New York City has a long history of settling poorer residents far from Manhattan. Think of one of those distant crime-infested housing projects placed in Far Rockaway in Queens, with the emphasis on far from Manhattan. Mayor Eric Adams, following this tradition, put his 1,000-resident tent city for illegal migrants far, far away from the city center. It was located on the end of a windswept peninsula in the city’s largest park and poorest borough, the Bronx.
In fact, it is smack on the border of another city, New Rochelle, N.Y., in Westchester County. Nothing says “welcome” to the tired and poor teeming wretches than placing them in the parking lot of Orchard Beach. This is a place most people travel to by car, since it is about a three-mile drive along a winding, country-like park road to the nearest highway, I-95. Lots of green grass and trees, even a horse stable, before you make it to the lights of civilization, if you want to call it that, and Co-op City, the largest co-op development in the world. The subway line that was supposed to connect it to the city in 1968 is still waiting to be built. Patience, New Yorkers, patience. New York wasn’t destroyed in a day.
Another fly in the ointment is that Orchard Beach is in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 14th Congressional District. You’d think this Pasionaria of Marxist benevolence would be out there welcoming the influx of illegals into the part of the city she represents. What could be a more perfect way to provide new constituent services to thousands of potential citizens yearning to be free?
It’s a Trifecta. Sanctuary city, sanctuary borough, and now sanctuary congressional district, all rolled into one great, loving sanctuary socialist paradise. Alas, the welcome seems about as cold and frosty as this cold, rainy October autumn in New York City. The Bronx borough president, Vanessa Gibson, and other officials soon joined the not-in-my-backyard chorus of critics of the mayor’s decision.
The mayor, saying he was “pivoting and shifting,” decided the migrants should go elsewhere. Perhaps closer to Queens, where vans have been picking up people outside homeless shelters. Those who get in are offered a drive to sunny Florida where they can get rich, $15-an-hour rich, working on hurricane cleanup. The mayor, who has whined that Florida is sending illegals to New York and other cities because their mayors are Black, seems none too concerned about the lack of equity in a Black mayor allowing migrants to be shipped off to communities where mayors may be White.
And AOC, rather than fighting to keep these 1,000 instant welfare recipients in her district, is allowing them to be taken away and moved to Randalls Island — in Manhattan. “I think we can get to a place with a better solution,” she said of the Orchard Beach tent city.
Very few people in Manhattan actually live on Randalls Island other than perhaps about another 1,000 homeless. The migrants will almost double the island’s current population. It is an island in the East River underneath the old Triborough (now JFK) Bridge. (Why must bridges and tunnels in New York be renamed for Democrat politicians?) There is still no subway there, but they can walk to Manhattan or Queens on the bridge’s footpath or take a bus.
Randalls Island is the home to a vast psychiatric hospital (please explain why the state legislature isn’t housed there?), a sewage plant, various police and fire offices, homeless shelters, and even an urban farm. Perhaps the farm can host a bring-your-own-machete-to-work day for those instant welfare recipients from rural locales in Latin America.
Related: If Texas Border Towns Can Handle Surge of Illegal Aliens, Why Can’t New York City?
Of course, there is no politics involved here. There never is in New York City. No behind-the-scenes pressure from Democrats in the Bronx to migrate the migrants out, no “what AOC wants, AOC gets” here. It seems there is flooding in the parking lot at Orchard Beach. Why should Mayor Adams fix the parking lot and drainage problem local residents have been complaining about for years when he can just move his tents-for-illegals program to a different parking area and park in a different borough, where there is a little less flooding? It will be a pip in the Winter when the cold winds blow through the Hell’s Gate section of the East River and freeze their nutmeg and eggnog at Christmas.
As for AOC, she will have to suffer the disappointment of losing this chance to strengthen her own congressional district (migrants are our strength!!!) and increase diversity (diversity is our strength!!!). Her district is so much weaker now. She could have placed herself at the service of all these new constituents. I guess she just didn’t feel it would be right to fight her fellow Democrats as they give these instant welfare recipients the bum’s rush.
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