Things appear to be coming to a head in New York State this week. Gotham Mayor Eric Adams has pitched (and attempted to launch) one plan after another to deal with the flood of illegal migrants taking New York City up on its offer of “sanctuary.” His scheme to ship the migrants to suburban and rural counties has been met with lawsuits and state of emergency declarations. Just yesterday, another county introduced what it called “extreme measures” to shut down Adams’ plans. The scheme he cooked up with Governor Hochul to stuff the migrants in SUNY college dormitories was met on Wednesday with new state legislation to block it. At the New York Post, Michael Goodwin calls on the Mayor to do what he should have done at the outset of this debacle. Adams needs to meet with Joe Biden and demand that he seal the damn border and send these migrants home.

Watching Mayor Adams get attacked by The New York Times and other left-wing Democrats after he criticized President Biden’s hand­ling of the migrant mess, I was tempted to praise the mayor for courageous straight talk.

But the moment passed because Adams soon took a different tack, creating confusion about what he believes and where he stands.

Nearly a year after the mayor first announced that 2,800 uninvited newcomers were crowded into city shelters, his policy for dealing with the expanding crisis is almost as messy as the problem itself.

As Goodwin points out, Adams has already gone to a judge with his hat in his hand, asking the court to suspend the city’s “Right to Shelter” rules. Nothing he has attempted has made any meaningful impact and there are now an estimated 70,000 migrants in the five boroughs with as many as 900 more arriving each day. As the author describes it, this is “like trying to bail out an overflowing bathtub with a spoon while the spigot remains open.”

But Adams, who is rumored to be considering a run for the Governor’s office, is caught between a rock and a hard place. This flood of migrants is deeply unpopular with voters of all political stripes. But if he places the blame where it belongs – on the shoulders of the current Democratic administration – he will be seen as a traitor to his party. It would be a sin they won’t soon forget.

Then there is the plan we already discussed that Adams and Hochul cooked up. They are demanding that Biden authorize work permits for the tens of thousands of illegal aliens. Not only would that fly in the face of federal immigration laws, but it would have another, even more detrimental effect. No other city is attempting anything that crazy, so as soon as the word gets out along that border that the Big Apple is handing out work permits, the human flood heading toward New York would only increase at a vastly higher rate.

If this is all part of some secret plan of Joe Biden’s to turn New York red, it may wind up being one of his most successful ventures. Last year we watched in amazement as Kathy Hochul barely squeezed past Republican Lee Zeldin in the Governor’s race and several congressional legislature seats flipped from blue to red. New York’s Democrats have been pushing policies for decades that have been driving people out of the state, but their sanctuary plans and the many woes of illegal immigration may finally be the straw that breaks the Democratic camel’s back.

Just as a reminder, under the current red/blue makeup of the country, the Democrats cannot win any presidential election without carrying both New York and California. It’s just a mathematical impossibility and it wouldn’t matter whether the Republicans nominated Trump, Tim Scott, or Donald Duck. The GOP would take the White House. Perhaps whoever is writing Joe Biden’s cue cards this month should take that into consideration. “Welcoming migrants” was all fine and dandy as long as it was hypothetical. But now, for very many people it’s become very real very quickly. New York isn’t the only place where this is happening and illegal immigration may yet turn out to be the defining issue of 2024, despite the flood of other awful things that have been happening.