New York is struggling to handle illegal migrants

Last year the Texas governor Greg Abbott started sending illegal migrants crossing into his state to New York by bus. Yesterday he followed up with an in-person visit to say, in effect, “see what I mean?” In a speech at the Yale Club in Manhattan, Abbott said New York’s handling of an influx of 120,000 migrants over the past year was “calm and organised” compared with the situation in Texas, which shares a 1,200-mile border with Mexico. He knows New Yorkers don’t see it that way. The city that welcomed Europe’s huddled masses through Ellis Island is struggling to handle new arrivals from Mexico, the rest of Central America, Venezuela and a growing number from sub-Saharan Africa. Progressives and conservatives alike see it as a political and practical emergency, and it has driven a wedge between the White House and the city’s Democratic mayor, Eric Adams. Last week Biden visited to announce new “temporary protection status” for half a million Venezuelan asylum-seekers to allow them to work – but he didn’t visit Adams. Abbott’s buses account for barely ten per cent of migrants arriving in New York. Adams wants the rest of the state and country to help host them; the federal government has yet to help.