New York City:

The ‘American dream’ has triggered a big crisis in New York. The quest for a better life and more opportunities has thousands of immigrants moving to the Big Apple. But at what cost? A housing crisis and a big burden on the administration.

New York City received 118,000 migrants since last year, over 60,000 of them housed in the city’s shelter system. But officials are struggling to respond to their needs.

Mayor Eric Adams has called it a humanitarian crisis that could “destroy New York City”.

Most migrants came to New York from countries in South America and West Africa in hopes of safety, work and stability. But integrating them into a new city isn’t an easy task – both for the migrants and the administration.

The migrants are typically housed in hotels, office buildings and school gyms. The city administration has been paying for budget hotels to house them, but it is now running out of housing options.

The migrant influx could cost $12 billion over three years, claims Mayor Adams who has previously looked into housing migrants in parking lots and cruise ships.

Eric Adams and New York Governor Kathy Hochul have both blamed the Joe Biden’s administration for not providing enough support for the migrant crisis.

New Yorkers, aware of the acute crisis, seek a humanitarian approach to the issue and strategic allocation of resources.

“I’m not sure if New York is a good place to be for somebody who wants to start afresh. There’s a huge housing crisis, so maybe, it’s not the perfect place for immigrants,” opines a woman, an immigrant herself.

Some others think the “American dream” is turning out to be a “nightmare”, but still a lot can be done to help them.

“It’s a crisis even for the people migrating to New York. They are coming from horrible places and switching for opportunities – just like the American dream from so many years ago. The American dream is actually being an American nightmare.New York has very limited space but also a lot of fun space. If we allocate some of those places to help the migrants, that’ll be awesome,” says a New Yorker.

Besides housing, the migrants are also facing difficulties in finding work as well. Before they can officially start working, they must get a work permit which can take up to six months to process. Without a permit, they can only work as undocumented workers, who are often overworked and underpaid.

New York:

Eric Adams, the Democratic mayor of New York, sounded the alarm this week over the financial strain his city faces as thousands of asylum seekers arrive each month — many sent by Republican governors after crossing the southern US border.

“This issue will destroy New York City,” Adams said Wednesday evening at a public meeting where he responded to residents’ questions.

He said 10,000 migrants are arriving each month “from all over the globe” and that 110,000 people have shown up since Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, began sending migrants to New York aboard buses.

“We have to feed, cloth, house, educate the children, wash their laundry sheets, give them everything they need, healthcare,” he said.

In addition to New York, Abbott has been sending migrants to other cities governed by Democrats, including Washington and Los Angeles.

Other Republican governors, and some Democrats, have followed suit and began transporting migrants out of their jurisdictions.

Sending migrants to Democratic strongholds has become a political cudgel for the American right as a means of denouncing President Joe Biden’s immigration policy, which they say has allowed undocumented migrants to cross the border with Mexico in large numbers.

City leaders however say that their support systems have not been set up to receive such large numbers of migrants.

Mayor Adams, a Black former police officer who hails from the moderate wing of the Democratic Party, estimated last month that providing support services to the incoming migrants at $12 billion over three years.

“New Yorkers’ compassion may be limitless, but our resources are not,” he said in early August.

While describing Abbott as a “madman,” Adams on Wednesday also repeated complaints that the federal government currently under his party’s control was not adequately addressing the issue.

“We’re getting no support on this national crisis and we’re receiving no support,” the mayor said.

Homeless and migrant advocates condemned the remarks by Adams, with two groups calling them “reckless and unproductive fear-mongering.”

“This dangerous rhetoric is something you’d expect from fringe politicians… not the mayor of a city that has always welcomed and celebrated its diverse and critically important immigrant community,” the Legal Aid Society and the Coalition for the Homeless said in a joint statement Thursday.

The governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, visited Washington in late August to discuss the issue, including with White House officials.

Hochul and Adams have called for the federal government to speed up work authorizations for the asylum seekers.

“Thousands of jobs are available to be filled, to provide the services we need in the city,” Adams said last month.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)