Point and Counterpoint: Who Should Pay for the Estimated 50,000 Asylum seekers who have flooded into NYC?
Eric Adams Says fellow Democrat Joe Biden and the White House “have failed New York City. The national government has turned its back on New York City.” Our POINT columnist agrees saying the city can’t turn its back on the masses–and neither should the feds. Our COUNTERPOINT columnist says NYC, which advertises itself as a sanctuary city, is paying the price for its generosity and is going to have foot at least half the bill on its own.
| 28 Apr 2023 | 08:02
Give me... your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. But debate rages on who should pay to shelter the huddled masses. Photo: Keith J. Kelly
We always have done what Emma Lazarus asked us to do for the world’s “tired and poor yearning to breathe free.”
The first big wave of immigrants were the Germans. Then came the Irish, fleeing the Great Hunger starting in the late 1840s and eventually sending two million to our shores. The Irish built political organizations that ran our cities, our states and the labor unions ending child labor, giving us the weekends we cherish. A little later Italians found New York City, found America, nearly four million strong, largely fleeing the bracing poverty in Sicily and southern Italy and filling many of the back breaking jobs that the Irish did before them. Jews came running from the many nations in which they lived because travelling for weeks to cross an ocean seemed better than waiting for your neighbors to decide which would be the big night of rape, slaughter and larceny.
Wave after wave. The immigrants came. They saw. They worked. They were hated. Abused. Punished for their accents, language, customs, religions.
And they kept coming.
That was until the guys sitting in Washington thought they were better than those risking everything to travel weeks across an ocean in steerage, vomiting sea sickness, and illness. Keep them out, they bellowed. What the law wouldn’t do, the haters who burned Catholic churches did. What those politicians who hide their consciences behind a majority vote wouldn’t do, the gangs marauding city streets did with fists and pipe and brick.
Now the great wave of immigrants come again. They flee poverty, rape, human traffickers, gang and political violence. They come from south of the border, walking through jungle and swamp.
There is no one waiting them for them at the entry to the place a poet called the golden door. They are doing nothing different than any have done before. No one wanted European seekers of freedom, of safety, either.
The Mayor says we need federal help. Adams says President Biden has failed New York and that we can’t afford the cost of the newest new comers.
Mayor Adams is correct. Where is Washington?
Our city gave this nation immigrants who built much of it. We’ll never say go back across the border, back through the jungles, back across the mountains where those newest seekers of hope walked as much as a thousand miles.
Eric Adams wants Joe Biden, descendant of the proud hard working Irish nation to give us federal money so we can house those who want to be New Yorkers, to be Americans, to breathe free.
Adams is right. Period. Time for Washington to pick up the tab. All of it. Yes. Every single cent.
No excuses. It’s Washington’s obligation. Biden: give New York what we deserve to create what could be the next greatest generation.
Hank Sheinkopf is CEO of Sheinkopf Communications, an international public affairs firm in Manhattan.