The Rolling Stones may not be going on tour, but New York City Mayor Eric Adams is. He won’t be doing any singing or laying down riffs with a guitar, however. (Or at least that’s not on the official schedule.) He arrived in Mexico yesterday for the start of a tour that will also take him to Ecuador and Colombia. He’s planning to speak to Mexican and Central American leaders about the migrant crisis and directly address potential migrants. He plans to inform them that the conditions they will find if they travel to New York City are not what many of them might expect and that they should seek to go elsewhere. That’s why this is being dubbed “the migrant discouragement tour.” Apparently handing out slips of paper on the American side of the border didn’t work. (NY Post)

Mayor Eric Adams touched down in Mexico’s capital city Wednesday evening for the first leg of his four-day tour in Latin America, where he will try to dissuade migrants from coming to the Big Apple.

Adams said before takeoff he plans “to speak with [Central and South American] leaders there to really start the process of understanding the flow of migrants here to New York City and throughout the entire country.”

“This is the type of conversation we believe we need to have both local, national and international to come up with a resolution,” the mayor whispered in a social media video from his aisle seat while again sporting a hat for the one-win Jets.

In addition to trying to “discourage” potential migrants, Adams said he plans to “learn more about the dangerous path asylum seekers are taking.” That deals with the root causes of illegal migration. But wait… wasn’t that supposed to be the job of our supposed border czar, Kamala Harris? Whatever happened to that plan? She made one trip to the Northern Triangle that produced no new policies and clearly didn’t deter illegal immigration, and that’s the last we heard from her on the subject.

Why would Adams think that this plan is going to produce more results than everything else they have tried? No amount of lecturing or pleading has discouraged the army of migrants heading north up until now. And being told to avoid New York by one mayor (albeit the mayor of one of our largest cities) may not have much of an impact when we’ve had the President essentially saying “Come one, come all” until very, very recently. (To his credit, Biden may have suddenly realized that Trump’s border wall was a good idea and he claims to want to restart construction.)

You should take note of not just what Adams is saying but perhaps more importantly, what he’s not saying. He’s saying ‘Don’t come to New York City because we’re out of room.’ The implication there is that they should go to some other American city if they must make the trip. He’s not saying that they will be rounded up and shipped right back to Mexico or wherever they came from, though that’s precisely what he should have been saying all along.

Whatever Adams plans to do, he needs to do it quickly. On Tuesday, more than 800 migrants arrived in New York on a single day. That was more than double the already staggering number of illegal aliens that have been showing up over the summer. There were not nearly enough beds for all of them, so some inevitably wound up out on the streets. The northeast is currently enjoying an unusual wave of warmer-than-usual weather, so being stuck outdoors isn’t quite as bad as it might otherwise be. But this is New York we’re talking about, and as Jon Snow reminded us endlessly, winter is coming.

Last winter we had a single storm that deposited a sheet of ice on the ground followed by three feet of snow in a fourteen-hour period. If you get caught out in the park under those conditions, you’re going to die, plain and simple. And if you grew up in the equatorial region around the Northern Triangle, your body is likely not at all acclimated to this sort of weather. Perhaps Adams should include those details in his discouragement speeches. Just to be clear, I’m not faulting the Mayor for at least trying. It’s a lot more than Joe and Kamala have accomplished to date. I’m just not sure how effective this can possibly be.