NY Gov. Hochul says she could fix key national issues including migrant crisis ‘in about 5 minutes’
Gov. Kathy Hochul on Monday boasted she could fix key national issues including the migrant crisis “in about five minutes’’ — while touting her latest answer to New York’s asylum-seeker disaster: a new app.
Hochul’s “Ms. Fix-It” claim, and the unveiling of an app designed to connect some migrants to legal jobs, surfaced as she appeared to back-pedal on her comments only a day earlier involving US immigration woes.
The Democratic gov had finally ramped up her rhetoric over the Biden administration’s immigration crisis Sunday by saying the country’s borders are “too open” and that Congress needed to “put more controls” on them, including a “limit’’ on the number of people allowed over.
She was far more tempered Monday, after headlines blared her concerns.
“With respect to what was said about the border, I have called for a thoughtful, balanced national immigration, federal immigration policy,” said Hochul, 65.
“That’s what we need. I know it can be done because I was a young staffer on Capitol Hill. We had a bipartisan plan where there were interdictions and controls at the border, but there will always be legal categories of people who can come over across the border,” the governor said.
But the former Buffalo-area congresswoman added that if she were back in the House, she could enact meaningful nationwide change on both immigration and Congress’s budget showdown in a New York minute.
“I’m calling on Republicans in Congress to stop threatening a shutdown of our government, which we’re going to have a repeat of this nightmare again in 45 more days,’’ Hochul said, referring to Capitol Hill’s budget roller-coaster.
“Instead of gambling with the future of this country, why don’t you roll up your sleeves and sit down with Democrats and get in the room and don’t come out until you’ve figured it out,’’ she said.
“It’s not that complicated. I could do it in about five minutes. It’s about finding balance and putting the resources out there for the borders but also for states like New York that have extraordinary expenses managing the crisis that’s unfolding.”
The governor was not the only New York power broker to recently give conflicting remarks on the crisis.
Hours after New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ top adviser, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, told PIX-11 that the feds need to “close the borders” until they devise a “full-on decompression strategy” that takes pressure off of the city, Hizzoner’s spokesman, Fabien Levy, issued an about-face of a clarification.
“To be very clear, and as @NYCMayor has said over and over again, of course this nation should continue to welcome immigrants — both those seeking asylum and those who are not,” Levy said in a series of posts on X.
Hochul appeared at the Manhattan press conference to announce that the state’s Labor Department has been working with about 380 businesses to come up with 18,000 jobs for Venezuelan migrants recently given Temporary Protected Status by the Biden administration.
That status allows the migrants to start legally working in the US much sooner that the usual route.
“We will be pairing the skills of the qualified Venezuelans wanting to apply for temporary protective status beginning tomorrow,’’ Hochul said at Hot Bread Kitchen in Chelsea Market, which is one of the employers.
“The window opens tomorrow. We’ve been waiting for this day.
“We have 400 employers, half of which are in the city, half are upstate, in search of workers,” she said, adding that the most common jobs are in hospitality, health care and manufacturing, and provide stable paychecks that would allow migrants to pay for their own housing.
“Migrants and asylum seekers came here to work — so let’s put them to work,” she said, saying the initiative would help solve a “migrant crisis and a workforce crisis.”
Eligible migrants who arrived in the US from Venezuela on or before July 31 would be able to access the job listing through a new phone app beginning Tuesday, the governor explained.
Some 260,000 migrants had entered the country from the southern border in September, setting a new monthly record, officials said.
Additional reporting by Craig McCarthy
