISEMENT What about people who say that, all else being equal, the flow of people to the border is a good thing? You have to decide: Do we believe in open borders or not? This is a fundamental philosophical issue. If you believe in open borders, then that’s the argument. If you don’t believe in open borders, then you believe in the rules-based system. Under the rules-based system, you can always seek benefit under the rules. We can always say we should change the rules—which is exactly what we are advocating. But Biden can’t do that; only Congress can do that. We do think that we should increase the avenue for people to come legally, hugely, at least in the low-wage sector of our economy. I’m a big advocate of that, but only Congress can do that. It seems that Congress’s unwillingness to do what you’re putting forward now has made the system even worse in almost every way. It’s a cruel system. It’s a system where you have these crises that pop up at various times, and they’ve made people now turn to asylum as the way in. The people who’ve been unwilling to reach a deal on a federal policy have made every aspect of the system worse. All that is true. And now the crisis at the border has provided an argument for Republican lawmakers to not do what they say they want to do. They say, “I really would like to increase options for people, but I can’t do it until the border is under control.” This has provided a potent weapon for them not to make any reforms. That’s why I believe that we have two big challenges in the immigration system. One is that we don’t have enough legal pathways, and two, we have a border crisis, and the two are related. Given current political constraints, there doesn’t really seem to be any obvious way out of the crisis. I do think that, if we got the asylum-officer rule going, that would make a difference. This is a regulation that the Biden Administration issued last year. They initially started it but then put it on pause. For legal reasons? I think for bandwidth reasons. The pressure at the border was so high that they could not deal with anything else. I mean, I have some sympathy there. But this is something the Administration should prioritize, in your view? They should prioritize it, and they should use it for what accountants call “last in, first out,” because you have to send a message. The more recent cases should be sent to asylum officers, so the recent arrivals will get a much quicker determination. That will send the message, “Folks, this is not working out as you thought.” They should just speed up hiring more asylum officers—something they have been authorized to do—and let the asylum-officer rule become robust. I do think that President Biden should have seized the issue earlier. He let it become a food fight between states and states, and between states and cities. He should have called at least all the impacted governors and mayors early on, if not all fifty governors, and said, “Look, this is happening. Let’s just accept that this is a national problem. This is not a Texas or New York problem. We are going to try to find a national solution.” There is the refugee precedent. We have a reimbursement scheme for refugees, where we just basically say, “Look, we’re trying to create order at the border. We are letting them in with our permission. We must compensate states and localities.” Then the federal government could get into the decision about where these people should go. Should we send them to North Carolina? Should we send them to Colorado? Should we send them to New York City? That should be made as a federal decision. We missed the boat. ♦ For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.