NY Gov: Why won't Joe Biden take ownership of the migrant crisis?

AP Photo/Mary Altaffer

Hopefully, President Joe Biden is enjoying the view from the underside of the bus courtesy of New York Governor Kathy Hochul. Following the lead of New York City Mayor Eric Adams, Hochul has at least partially surrendered to reality and been forced to publicly admit that New York – particularly the Big Apple, along with some upstate cities – has been overrun with illegal migrants. All of these new arrivals are demanding various services and the resources available in the system are already strained to the breaking point. With nobody else to blame for the results of the “sanctuary” policies that Hochul herself has promoted, she’s pointing the finger of blame for the Biden border crisis at the person it’s named for. In what was described as an “exasperated” tone, the Governor told reporters that New York is facing a “humanitarian crisis” and her pleas to the White House for help have largely fallen on deaf ears. (NY Post)

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Gov. Kathy Hochul says repeated pleas to President Biden about the worsening “humanitarian crisis” caused by a flood of migrants into New York City have fallen on deaf ears — but she continued to sidestep the issue of whether his open-border immigration policies are also to blame.

“We really are looking for a federal response to this – to take ownership of a crisis and we’ll be there to help but this belongs to the federal government,” Hochul, a self-described “Biden Democrat,” exasperatedly told reporters in Manhattan.

The arrival of 18,600 asylum seekers, who can remain in the US legally while their cases are adjudicated, in New York City the past few weeks has led to “overwhelmed” schools across the five boroughs where Mayor Eric Adams has declared an emergency over the issue and says “every community” should expect migrants after city homeless shelters hit record numbers.

The first thing to look at in this story is what the Governor is actually saying. She’s claiming that her state is being overwhelmed by a human flood of mostly illegal migrants and “asylum seekers,” which is obviously true. The state’s inability to handle all of these people of various (and frequently dubious) backgrounds comes down to a lack of resources, at least in Hochul’s opinion. She says she has repeatedly asked the White House for more funding to deal with the situation, but Team Biden has offered her scraps when she needs a full buffet.

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Perhaps that’s accurate, at least to a point. But New York, particularly in Gotham, has been dealing with a massive homelessness problem for ages, growing significantly worse over the past decade. Countless dollars from all levels of government have been thrown at the problem with little to show for it in terms of concrete results. Would another couple of billion dollars suddenly make these problems go away? Color me dubious.

Far more importantly, we should look at what Kathy Hochul isn’t saying. Just as almost all liberal politicians don’t want to address the root causes of homelessness, Hochul completely ignores the root cause of this surge in illegal immigrants. That cause is the open border policies of her own party, particularly at the national level. If the federal government actually closed the border (or came as close to doing so as is practical under the current circumstances), she wouldn’t have to find a way to deal with all of these people. But she won’t say that aloud, particularly so close to an election.

But let’s put aside the source of the human tide of people requiring resources for a moment. Almost all of the new arrivals came into the country over the southern border. That’s literally on the opposite end of the continent from New York, nearly 2,000 miles away. How are all of these people showing up in the Empire State?

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Hochul is quick to point the finger at Republican Governors who have been sending busloads of migrants to the northeast to draw attention to Biden’s border crisis. (And it’s been working according to most recent polls.) But the number of migrants on all of those buses combined pales in comparison to the thousands of illegal aliens who have been flown on secret nighttime flights to suburban airports in New York. Many of them eventually wind up in New York City.

Do you know who authorized all of those secret flights, Governor Hochul? If you said “Joe Biden,” give yourself a cookie. You’ve been forced to call out Joe Biden over the “lack of funding” available to care for these migrants. How about demanding that he stop shipping all of these people into your state to begin with? And not to belabor the obvious, but if we hadn’t allowed two million illegal aliens to come into the country over the last year, you wouldn’t have to deal with this problem at all.

But I suppose it would be too politically inconvenient for you to point out the obvious, eh? No wonder Republican Lee Zeldin has closed within striking distance of you (45/43) in an election that you should have won by 25 points without even getting out of bed in the morning. That sound you’re hearing is the world’s tiniest violin playing, “My Heart Bleeds Purple Panda Pee for You.”

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