Illegal migrants and NYC citizens alike are rueing the day the city’s administration put out the welcome mat for the world’s excess. Crowing loudly about its sanctuary status, New York has absorbed onto its streets and sidewalks a mind-blowing 93,200 illegals in just the past year and a half, with another 2,500 still arriving each week. Most of those are lacking any resources of their own and have fully expected the boastful administration of Mayor Eric Adams to take care of them, providing shelter, food, medical care, education, and virtually anything they required or demanded.
Unfortunately, it was not to be. The cost so far has reached an estimated $4.5 billion and counting. Fully one hundred hotels have been turned into shelters to provide ten thousand hotel rooms to house them, and yet they have proven to be not nearly enough. Emergency shelters, most of them simply huge, soft-sided tents, have been tried all over the city’s various boroughs, but those have either failed due to harsh weather conditions or merely proved inadequately sized. Recently, as noted here, Mayor Adams declared the city full and implored the migrants he had so recently and so brashly welcomed to go anywhere else. He even had Spanish-language fliers printed for distribution at the border that, in a kind of reverse-boosterism, urged prospective newcomers to stay away.
It is against this background that the NY Post on July 31 published “Sobering video shows migrants sleeping on cardboard outside iconic NYC hotel as shelter hits capacity.” The hotel in the title is the Roosevelt, whose current predicament we noted on Monday. The Roosevelt is an historic midtown inn, at 45th Street and Vanderbilt Avenue. Closed for three years during the Covid epidemic, it re-opened last year, not as a trendy destination for well-heeled vacationers but as the flagship shelter for “asylum seekers.”
Now, the hotel is filled to the gills, and migrants with nowhere else to go are sleeping on the sidewalks and in the cordoned-off street outside it, hoping to catch a break and get a roof over the heads. They are not happy. One, a 36-year-old man from the Central African Republic told The Post: “We’re all sleeping on the street. We don’t have blankets or pillows. They brought in vans for some people to sleep in, but there’s not enough space in the vans.” The man said he came to the U.S. border through eight different countries: Chad, Turkey, Colombia, Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. Before arriving in New York in July, he was in Louisville, Kentucky, where he lived on the street and subsisted on two meals a week. Then he embarked for New York.
“I came to New York City because I thought there would be help. I wish I didn’t come to New York,” he lamented.
A lot of others agree with him. One journalist tweeted a video of the chaos outside the hotel, repeated in places all over the city. To the video, he added:
The situation in New York is starting to look apocalyptic.
For more, see The New York Post.