The Big Apple’s Big Pickle
As New York City buckles under the burden of Biden’s migrants, can the 1996 welfare reform law come to the city’s rescue?
By George Fishman on August 11, 2023
The Pickle
New York City finds itself in a pickle partly of its own making (with co-credit going to the Biden Border Disorder). The pickle is the result of the collision of an unstoppable force — per the Washington Post, “the nearly 100,000 migrants [who] have arrived in New York City seeking shelter” since the spring of 2022 — with an immovable object — a utopian (turned dystopian) 1981 consent decree requiring NYC to “provide shelter and board to each homeless man [since expanded to woman and families] who applies ... [and] meets the need standard to qualify for the home relief program established in New York State; or by reason [of] physical, mental or social dysfunction is in need of temporary shelter”.
New York City’s migrant crisis gets worse by the month. This May, the New York Times reported that:
The city has struggled to find places to house migrants, opening more than 150 sites to house the newcomers, including 140 hotels. Migrants have also been housed in a cruise ship terminal in Brooklyn and in tents on Randall’s Island. A plan to place migrants in school gyms was quickly reversed last week after protests.
As to the gyms, Gabriela Vizhnag, mother of a third grader, explained that she is “‘not racist or anti-immigrant’ because she herself immigrated from Mexico. But she opposed the plan to house people in a school gym with no available showers and only two bathrooms. ‘It is not good for the children and it is not humane for the migrants’”.
Politico reported that month that NYC “now has more migrants in the [shelter] system than more established New Yorkers. And while the city’s budget office initially pegged the cost at $4.3 billion through next summer, officials said that figure will likely increase.”
https://cis.org/Fishman/Big-Apples-Big-Pickle
