Once you create an industry, it’s nearly impossible to get rid of it — especially if it’s government-subsidized and the government’s charity is fueled by an “emergency.”
In an emergency, the government can’t see beyond what’s in front of it and doesn’t recognize it’s incentivizing the elongation of a social catastrophe at everyone else’s expense.
New York City’s migrant crisis is the epitome of this behavior.
And while the city government’s failures are predictable, the Big Apple’s desperation to funnel money into every private housing institution and nonprofit to mitigate the problem has made casualties out of some of the most vulnerable American citizens: our seniors.
Frank Tammaro, a 94-year-old Army veteran, and 53 other Staten Island senior citizens were given not even two months’ notice in March to vacate Island Shores Residences, an assisted-living home.
“I felt horrible,” lamented Tammaro in a Fox News interview. “It’s no joke getting thrown out of a house.”
Tammaro eventually moved into the home of his daughter, Barbara Annunziata, who cared for him after he fell.
It was then he learned what was behind Island Shore Residences’ abrupt mass evictions: It turned into migrant housing.
“These migrants, they’re getting everything. They’re getting everything, and I can’t get nothing for” Tammaro, his daughter said.
Local lawmakers like Assemblyman Michael Tannousis have been sounding the alarm about the city’s lack of transparency.
“New York has been employing a practice of opening migrant shelters and placing migrants into shelters under the cover of darkness,” he said. City officials “are not keeping the community apprised, and they are not keeping the elected officials apprised. This has caused a sense of panic amongst the constituency.”
What New York City’s government refuses to admit to the public is not that it doesn’t have a current solution but that there will never be a permanent solution — because there is now an economy built around migrants’ desperation and strife.
The city has just one strategy, and it’s to throw money at the emergency — but the emergency doesn’t go away with money; that only strengthens the demand for it to stay.
With many former businesses converting into on-demand project housing and organizations shifting their objectives to singularly support the migrant lifestyle, they will always lobby to maintain the status quo of basing profit margins on the government dole.
When Mayor Adams throws $275 million to the Hotel Association of New York City to convert hotel rooms into migrant housing, it sends a signal to every institution in the city: There is money to be had from a desperate government.
Island Shores Residences heard this signal.
There’s always been a canary in the coal mine for this scenario, but we didn’t heed the warning of the political turmoil, human suffering and budgetary failures surrounding Europe’s migrant crisis.
Many people aren’t aware of how in Western Europe, especially Germany, the mass rush of migrants coming from Africa and the Middle East during 2015 manifested an entire economy of nonprofits, immigration law firms and general migrant services propped up by federal dollars.
This creation of an asylum-seeking-migrant economy has only incentivized the continued importation of more than 1 million Ukrainian war refugees, with Germany spending $32.8 billion in 2022 alone on migrant services: Once the economy has been created, it must always be sustained.
Germany is in a budget crisis partly because it thought the well would never dry out and it foolishly believed it could manage to maintain the lives of millions of migrants. Now New York City, among many other Democratic “sanctuary cities,” is experiencing the same budgetary catastrophe.
The American people are the ones who will lose out as the government services created to benefit its citizens will eventually get dissolved to support an economy for people who may not be legitimately seeking asylum.
We won’t receive the benefits, but we will be responsible for the debt.
Adam B. Coleman is the author of “Black Victim to Black Victor” and founder of Wrong Speak Publishing. Follow him on Substack: adambcoleman.substack.com.