On Friday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Special Report,” New York City Councilman Kalman Yeger (D) said that the influx of migrants is “an absolute national problem that is foisted upon cities like ours where people believe that they can come here, they’re going to get a room at the Roosevelt Hotel, they’re going to get a phone, and they all seem to have motorcycles and they seem to be doing just fine.”
Yeger began by saying, “Well, anybody who says that every single person who comes over the border, lawfully or unlawfully, is here to commit crimes is simply wrong. But, at the same time, it’s naive and false to say that nobody who comes here is committing crimes. And the reality is, when a city like New York, with the numbers at approximately, as of two months ago, over 205,000 migrants have come to New York City in the last two years, that is — it’s simply not believable to say that our crime numbers are not seeing the result of that policy.”
He added, “Well, to put this in perspective, the number of migrants who have come into New York City exceeds the number of residents of [the] council district that I represent and that [Joe Borelli (R)] represents. Each of our districts have about 170,000 people. So, we’ve already taken in more than an entire New York City Council district into our city in the last two years. It’s just simply not sustainable. And when we talk about this $5 billion number, think about what New York City can do with $5 billion. We just adopted a budget three months ago. And the biggest fight on the table was whether or not we can keep our libraries open, that’s the battle, whether or not we can afford to keep our cops on the street, to hire more cops for retiring cops, because they’re leaving the job, to hire firefighters, to hire teachers. The services that are required by the migrants who are coming to New York City are immense. They’re costing us an enormous amount of money. We just simply do not have the resources to keep on footing this bill.”
Yeger further stated, “This is a national problem. And just because a city like New York, a city like Chicago, a city like Dallas are the poster [children] and at the forefront of seeing the problem, this is an absolute national problem that is foisted upon cities like ours where people believe that they can come here, they’re going to get a room at the Roosevelt Hotel, they’re going to get a phone, and they all seem to have motorcycles and they seem to be doing just fine. And this is a policy — we do not, in the city of New York, control the borders, all we can control is what’s going to happen to people once they show up in our city.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett