National Public Radio’s idea of fulfilling its mission to “inform the public” is to sponsor every leftist cause coming down the pike. This was made clear once again by their March 12 report, “Asylum dreams remain elusive for tens of thousands of migrants bused to New York.”
That piece deals with the plight of the 50,000 or so illegal migrants who have come to the city since last April. Most of those migrants have been placed in taxpayer care, forcing the repurposing of dozens of hotels and other structures into shelters and costing, according to Mayor Eric Adams, up to $4.2 Billion and counting.
Many of the migrants are being put up in one of 85 city hotels, such as the Watson, each of whose 600 rooms pre-migrant would have rented for $255 and up per night. In spite of such treatment, the migrants complain that Mayor Adams’s efforts at supporting them are not good enough.
One such illegal, a Venezuelan named Luis, until recently was being housed at the Watson, which he judged to be “decent.” Then the city came along and decided to make room for families in the hotel and told Luis he would be moved to a new shelter near the harbor at Red Hook. Luis took umbrage at the suggestion and decided the move was intended to “tire him out” and compel him to return to his home country, which he insists he will not do. In addition, since he had found an (illegal) job nearby, the move would have made commuting inconvenient. He decided he would have to fend more himself and so used the money he was saving for a lawyer to get his own place, which he shares with four other Venezuelans. He concludes his story to NPR by saying, “I like the US. But you have to be psychologically prepared for it.”
Like the other Venezuelans NPR interviewed, Luis claims his life was endangered in Venezuela. Yet while making his way up to the southern U.S. border, he would necessarily have crossed through a half-dozen other countries, including Mexico, which yesterday was declared by its president “safer than the United States.” But none of those countries would do, because of that old myth of the American Dream. Clearly, so-called asylum seekers are most often looking not for physical safety but financial gain, which is an asylum non-qualifier.
The American dream of a cushy life has not happened for many of these illegal migrants, it is true; but the fact is, it has not and will not ever happen to a great many American-born citizens either. Life is like that. By perpetuating the myth and dangling before the world the prospect of an open border to paradise, news organizations like NPR and its financial supporters in Washington do us all an incalculable disservice.
For more, see NPR.