New York City Mayor Eric Adams has finally realized it: If you're not actively playing the game of Illegal Immigrant Hot Potato, you're on the losing end of it.
For months, New York has been on the receiving end of the game, as the Republican governors of Texas and Florida aggressively bus migrants to New York and other big, blue cities. Now, with his city busting at the seams with hordes of varied Third Worlders, Adams has decided he's all-in, and New York City is now aggressively offering migrants one-way plane tickets to anywhere else in the world but there.
Given the leftist uproar and accusations of racism leveled at Governors Abbott and DeSantis, it's amusing to watch the mayor's office try to couch its aggressive migrant-export scheme in delicate terms. “With no sign of a decompression strategy in the near future, we have established a reticketing center for migrants,” said spokeswoman Kayla Mamelak. “Here, the city will redouble efforts to purchase tickets for migrants to help them take the next steps in their journeys.”
On Thursday, Adams reiterated his previous plea for the federal government to scatter migrants all across the United States -- not just in Democrat-run "sanctuary cities" like his, but in small towns too: "When people come across the border, we have 108,000 cities and villages — we should spread them out across the entire country, and not just New York, Chicago, Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston."
"Get them out! Get them out!"
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) September 15, 2023
A sea of New Yorkers waving USA flags chant in unison at a protest against Eric Adams plan to resettle migrants in Staten Island.pic.twitter.com/W9tm4JYB37
While he continues to beg for financial and other help from the Biden administration, Adams has recognized that, against a daily cost of $394 per migrant, a one-way plane ticket to anywhere has a huge return on investment. And we don't use "anywhere" lightly -- Politico reports some have been given tickets to places like Morocco and Colombia.
If you were planning to see New York City at Christmastime, note that Adams and his team are now thinking of "distributing tents to newly arriving migrants and creating encampments in parks and other outdoor spaces," the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday. That could include tourist destination Central Park, and Prospect Park too. “When you are out of room, that means you’re out of room,” Adams said Thursday. Some 130,000 migrants have arrived in the city this year, with another 4,000 now arriving weekly.
Adams' approach to the immigration crisis isn't winning fans among the progressive left. “What we’ve witnessed from this administration — even if they’re not directly saying ‘you’ve got to get out of here’ — is that they’ve consistently created hysteria and chaos and confusion and have not used a tone of inclusivity and welcome,” New York city council member Shahana Hanif told Politico.
