Yet again, hard data prove that progressive madness is smashing New York’s most vulnerable: Three of the five NYC zip codes with the city’s highest concentration of migrant shelters are among its poorest areas.
Zip codes covering places like Jamaica, Queens, and East New York, Brooklyn — with median incomes below $37,300 — are getting slammed as migrant inflows climb to more than 200,000 since the start of the crisis.
The migrant arrivals bring not only an increasing drain on city services (almost $5 billion through May 31 and set to soar over the next two years), they also drastically lower the quality of life.
Take Long Island City, in Queens, home now to 12% of the 193 shelters hosting the 65,000-plus illegal immigrants in city care — shelters clustered around two public housing projects.
Residents are afraid to take their kids to local parks because migrants reportedly use them as electric scooter racetracks and public sex dens.
As one local put it, “This is not a Third World country. We can’t just let anyone come into our neighborhood and do whatever the f— they want!”
In the 114th Precinct, which covers LIC, major crime is up 12.3% through the first half of the year over 2022, even as that figure dropped slightly citywide.
Turns out importing gang members en masse to beat up cops and ride hell for leather on scooters as they snatch purses has a deleterious effect on public safety — who’d’a’thunk?
And remember that the people who live in these economically hurting areas not only have to put up with the increased crime and disorder.
Most migrants are here for a better life, but it doesn’t take many members of Venezuela’s notorious Tren de Aragua gang to make a neighborhood intolerable.
Even worse, they get free rooms, free food and debit cards as a reward for breaking immigration law.
Let’s be totally clear.
New York City should not be doing any of this at all.
Yes, the Big Apple’s a city of immigrants, but past arrivals had to find their own way — and they did.
Mayor Eric Adams and other enablers having remade New York’s welfare apparatus into a migrant-caring machine not only stops this from happening.
It attracts ever more border-jumpers and risks putting the city into a socioeconomic death spiral.
Doing it at the expense of the city’s poorest only adds insult to injury as it sends a loud and clear message to the vulnerable.