Illegal Immigrants Glamping in New York Tent City at Taxpayers’ Expense
Mayor Adams declares a state of emergency.
New York City’s Democrat Mayor Eric Adams declared a state of emergency on October 7th in response to the thousands of illegal immigrants arriving in the Big Apple by bus from Texas during the last several months. After having floundered at first over how to manage the influx of illegal immigrants into his city, Mayor Adams ended up deciding to house some of them in sparkling new tent city accommodations on Randall’s Island. The facility opened its doors on October 23rd.
The Randall’s Island tent city residents will consist mostly of men from Venezuela. Families with children will be offered hotel lodging, including at a $400-a-night hotel.
The illegal immigrant residents on Randall’s Island are being offered a place where they “can come, rest, relax and kick their feet up after the journey they have been on,” said Emergency Management Commissioner Zach Iscol. That is an understatement.
These illegal immigrants will enjoy such creature comforts as fluff-and-fold laundry service, Wi-Fi, and a lounge with plush couches to relax on while watching flat-screen TVs or playing video games on Xbox game consoles. If they get bored with those activities, they can play ping-pong, foosball, and board games while munching on popcorn. And there are phones that the illegal immigrants can use to make international calls. When it is time to eat, the illegal immigrants will be able to dine on three square meals a day that Mr. Iscol has assured reporters are “all culturally appropriate.”
In other words, the illegal immigrants housed at Randall’s Island will enjoy what amounts to a glamping experience. New York taxpayers will be stuck with the bill. Meanwhile, some homeless U.S. citizens, including veterans, are living on the streets or in unsanitary, unsafe shelters.
Mayor Adams complained that his city was unprepared to absorb the surge of illegal immigrants sent his way but would do the best that it can under the circumstances. “There was never any agreement to take on the job of supporting thousands of asylum seekers,” Adams grumbled during his state of emergency declaration announcement. “This responsibility was simply handed to us without warning as buses began showing up. There is no playbook for this, no precedent.”
Mayor Adams has conveniently forgotten that the border states had no “playbook” either when President Joe Biden opened the U.S.-Mexico border and allowed record numbers of illegal immigrants to enter the U.S. and remain in the country. While Mayor Adams has correctly called the flood of illegal immigrants into the country a national issue which demands a national solution, the only real way to begin fixing the problem has eluded him. In response to a reporter’s question whether he was asking President Biden “to slow the flow of migrants,” the mayor’s answer was a firm “No.”
The Biden administration at first dumped the illegal immigrants into border towns, which were forced to cope with the overwhelming burdens imposed on their resources. Then, without notice, the Biden administration selected other locations away from the border as well, including Westchester County in New York, to drop off illegal immigrants in the dead of night.
Eric Adams and mayors of other large Democrat-led sanctuary cities such as Chicago and Washington, D.C. did not show much concern about the surges of illegal immigrants burdening local communities’ resources until illegal immigrants began arriving on their doorsteps. Only after Texas and Arizona started busing north a small proportion of the new arrivals in their border towns did the sanctuary city mayors and the national media take serious notice. And, of course, they charged that Republicans such as Texas Governor Greg Abbott were using the illegal immigrants as props to stage a political stunt.
In New York City’s case, most of the illegal immigrants arriving by bus from Texas were not sent by Governor Abbott or by any other Republican. They were being sent until very recently by El Paso’s Democrat Mayor Oscar Leeser.
Mayor Leeser reportedly declined to declare a state of emergency in El Paso at the request of the Biden administration. The Biden team was worried that it would embarrass President Biden if a border city mayor from his own party took such a drastic step. Leeser’s solution was to simply spread the burden his city was facing from the surge of illegal immigrants and make El Paso’s problem New York City’s problem.
Mayor Adams avoided openly criticizing his Democrat counterpart in El Paso, Mayor Leeser, for shipping so many illegal immigrants to New York City. At the same time, Adams has strongly denounced Governor Abbott, who sent fewer illegal immigrants to the Big Apple. Unlike Mayor Leeser, however, Mayor Adams did declare a state of emergency in New York City. Yet he is incentivizing even more illegal immigrants to come to New York, who will expect to be housed and well-fed in cushy facilities like the Randall’s Island tent city.
Meanwhile, just yards away from the new tent city where illegal immigrants will be glamping is a dingy, run-down shelter housing homeless Americans. One resident from Brooklyn, who was angry when he learned about the comfortable living conditions the illegal immigrants will be enjoying in their new tent city, complained about the “awful” living conditions that he had to endure every day. He mentioned the foul odor on every floor, bathrooms filled with urine and excrement, the “raggedy bed” he sleeps on “with a hard mattress,” and food he often refused to eat “because that s..t will kill you.” The elevators in the high-rise shelter frequently malfunction as do the washing machines. No fluff-and-fold laundry services for the poor souls living in this shelter.
Mayor Adams decided not to impose a deadline on how long the illegal immigrants can stay in their cushy digs on Randall’s Island. “There is no limit to how long people that are seeking asylum can stay in this facility,” a senior official in the city’s Health Department said.
The tent city was originally supposed to be built in Democratic-Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s district in the Orchard Beach area of the Bronx. But in true “not in my back yard” fashion, AOC objected. “I think we can get to a place with a better solution here,” she said.
Just demobilizing the original Orchard Beach facility and setting up its replacement on Randall’s Island cost $650,000. Who knows how much the amenities inside will cost, including all that “culturally appropriate” food.
Leftist pro-immigration activists are not satisfied, however. Take, for example, Murad Awawdeh, Executive Director of the New York Immigration Coalition.
“The decision to open the Randall’s Island tent camp,” Awawdeh said,” is a stain on our city’s rich history of welcoming immigrants and is morally reprehensible.”
Awawdeh went on to accuse Mayor Adams’ administration of “confining new asylum seekers to isolated tents, vulnerable to inclement weather and removed from critical social services.” He added that “Mayor Adams has compromised New York City’s status as a beacon of hope.”
New York City is not losing its “status as a beacon of hope” because it is housing some of the recent illegal immigrant arrivals in a well-appointed tent city. What is compromising this status is the rampant crime enabled by insane progressive criminal justice “reforms” such as cashless bail and by Manhattan’s ultra-Left District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who returns career criminals to the streets.
The illegal immigrants residing in the Randall’s Island tent city with all of its amenities will be living well at taxpayers’ expense. Many disadvantaged New Yorkers who have been living in the city for a long time will not be so lucky.
Joseph Klein
Joseph Klein is a Harvard-trained lawyer, and the author of Global Deception: The UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom and Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, The United Nations & Radical Islam.
Trump Campaign: Democrats Give Housing to Illegal Migrants, Penalizing Black Americans
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
28 Aug 202023
3:30
President Donald Trump’s campaign used the issue of illegal immigration on Thursday to seek votes from working-class blacks.
A short video released by the Trump campaign Twitter account highlighted the president’s record on improving public housing in New York and other cities.
“My name is Judy Smith,” said one black woman, who continued:
I live in New York City public housing. I’m grateful for the spotlight that President Trump is putting on New York City public housing. I think it’s wrong that the Democrats put illegal immigrants before black Americans. How is it that we have people waiting on the waiting lists for New York City public housing for 10 years or more, but yet we have illegal immigrants living here? Something is wrong with that picture.
President Trump is bringing real solutions to real problems.#RNC2020 pic.twitter.com/3Q7s2ZEchE
— Team Trump (Text VOTE to 88022) (@TeamTrump) August 28, 2020
The comments were likely aimed at working-class blacks in many swing states, including several Midwest states.
“Working-class African Americans are significantly more supportive of policies that seek to: decrease the number of immigrants coming to the United States, increase the federal role in verifying the employment status of immigrants, and attempts to amend the Constitution’s citizenship provisions,” said a 2013 peer-reviewed study by Tatishe Nteta, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The study continued:
For African Americans who lost a job to an immigrant, working-class membership resulted in a 13 percentage point increase in the probability of support for an increased federal role in workplace oversight [against employment of illegal immigrants] when compared to middle-class African Americans who experienced a similar loss.
Numerous polls show that blacks — like all other groups — say they wish to welcome migrants, but strongly prefer that Americans get jobs before companies import more migrants.
Nationwide, the expanded supply of new migrants also cuts Americans’ disposable wages by inflating their housing costs. That reality is recognized by investor groups who are urging more immigration. For example, the Economic Innovation Group says, “The relationship between population growth and housing demand is clear. More people means more demand for housing, and fewer people means less demand.”
Mike Bloomberg’s pro-migration advocacy group, New American Economy, pushed the same argument:
The research shows that an increase in the absolute number of immigrants in a particular county from 2000–2010 results in corresponding economic gains—increased demand for locally produced goods and services, a corresponding inflow of U.S.-born individuals—that are reflected in the housing market.
The video also included comments from other blacks in New York:
My name is Manuel Martinez … Under the Trump administration, New York City Housing Authority has received an influx of cash that it has not seen since 1997.
My name is Claudia Perez I’m the resident council president of Washington Houses, which is in Spanish Harlem. [New York Mayor] Bill de Blasio and the way he has dealt with public housing residents is disgraceful. President Trump administration has opened their ears and has listened … [and] is bringing real solutions to real problems.
The video ends with the claim, “More Funding: Better Housing: Promise Made: Promise Kept.”
Donald Trump's labor & immigration promises for a 2nd term are vague but useful.
They are also better for ordinary Americans than Joe Biden's business-backed, open-ended inflow of wage-cutting & rent-raising blue-collar workers & college-graduates. https://t.co/OmE4tRPf4T
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) August 26, 2020
Another line they cut into: Illegals get free public housing as impoverished Americans wait
Want some perspective on why so many blue sanctuary cities have so many homeless encampments hovering around?
Try the reality that illegal immigrants are routinely given free public housing by the U.S., based on the fact that they are uneducated, unskilled, and largely unemployable. Those are the criteria, and now importing poverty has never been easier. Shockingly, this comes as millions of poor Americans are out in the cold awaiting that housing that the original law was intended to help.
Thus, the tent cities, and by coincidence, the worst of these emerging shantytowns are in blue sanctuary cities loaded with illegal immigrants - Orange County, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, New York...Is there a connection? At a minimum, it's worth looking at.
The Trump administration's Department of Housing and Urban Development is finally trying to put a stop to it as 1.5 million illegals prepare to enter the U.S. this year, and one can only wonder why they didn't do it yesterday.
According to a report in the Washington Times:
The plan would scrap Clinton-era regulations that allowed illegal immigrants to sign up for assistance without having to disclose their status.
Under the new Trump rules, not only would the leaseholder using public housing have to be an eligible U.S. person, but the government would verify all applicants through the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database, a federal system that’s used to weed illegal immigrants out of other welfare programs.
Those already getting HUD assistance would have to go through a new verification, though it would be over a period of time and wouldn’t all come at once.
“We’ve got our own people to house and need to take care of our citizens,” an administration official told The Washington Times. “Because of past loopholes in HUD guidance, illegal aliens were able to live in free public housing desperately needed by so many of our own citizens. As illegal aliens attempt to swarm our borders, we’re sending the message that you can’t live off of American welfare on the taxpayers’ dime.”
The Times notes that the rules are confusingly contradictary, and some illegal immigrant families are getting full rides based on just one member being born in the U.S. The pregnant caravaner who calculatingly slipped across the U.S. in San Diego late last year, only to have her baby the next day, now, along with her entire family, gets that free ride on government housing. Plus lots of cheesy news coverage about how heartwarming it all is. That's a lot cheaper than any housing she's going to find back in Tegucigalpa.
Migrants would be almost fools not to take the offering.
The problem of course is that Americans who paid into these programs, and the subset who find themselves in dire circumstances, are in fact being shut out.
The fill-the-pews Catholic archbishops may love to tout the virtues of illegal immigrants and wave signs about getting 'justice" for them, but the hard fact here is that these foreign nationals are stealing from others as they take this housing benefit under legal technicalities. That's not a good thing under anyone's theological law. But hypocrisy is comfortable ground for the entire open borders lobby as they shamelessly celebrate lawbreaking at the border, leaving the impoverished of the U.S. out cold.
The Trump administration is trying to have this outrage fixed by summer. But don't imagine it won't be without the open-borders lawsuits, the media sob stories, the leftist judges, and the scolding clerics.
Los Angeles County Pays Over a Billion in Welfare to Illegal Aliens Over Two Years
BY MASOOMA HAQ
In 2015 and 2016, Los Angeles County paid nearly $1.3 billion in welfare funds to illegal aliens and their families. That figure amounts to 25 percent of the total spent on the county’s entire needy population, according to Fox News.
The state of California is home to more illegal aliens than any other state in the country. Approximately one in five illegal aliens lives in California, Pew reported.
Approximately a quarter of California’s 4 million illegal immigrants reside in Los Angeles County. The county allows illegal immigrant parents with children born in the United States to seek welfare and food stamp benefits.
The welfare benefits data acquired by Fox News comes from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services and shows welfare and food stamp costs for the county’s entire population were $3.1 billion in 2015, $2.9 billion in 2016.
The data also shows that during the first five months of 2017, more than 60,000 families received a total of $181 million.
Over 58,000 families received a total of $602 million in benefits in 2015 and more than 64,000 families received a total of $675 million in 2016.
Robert Rector, a Heritage Foundation senior fellow who studies poverty and illegal immigration, told Fox the costs represent “the tip of the iceberg.”
“They get $3 in benefits for every $1 they spend,” Rector said. It can cost the government a total of $24,000 per year per family to pay for things like education, police, fire, medical, and subsidized housing.
In February of 2019, the Los Angeles city council signed a resolution making it a sanctuary city. The resolution did not provide any new legal protections to their immigrants, but instead solidified existing policies.
In October 2017, former California governor Jerry Brown signed SB 54 into law. This bill made California, in Brown’s own words, a “sanctuary state.” The Justice Department filed a lawsuit against the State of California over the law. A federal judge dismissed that suit in July. SB 54 took effect on Jan. 1, 2018.
According to Center for Immigration Studies, “The new law does many things: It forbids all localities from cooperating with ICE detainer notices, it bars any law enforcement officer from participating in the popular 287(g) program, and it prevents state and local police from inquiring about individuals’ immigration status.”
Some counties in California have protested its implementation and joined the Trump administration’s lawsuit against the state.
California’s campaign to provide public services to illegal immigrants did not end with the exit of Jerry Brown. His successor, Gavin Newsom, is just as focused as Brown in funding programs for illegal residents at the expense of California taxpayers.
California’s budget earmarks millions of dollars annually to the One California program, which provides free legal assistance to all aliens, including those facing deportation, and makes California’s public universities easier for illegal-alien students to attend.
According to the Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on United States Taxpayers 2017 report, for the estimated 12.5 million illegal immigrants living in the country, the resulting cost is a $116 billion burden on the national economy and taxpayers each year, after deducting the $19 billion in taxes paid by some of those illegal immigrants.
BLOG: MOST FIGURES PUT THE NUMBER OF ILLEGALS IN THE U.S. AT ABOUT 40 MILLION. WHEN THESE PEOPLE ARE HANDED AMNESTY, THEY ARE LEGALLY ENTITLED TO BRING UP THE REST OF THEIR FAMILY EFFECTIVELY LEAVING MEXICO DESERTED.
New data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that more than 22 million non-citizens now live in the United States.
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