New York City has been struggling for some time now to deal with the flood of illegal migrants who have swamped Gotham and maxed out its shelter capacity because of Joe Biden’s open border policies. Mayor Eric Adams has tried all sorts of schemes, mostly dealing with begging for more federal money and driving away tourists by converting formerly nice hotels into shelters. The migrants are still arriving at a rate of roughly 4,000 per week, but he recently attempted something different. The city put a limit on how long any migrant can stay in a shelter space, after which they would have to move out and reapply for a new room. Single migrants would have to shift every 30 days while families could remain for 60 days. And amazingly, it seems to be working. The most recent reports indicate that the number of applications has dropped by more than 50%. (NY Post)

Fewer than half of the migrants who have been forced to reapply for housing after the city’s new 60-day limit have returned to the Big Apple’s shelter system, officials said Tuesday.

It was unclear the actual tally of asylum seekers who have left the city’s care as a result of the new mandates — which required single adults to reapply for a home every two months — but the percentage appears to show the limits are helping make space in the shelter system.

“It looks like about less than 50% of the people are coming back after those time limits but we’ll know more about those in the coming days and we will give you that information,” Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom told reporters during the mayor’s weekly off-topic presser.

I’ll confess to having been a bit dubious about this plan when it was announced. After all, if you’re just booting a migrant out of a room while allowing them to immediately apply for another, it sounded like all they would be doing is shuffling the migrants around from place to place without reducing the volume. But that’s clearly not what’s been happening.

Some of the migrants that reporters spoke to said that being kicked out forced them to go look for somewhere else to stay, with some saying the found rooms “with friends or relatives.” They apparently didn’t want to go through the hassle of going through the application process again. Others left the city entirely, seemingly not finding it as “welcoming” as had been advertised down at the border.

But this revelation tells us something else that many of us already suspected. All of those people who found a bed with contacts they had in the city could have stayed out of the shelters to begin with. They only went that route when they were forced out. And that should have already been obvious. When you ask to be taken to a “sanctuary city” and you are immediately put up in a nice hotel room for free with unlimited food and other resources, why would you go and stay in someone’s guest room where you might have to eventually fend for yourself? The city’s taxpayers are being played for suckers here.

None of this addresses the underlying problem, of course. The migrants are still arriving steadily and a temporary decrease in demand for shelter will not stop the inevitable build toward all of the shelter space being taken yet again. And the non-migrant homeless population, including some military veterans, is still being sent to the back of the line in favor of illegal migrants. Until the border is closed and the vast majority of these people begin being deported, the crisis will not end. If Mayor Adams wants a true, lasting solution instead of a Band-Aid, he should try talking to Joe Biden about that.