ICYMI: NYC Comptroller Lander’s Op-ed on How Immigrants Deserve Better in El Diario

On National Immigrants Day, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander published an opinion piece in El Diario on how immigrants deserve better treatment, be met with dignity, and how the Adams’ Administration can better manage asylum seeker care going forward.

Read the full op-ed in English below:

When the first buses bringing asylum seekers from Texas arrived at Port Authority in 2022, mutual aid and community groups welcomed them, provided essentials, and helped them apply for shelter. Since then, more than 200,000 asylum seekers have come to New York City.

Two years later, these grassroots New Yorkers are still helping, but without sufficient resources, support, or coordination from the City. As a result, most new arrivals are pushed into a poorly managed shelter system with little or no case management or support to find permanent housing or jobs.

Instead, in a cruel and shortsighted effort to save money, Mayor Adams instituted 30 and 60-day shelter limits, evicting people from shelter, disrupting school for kids, and leading to missed mail and immigration court dates. To compound the problem, City Hall’s mismanagement had asylum seekers in shelters for nearly a year before any coordinated effort was made to put people on a path towards work authorization.

Immigrants deserve better. And New York City, the greatest city of immigrants the world has ever known, deserves better.

For generations, the federal government has coordinated with nonprofit resettlement organizations to provide refugees with case management and a pathway to housing, stable work, and education to seamlessly integrate into communities across the country. This network of care and coordination has allowed people to escape persecution and communities to benefit economically.

Since 1862, Jewish Family Services has provided these resettlement services in New York State. In Buffalo, they are providing 530 asylum seekers with the legal support, English-language classes, and job training and placement – paid for by NYC taxpayers. Why aren’t we doing the same thing here?

If the City helps people submit immigration applications upon arrival, they are eligible for work authorization six months later. We can use that time for case management, English-language lessons, job training and placement services.

Programs run by organizations like Hot Bread Kitchen and New Jewish Home could train new arrivals for jobs in hard-to-fill positions. Scaling up these models would actually save the City money over time, since it costs the same to house a family in shelter for one week as it does to help an asylum seeker submit their asylum application.

If we make our best effort to get the newest New Yorkers work authorization and jobs, asylum seekers in City shelters could collectively earn over $470 million a year, putting them on a path to stability and generating new tax revenue.

Calling the arrival of immigrants in New York City “a crisis” and evicting people while they await the arrival of their work authorization is a choice the Adams administration should have never made. Rather than shuffling new arrivals through broken City systems and deeper into instability, we can meet them with dignity and invest taxpayer dollars far more effectively in our city’s future.

That is the history—and the future—of New York City.

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