Earlier this week, city officials correctly moved to clear an encampment of migrants outside of the Randalls Island shelter, most of whom seem to have run out their allotted 30 or 60 day shelter stays after the Adams administration shifted the rules earlier this year.
Ideally, people ending their shelter stays will find their own housing and move on, but for those who can’t, the proper choice is to get back in line, not pitch a tent on parkland. It’s not cruel to have some sense of order on public property and the same law applies to newcomers as well as long-established New Yorkers. That the number of arrivals is going down should also ease some of the pressure.
The lack of affordable housing isn’t a problem just for migrants. It hurts everyone in the city, from the traditional homeless population to vast numbers of others who are getting squeezed by few choices and high rents. Of course, the hurdles are even higher for migrants who often have not yet been able to secure work authorization and mostly lack connections to friends and family outside of the city. That some portion of them would end up on the street was inevitable.
Does that mean they should have free rein to set up sleeping accommodations in front of the shelter? Certainly not. The city has an obligation to ensure people are not living in unsafe or unsanitary conditions, and encampments are both. That only a small handful of the tens of thousands of migrants aided by taxpayers resorted to their homemade shelter shows that the more legitimate options are being used by the overwhelming majority.
While city personnel offered the migrants rides to a processing center to apply for new shelter placements, that may not be a successful path for some of these folks who had already run out their allotments. We would like to remind everyone that City Hall has been left to figure all this out — and pay the billions it cost — without much help from Albany and Washington.
It was never fair to expect the city to devise a solution to an issue it was not set up to fix; maybe Vice President Kamala Harris, as the Democratic nominee, can help shift the direction of the federal government’s response to the issue, including initially by simply handing the city more funding to house migrants.
The Biden administration’s efforts to curb additional humanitarian arrivals at the border does nothing to help contend with the migrants who have already arrived. The feds have both capacity and expertise to provide migrants a runway to stability and prosperity and help them settle in jurisdictions around the country that are themselves starved for additional population and labor pool. They should do so.
In the meantime, the city should keep doing what it can to allow these migrants to have dignified lives and, ideally, become contributors to NYC’s rich history of immigrant excellence, which has itself made the city into an international capital of commerce and culture. This can take the form of even small-bore practical steps like providing washers and dryers for homeless kids in city schools, a measure that will help migrant children in shelters as well.