It’s a comic opera of blatant hypocrisy, virtue signaling, political posturing, and compassion theater. Welcome to New York, the state whose politicians have been playing a game of “hot potato” with some of the thousands of asylum seekers just wanting a place to lay their heads until they’re told where they can shelter.
There literally is no more room in New York City, their original destination. So Mayor Eric Adams has been frantically calling around to neighboring counties and jurisdictions about maybe taking some of these people off his hands.
After a newspaper story alleged that some of the asylum seekers would be on the move, Schenectady County manager Rory Fluman issued a statement saying they “cannot accommodate any additional asylum-seekers. We have not agreed to have any additional asylum-seekers in Schenectady County and have been assured there is no intent to send additional asylum-seekers to Schenectady County.” (Sound of door slamming).
Meanwhile, New York’s Attorney General Letitia James has broken with her boss, Gov. Kathy Hochul, over the asylum seekers. It appears that Hochul wants to challenge a decades-old New York City law to provide shelter to anyone who seeks it, while James just doesn’t think that Hochul is radical enough. James is refusing to represent the governor in court. Hochul believes that James will attempt to apply the law to the entire state, turning a nightmare into a real-life disaster.
And that scares the daylights out of Hochul, who is, if nothing else, a very practical politician.
“We believe — and I’m convinced — that the right to shelter is the result of a consent decree undertaken by the City of New York,” Ms. Hochul told reporters in Albany. “The state is not a party to that, so right to shelter does not expand to the whole of the state.” (Sound of another door slamming).
All of this musical migrant chairs has provoked NRO’s Charles Cooke to call out the New York politicians and the national left during “The Editors” podcast.
“These people,” Cooke said, “go from, ‘Have you seen the Statue of Liberty? Have you read the poem on it?’ They go from crying at the border. They go from spreading lies about border agents. They go from lionizing Ellis Island to proposing that the influx of a few thousand of the people that, until yesterday, they were suggesting could fit quite happily into tiny border towns in Texas, is going to strain the social fabric to such an extent that it represents a crisis. And there’s nothing in the middle. There’s no acknowledgement that they’ve changed their mind. There’s no slow transition from one to the other. They just turn on a dime, as if overnight they had downloaded the latest patch to their software.”
He concluded that “progressives in this country have nothing to add to” the immigration reform discussion.
“We’ve got no change in the national discourse. We’ve got no change in national policy. What we have done by bussing immigrants north, which I think is salutary, is demonstrate some hypocrisy and perhaps add to, as progressives might say, the ‘lived experiences’ of people in big cities in the Northeast when it comes to illegal immigration. But these people are useless, I’m afraid.”
“They are useless.”
Also for our VIPs: Joe Biden Turns His Back on Democratic Mayors As the Border Crisis Moves North
I’m beginning to feel a little sorry for Eric Adams. He keeps tossing the hot potato to someone else, and they just keep throwing it back. But the lessons that New Yorkers and the rest of the Democratic Party should be learning from what’s happening in New York City aren’t taking. So they will go on with their hypocritical, bleeding heart “sanctuary city” bleating. Meanwhile, Texas, Arizona, and much of the rest of the Southwest are inundated with illegals and asylum seekers because Joe Biden can’t help but cater to his far-left base who are demanding an open border.
