New York boasts an immigration model but criticizes lack of federal support

The city of NY boasts a migration model having received and integrated more than 200,000 in the last two years immigrants irregularities, but complains about the lack of support received from the federal government in Washington, trapped in an electoral logic where the immigration issue has become political dynamite.

“Our support network is better than what you find in any other city and state, and we are proud to have been able to concretely support all these people, who now number 202,000, but the burden is ours alone and we do not see enough support from the federal government“, says the city’s Immigration Commissioner in an interview with EFE, Manuel Castro.

Castro He embodies like few others the famous ‘American dream’: he arrived in New York from Mexico as an undocumented person when he was only five years old, and three decades later, after a youth dedicated to activism in favor of asylum seekers, he became the top immigration official in New York, the cityraised by immigrants”, as he himself remembers.

Flooding the ‘progressive cities’ with emigrants

Two years ago, the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, devised the ‘bus strategy’, which consisted of filling these vehicles with immigrants recently arrived from Mexico and sending them to what he called ‘progressive cities’ with the promise that there They would receive room and board. It was not a lie in the case of New York: a 50-year-old rule obliges the city not to leave anyone homeless.

In the following months, New York declared a ‘humanitarian crisis’ but it did not stop providing assistance to the thousands of people who arrived not only from Texas, but from other states attracted by the generosity that the city displayed towards immigrants: ceiling for everyone, school for the minors (right now there are 37,000 sheltered in the system) and medical expenses.

The attention to all these people caused the city to calculate an extra expense of US$ 10,000 million between 2022 and 2025, which it faced “without support from the federal government, even though it should be a responsibility shared with other cities and states”Castro remembers.

The city was seenobligatory” – in the words of the Commissioner – to limit the stay in public shelters to one or two months, depending on the circumstances, through an exceptional judicial remedy, but guaranteed that families with children were not evicted in any case.

However, and as EFE has been able to verify in the giant camp on Randall’s Island, where adults without families are sent, the law is applied very flexibly and there are several tenants who have been there for more than four months, while they seek a permit to work that never comes.

And another of the problems they face is the enormous slowness of the bureaucratic procedures to obtain asylum status and/or a work permit, which generally takes more than 12 months, and that forces many immigrants to fall into the underground economy, generally in street vending or as food delivery men on bicycles.

Unsatisfied job demand

“The emigration system does not work -Castro reflects-. There is a great demand for jobs and it would be logical that we support them with a work permit. We have spent decades without a solution to these problems, it is an inadequate system and Congress should act“, he insists, although he recognizes that the proximity of the electoral event complicates everything.

Castro laments that all the attention paid to immigrants is now the victim of two opposing narratives: “On the one hand, they tell us that we are not doing enough for immigrants, that we have a moral obligation not to abandon them; On the other hand, they accuse us of giving them too much, and the more we give them, the more they will come.”, he details.

“It is symbolic of what is happening in the country, there is too much political division“, he considers, recognizing that in an election year the issue has become especially thorny, with a Republican candidate like Donald Trump who “with its threats of mass deportations it is generating enormous fear and uncertainty”, and makes some immigrants not dare to go to a health center or a police station for fear of deportation.