I honestly can’t say I expected much out of Mayor Adams’ trip to South America but I did expect it would turn out better than, say, Vice President Harris’ efforts in 2021. Now I’m not so sure. Prior to his visit to Colombia, Mayor Adams made a couple stops in Mexico where his message was very different from the one he plans to deliver farther south:

On Thursday, he hyped the “Empire State of Mind” at a forum on Mexican-American business relations in Mexico City. Stumping for the city’s burgeoning technology sector, he extended an invitation: “Any tech companies out here, wherever you are, pack your bags, move to New York City and bring it here.”

Then he headed to the city of Puebla to pay homage to the hometown of much of New York City’s Mexican immigrant community. In a speech in Puebla’s state Congress building, Mr. Adams described how New York City’s immigration affairs commissioner, who joined him on the trip, had come from Puebla as a child, “in search of the American dream.”

“I am here in Mexico to say that we have been long partners. We are neighbors. We are familiars,” he said. “Mi casa es su casa.”

How dumb are these people? If your goal is to try to limit the illegal migrants showing up at the border, why would you go to Mexico and say “Mi casa es su casa?” Isn’t that exactly the wrong message?

Maybe Adams thought no one would find out? But obviously they did. God help us if someone got video of him saying it. This is the kind of thing that human smuggling operations could spread all over the place as proof that the border is open and now is the time to head north. Seriously, did anyone on the mayor’s team think this through?

At the same stop in Puebla he made a comment which, even to the Times, sounded like a kind of invitation: “We can cross-pollinate with the migrants and asylum seekers across our region. We only win if we pollinate with them, so they can produce the flowers that we were fortunate to produce.” I’m honestly not sure what that means but it doesn’t sound to me like he’s discouraging people from crossing the border. An immigration expert the Times consulted though it was possible the entire trip could backfire.

Natalia Banulescu-Bogdan, an immigration expert who has conducted research on messaging around immigration, offered a blunt assessment of the mayor’s plan. “I don’t believe that this method will be effective,” said Ms. Banulescu-Bogdan, a deputy director of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.

She said the mayor’s claim that the city is out of room is contradicted by the social media posts and news accounts migrants see showing people finding places to stay and work in the city…

Mr. Adams’s negative publicity campaign, Ms. Banulescu-Bogdan said, could easily backfire. The surreal sight of the mayor of America’s financial capital — a stylish man with swagger — traveling thousands of miles to one of the most desperate places on earth could end up inadvertently functioning as a recruiting tool, she said.

Again, isn’t this all just common sense. The swell-looking mayor in a nice suit travels to South America to tell people not to come to the big city because the big city is out of resources. Meanwhile, some of these people have relatives who are already there telling them that NYC is rolling out a red carpet of hotel rooms and free meals better than anything they have in the crappy socialist dictatorship of Venezuela. Nothing Adams can say is going to counteract what people are hearing from their friends and family.  But while he probably can’t make it better he can make it worse. Talking about cross-pollination and saying ‘my house is your house’ is exactly the wrong message.

While there the mayor also managed to insult migrants by suggesting continued migration would result in increased shoplifting in his city. Later in the day he had to walk that back, saying he wasn’t implying that migrants would shoplift.

Does anyone remember why VP Harris’ trip to Guatemala was widely deemed such a flop? It was because the president of Guatemala took the opportunity of her visit to blame the Biden administration for sending the wrong message:

The Guatemalan president said he and Harris “are not on the same side of the coin” on migration.

“We asked the United States government to send more of a clear message to prevent more people from leaving,” Giammattei said.

When Biden took office, “The message changed too: ‘We’re going to reunite families, we’re going to reunite children,’” he said. “The very next day, the coyotes were here organizing groups of children to take them to the United States.”

He gets it. You can’t send mixed messages to people south of the border. If you want to discourage them you actually need to say something that is clearly discouraging. So far, Mayor Adams hasn’t been able to do that.