More than 1,300 illegal African migrants gathered Tuesday outside NYC’s city hall in anticipation of receiving work permits. The actual occasion was a hearing to discuss the “black experience” in the city’s migrant shelter system. The hearing was held jointly by the Committee of Immigration and Committee on Hospitals to “understand how the [Adams] Administration is addressing language access barriers, cultural competency challenges, health needs, and other roadblocks.”
According to the NY Post, the illegal migrants — most of whom had recently arrived from the African nation of Guinea — had been lured to city hall by an activist group that had promised them green cards.
“They told me that they would help me to get a work permit and a green card if I came here today,” said Amadou Sara Bah, 44, who arrived from Guinea late last year. Bah said he would not have come just for a hearing.
As it happened, there was space in the hearing room for only 250 people, forcing more than a thousand to mill about outside for hours.
The Adams administration, true to form, attempted to place the blame on the migrants’ complants somewhere else. “This is mostly an issue that belongs to the federal government,” said Manuel Castro, commissioner of the Mayor’s Office on Immigrant Affairs.
A spokesperson for the migrants, Assitan Makadii, came to the event upon hearing the misinformation about migrants receiving “money and green cards.” The Africans are “desperate,” she said, and many are homeless and sleeping in subways. “They don’t have nothing and they deserve everything because they are human,” she declared.
One of the chief complaints of the Africans is that they don’t speak English and nobody in the Adams administration seems to speak their language. (Nearly 3,000 languages are spoken on the African continent.) Most of the early arivals entering the city during the Biden years were Spanish speakers, of whom New York has many. The African influx has come more recently and the city government has been slow to provide interpreter services, the migrants say.
Also, more broadly, New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams charged that African migrants are treated worse than Spanish-speakers, because of race. African migrants “may face increased scrutiny, xenophobia, and racism just by nature of being a black immigrant,” he told the hearing and asked the city to “push for the White House to do more and Gov. Hochul to do more, because they are not.”
Otherwise, we are informed that when the day ended, diversity remained the city’s strength.
For more, see the NY Post.