More Than 60% of Migrants Remain in New York City Shelters as Mass Immigration Exacerbates Costly Rents
More than 60 percent of migrants who have arrived in New York City since the spring of last year remain in taxpayer-funded shelters across the city’s five boroughs. Mass immigration has also only exacerbated the city’s sky-high rents that are often out of reach for working and lower-middle-class New Yorkers.
Data published in the Wall Street Journal this week reveals that of the more than 90,000 migrants who have arrived in New York City since April 2022, almost 61 percent are still living off taxpayers in shelters.
Mayor Eric Adams (D) said migrants will likely cost New York City taxpayers close to $3 billion this fiscal year alone after they have already spent some $1.4 billion to house, feed, and care for the new arrivals.
The issue has become so widespread that migrants now outnumber native New Yorkers in the city’s shelter system, with the city housing about 55,000 migrants compared to roughly 50,000 New Yorkers.
Meanwhile, mass immigration to New York City has only helped send rents skyrocketing for native New Yorkers and those moving to the city.
The median rent today in the city is about $3,700 a month, according to data compiled by Zillow. This represents a $200 increase compared to the same time last year. The city has the most inventory of rental properties, starting at $5,000 a month and going all the way to $150,000 a month.E
Last month, rents in New York City hit a new high, with the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment across the five boroughs costing a pricey $3,900 a month — a nearly nine percent increase compared to the same period the year before.
The addition of tens of thousands of newly arrived border crossers and illegal aliens, on top of those thousands of legal immigrants who arrive monthly, coincides with New York City’s increasing unaffordability for working and lower-middle-class New Yorkers.
A 2017 study published in the Journal of Housing Economics found that “increases in immigration into a metropolitan statistical area are linked with rising rents and home prices in that metropolitan statistical area and neighboring metropolitan statistical areas.”
RELATED — J.D. Vance: Illegal Immigration Robs Americans of Dream of Owning a Home
Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban AffairsMass immigration’s impact on boosting housing costs for Americans is so pronounced that New York Magazine recently admitted that it is “bad for housing prices.”
In 2013, a study by the Michael Bloomberg-funded New American Economy, which promotes mass immigration, explained how the importing of tens of millions of immigrants over decades had helped raise housing costs by $3.7 trillion for the next generation of homebuyers but spun the figure as the creation of “housing wealth.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Fifth Bus of Migrants Arrives in LA From Texas
A fifth busload of migrants relocated by state officials in Texas arrived in the self-proclaimed sanctuary city of Los Angeles this weekend.
"The city has continued to work with city departments, the county, and a coalition of nonprofit organizations, in addition to our faith partners, to execute a plan set in place earlier this year," the office of Democratic mayor Karen Bass said. "As we have before, when we became aware of the bus yesterday, we activated our plan."
Forty-eight migrants arrived in the city on Saturday, including 18 minors. The migrants were taken to a local school and medically examined.
It's the fifth bus to arrive from the border towns of Texas in the last month. The first bus arrived in the city on June 14.
"Texas just dropped off the 1st bus of migrants in Los Angeles," Texas governor Greg Abbott (R.) tweeted on June 14. "Small Texas border towns remain overrun & overwhelmed because Biden refuses to secure the border."
Abbott pointed to the Democrat-led city's "self-declared sanctuary status" as justification for his state's role in transporting the migrants.
"LA is a city migrants seek to go to," Abbott said in June, "particularly now its leaders approved its self-declared sanctuary status."
California governor Gavin Newsom (D.) has advertised that his state welcomes migrants. "Let me be clear, @realDonaldTrump: California is a sanctuary state," he tweeted in 2018. "We believe in the power of diversity. We have defied and resisted the xenophobic, hateful policies of your administration at every turn. We will do it again."
Texas's move comes as Abbott is set to battle the Biden administration in court over the installation of buoys with underwater netting in parts of the Rio Grande river to deter illegal migrant crossings.
The Department of Justice threatened to sue Texas if it did not remove the barriers, which are anchored to the riverbed. The buoys are set to cover 1,000 feet of the river near Eagle Pass, an area where Border Patrol agents reported the second-highest migrant crossing numbers this year. The first netting devices were set up earlier this month.
"Texas has the sovereign authority to defend our border, under the U.S. Constitution and the Texas Constitution," Abbott tweeted on Friday. "We will see you in court, Mr. President."