A seemingly hopeful moment in New York this week, as highlighted by Bob McManus at the New York Post, turned out to be significantly more underwhelming than it first appeared. During a speech delivered in Albany on Thursday, Governor Kathy Hochul finally appeared to call out Joe Biden and the open southern border as the root cause of the migrant crisis that is currently overwhelming New York City and is quickly spreading to the suburban and upstate regions of the state. But she never actually mentioned Biden by name. Nor did she address the other serious issues that are feeding into this mess. It was, as McManus put it, “One small step for Kathy Hochul and one big mistake for New York.”

To be sure, Hochul called out Washington’s abandonment of those states and localities shellacked by America’s shameful — and exceeding dangerous — border breakdown.

“This crisis originated with the federal government,” she quite correctly noted in an Albany speech Thursday, “and it must be resolved through the federal government.”

So, two cheers for Krazy Kat…

And a truly serious governor would have minced no words proclaiming a solution to the crisis — a reversal of Biden’s effective open-border doctrine.

Rather than calling out all of the bad actors and proposing concrete solutions, Hochul fell back on doing just what Big Apple Mayor Eric Adams has done in the recent past. She described the problem (correctly) as originating with the federal government. But the “resolution” she is seeking from Washington is just more money for more housing for migrants. She wants more work permits for migrants – which will obviously only give them an additional incentive to stay and act as catnip to attract even more of them from the border. She wants more federal land set aside for shelters, which would do precisely the same.

There is no solution to this crisis that doesn’t begin with sealing the southern border and beginning to round up and ship out the millions of illegal aliens that have already flooded the country. Everything else under discussion is nothing more than bandaids on a wound inflicted with a chainsaw. You can’t keep adding more housing even if you somehow come up with the money to pay for it because those new rooms will immediately fill up and you’ll be right back where you are now.

Hochul has also made not one reference to rolling back New York City’s sanctuary city law, which is also one of the biggest magnets attracting illegal migrants. Granted, that’s really the job of the Mayor and the City Council, but they rely on the state for a lot of support so when the Governor speaks, they tend to listen. She could show leadership in that area but chooses not to do so.

Hochul and Adams are also following in the footsteps of so many of their fellow Democrats across the nation when it comes to illegal immigration. They are pretending that just because more than 100,000 new people are camped out in the city, it is now the responsibility of the city and the state to ensure they are cared for, perhaps indefinitely. The vast majority of those people are in the country illegally. Many of them never even received a screening or a date to show up in immigration court.

Until very recently we had immigration officials tasked with locating such people, taking them into custody, and deporting them. Whatever happened to that plan? It worked fairly well for many, many decades. But it appears to have evaporated with the arrival of Joe Biden and the Democratic Majority in the Senate. Now the illegal immigration routine functions more like a game of Red Rover, Red Rover. Yes, we have laws against illegal immigration on paper. But once you step foot in our country you’re handed a golden ticket like Willy Wonka.

But now the Democrats in many cities have gotten a very large dose of precisely what they claimed they wanted. And they don’t like the taste of that medicine at all. But instead of addressing the underlying problems and admitting they were wrong, they are once again crying out for more federal money from all of the country’s taxpayers to endlessly support people who have no business being here. It’s pathetic.