A sits outside of processing centre in NYC (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

New York has always been powered by immigration. Over the 20th century, it was the Irish who built the subways and the Greeks who ran the supermarkets; now, Colombians watch over our children and Bangladeshis drive the cabs. Yet in the past three years, something has gone wrong with the city’s approach to immigration. Gone are the days of immigrants flocking to take part in New York’s booming economy. Today, the only thing drawing potentially unlimited people to this stagnant city is the government’s promise of a “right to shelter”.
Six years ago, few would have cast the presence of illegal migrants as a crisis. Illegal immigrants came to New York to work; their workforce participation rate was nearly 78%, compared to 63% for legal migrants, and 65% for natural-born citizens. Immigrants made up more than one-third of New York’s construction workers and a quarter of dishwashers, cooks, maids, and housekeepers. The fact that illegal migrants weren’t allowed to work wasn’t an impediment: domestic workers and gardeners could ask the families who hired them to pay in cash, and large parts of the construction and restaurant industry weren’t too troubled about paying workers under the table. For this reason, while all immigrant children could go to school and get healthcare, adult illegal immigrants weren’t a drain on the social safety net: federal law made them ineligible for food stamps, public housing, and non-emergency healthcare.
Between 1980 and 2019, newcomers were fully aware of this, and quickly learned that, to blend in, they had to obey the law. The city wouldn’t ask anyone for their immigration status — but it would arrest and charge people for small crimes, from petty theft to dealing drugs. Nor would New York much put up with lower-level disorder, from smoking marijuana in parks to camping out in a subway station. This crackdown, which began in the early Nineties, resulted in a fall in major crimes from more than half a million incidents annually to fewer than 100,000 by 2019. Immigrants came to a safe city, and they understood their role in abiding by its laws.
Theoretically, newly arrived migrants were eligible for one city-funded benefit: the city’s unique “right to shelter”. In 1979, a lawsuit was brought against the city by advocates for homeless people, who charged that the state constitution, under a provision requiring care for the “needy”, guaranteed a right to adequate housing. The state’s high court never ruled on this “right”; instead, Mayor Edward I. Koch decided to settle it, agreeing that the city would shelter all adult men who were homeless by reason of “physical, mental or social dysfunction”.
Over the decades, further advocacy litigation spurred new city agreements that expanded the right to shelter. Yet no one in city government, the advocacy world, or the media can recall large numbers of newly arrived migrants showing up looking for city shelter. (Until last year, the city didn’t record the immigration status of homeless shelter residents.) Just as immigrants, whether legal or illegal, didn’t come to New York unless they had a job lined up, or the possibility of finding one, nor did they come unless they had housing lined up — usually a room or part of a room in a cut-up apartment building in the Bronx, Queens, or Brooklyn.
Today, this is no longer the case. The right-to-shelter safety net is now drawing hundreds of thousands of people to the city — many of whom have little chance of finding a job. New York is treating this new surge of migrants as a crisis, with Mayor Eric Adams repeatedly saying that uncontrolled migration will “destroy New York City”. But is this a fair analysis?
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