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Big CITY

‘So Much Suffering:’ What Migran

t Children Carry to New York
The migrant crisis is a looming mental health crisis. Are city
schools prepared to care for their most vulnerable new students?

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Recently arrived migrants outside the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan. Spencer Platt/Getty Images

By Ginia Bellafante
Ginia Bellafante writes the Big City column, a weekly commentary on the politics,
culture and life of New York City.

Sept. 16, 2023, 3:00 a.m. ET

Of the more than 110,000 asylum seekers who have recently landed
in New York City, 20,000 are children now enrolled in public
schools, facing challenges both familiar to any kid who has moved
away and towering in their emotional complexity. The most recent
arrivals have been met by Mayor Eric Adams’s downcast mood
and language of resignation, his well-documented, inflammatory
claims that the migrant situation will “destroy” New York and that
“the city we knew, we’re about to lose.” There is little to suggest
that the school system is prepared for the mental health crisis that
looms.

The pandemic continues to reverberate. The city was already

struggling to meet the needs of families whose children have
suffered as a function of both learning loss and mounting incidents
of anxiety and depression. More than 8,600 children in the city lost
a parent to Covid. Over the course of 2021, according to data from
the Department of Health, 9 percent of high school students
reported that they had attempted suicide.

In response to these and other troubling statistics, the Adams

administration released a mental health plan last March with a
focus on children and teenagers and the goal of expanding clinical
services in schools. But that effort was likely to be hampered by
the critical labor shortage in the counseling fields. A RAND report
commissioned by the city and released last year found that there
were very few psychologists and social workers available to
patients who could not pay out of pocket, to say nothing of those
who spoke a language other than English. The shortage, in
essence, has been most acutely felt in the places where the need is
greatest.

The migrant crisis has been imagined largely in terms of the

housing emergencies that have flowed from it. But it is also a
psychological crisis unfolding within the context of a pre-existing
one. “We are seeing the highest level of mental health need we
have ever seen, in our city, in our clinic, in our country,” Alan
Shapiro told me recently.

Dr. Shapiro is the co-founder and executive director of Terra Firma,

a 10-year-old health care clinic in the Bronx that specializes in
helping immigrant children and their parents. The arrival of
migrants on such a grand scale has made it clear how essential this
kind of comprehensive care is — care that extends beyond
immunizing migrant children in shelters to prepare them for school
and tending to their physical well-being.

The Migrant Crisis in New York City

What to Know: In New York, the arrival of more than 100,000 migrants
over the past year has become a crisis for the city’s shelter system,
schools and budget .

The City’s Response : As officials struggle to handle the migrant crisis,

Mayor Eric Adams claimed that the “issue will destroy New York City .”
A Political Problem: The influx of migrants could become a potent
weapon against Democrats in elections next year. “The Daily” explains
why .

How They Are Faring: As politicians grapple with the crisis, some migrants
are already integrating into the city. Experts say that in the long run, the
influx could be good for New York .

About 80 percent of families the clinic is seeing now are migrants

from Venezuela, where crime, unrest and deprivation have been
the worst in the country’s history. “There has been so much
suffering before the families even leave,” Dr. Shapiro said. Often
they have spent time temporarily living in other countries also
afflicted with instability. A Venezuelan family might have passed
through Ecuador, which has been in the midst of its own political
unraveling. Traveling through the Darién Gap, the dangerous
terrain connecting the North and South American continents
within Central America, is intensely traumatic when it isn’t fatal.

Reaching the destination is a precarious kind of relief; the children

carry with them here the atrocities they have witnessed along the
way. One of the most upsetting cases he has seen, Dr. Shapiro told
me, was a family whose children were kidnapped in Mexico. The
parents had to come up with $3,000 to get them back. They
eventually landed in New York. “Before, they were just on the run,
but once they had the stability of being in a shelter, they broke
down,” Dr. Shapiro told me. The children especially were undone.

“If you have a depressed or anxious parent, how can they

themselves be that buffering caregiver?” Dr. Shapiro asked.
“Parents have to feel that they are getting the support they need so
their own stress level goes down. That is the monumental task we
have in this country for all indigent people, and now for migrants
as well.”

In New York, the bleak state of treatment availability has forced

primary care doctors and teachers deeper into roles as counselors.
“Ten years ago we were dealing with asthma and failure to thrive,
but now we have to focus on mental health, and the training of
doctors has to catch up to that need,” Dr. Shapiro said. “We are not
there yet.”
 For the most part, the mental health needs of migrant children are
going to be addressed in schools, Laura Guy, program and outreach
coordinator at Fordham University’s Clinical Mental Health
Services , told me. This is because getting children’s mental health
services in New York is, as she pointed out, incredibly complicated
no matter who you are, and a migrant family may be entirely
unfamiliar with it. How much can be done within that
infrastructure, with the social workers and mindfulness programs
on hand, is hardly clear.

Jenna Lyle, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, said

that the department was “continuing to work to ensure every new
student entering our system has what they need and that our
schools are well equipped to support the whole child.”

One of the many hurdles, Ms. Guy said, is that children of asylum-
eeking families are typically placed in schools where there is
space, not necessarily in those that have the particular resources
that could benefit them. Last spring, a school in Lower Manhattan
found itself with six migrant children from Latin America but no
Spanish speakers to accommodate them. The school contacted
Clinical Mental Health Services, which generally focuses its work
in the Bronx. It deployed two Colombian graduate students to
administer cognitive behavioral therapy meant to help with
integration. At the baseline, the new students, who were between
11 and 14 years old, struggled with the anxiety of taking classes in a
language they did not understand and adapting to life in a city if
they had not come from one.

This week, Mayor Adams proposed budget cuts of 15 percent

across city agencies, citing the burdens of the migrant influx. The
Fiscal Policy Institute, an independent think tank, quickly
responded with its own arithmetic , arguing that while the strains
were obvious, the proposed $10 billion in cuts were much higher
than increased cost estimates. If anything is to bring us back to
“the city we knew,” it would seem to be the deepest possible
investment in so many distraught children building their lives here.

Ginia Bellafante has served as a reporter, critic and, since 2011, as the Big City
columnist . She began her career at The Times as a fashion critic, and has also been a
television critic. She previously worked at Time magazine. More about Ginia Bellafante
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 17, 2023 , Section MB , Page 3 of the New York edition with the
headline: To Heal, Migrant Children Need Mental Health Services . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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