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Migrant Crisis Tests New Yorkers Who

Thought They Supported Immigration
As the city’s resources strain under the influx of thousands of
migrants, New Yorkers are still resolutely in favor of welcoming
newcomers. But for how long?

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Migrants slept outside the Roosevelt Hotel this summer as they waited to be assigned
rooms. Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

By John Leland
Oct. 7, 2023 Updated 11:07 a.m. ET

Carin Bail said she was walking with a friend in Queens this spring
when they stopped to talk with a woman who was holding a baby
and crying. The woman had just arrived at a nearby migrant
shelter, she explained in Spanish, and her baby would not eat the
food there.
Ms. Bail bought the woman baby food and diapers. “What tugged
at my heartstrings,” she said, “was she had a kid with her.”

Yet Ms. Bail, who teaches special education and yoga in public
school, opposes the migrant shelters, and has spoken at rallies
against them. She complained of overcrowding at her school, in
Jamaica, Queens, which recently took in 132 students, many of
whom do not speak English.
When asked to describe her feelings toward the migrants, she
paused. Her own parents immigrated to the United States after the
Holocaust, seeking a better life.
“These are human beings who deserve a chance at life and
opportunities,” she said. “My heart goes out to some of these folks.
But then on the flip side, I feel that our government and our
leadership have been failing us. There’s not one positive outcome
that has come from this yet. And it seems like it’s just heading
toward a downward spiral.”

Carin Bail, a public school teacher in Queens, has spoken out against migrant shelters.
Her parents immigrated to the United States after the Holocaust. James Estrin/The New
York Times

New York has long proclaimed its openness to new arrivals,

enshrined in the welcoming words on the Statue of Liberty. But the
influx of more than 110,000 migrants in a little more than a year,
and the strain on the city’s already stretched resources, has called
that openness into question. What happens when the tired, huddled
masses are suddenly not a poetic conceit but a continuous tide of
very needy newcomers, living in temporary shelters in residential
neighborhoods?
“People are extremely internally conflicted,” said Don Levy,
director of the Siena College Research Institute which has polled ,

New Yorkers on their attitudes toward the migrants.

The migrants — a mix of Venezuelans, West Africans, Afghans and
others — began to arrive in significant numbers last spring, driven
from their home countries by poverty or political strife, and drawn
to New York for its job opportunities and generous public services.
In a city whose population is more than one-third foreign-born, the
influx, swelling to fill more than 200 shelters, has divided
neighbors and families.
In polls, large majorities of New Yorkers say immigrants bring new
vitality to the country, and that the current migrants want only to
build a better life. They reject the suggestion that immigrants want
handouts or that they bring crime or drugs.
But majorities also say the recent influx of migrants is a “ serious
problem ,” and that it is time to slow or stop the flow of new arrivals.
Nearly half say migrants to the state over the past 20 years have
been a “burden” rather than a “benefit.”
Mr. Levy said New Yorkers fall into three comparably sized
categories. About a third hold generally negative views of the
migrants. Another third are resolutely supportive. That leaves a
large swath in the middle, Mr. Levy said.
“They agree that migration and immigrants have built this
country,” he said. “But then they turn around and go, ‘What about
now?’” He mentioned makeshift tent shelters and an intake center
at a Midtown Manhattan hotel that was so overcrowded that
migrants slept outside on the sidewalk, an emblem of a failing
system. When otherwise-supportive New Yorkers see such scenes,
Mr. Levy said, their reaction is often, “‘This can’t be.’ So there’s an
internal conflict and there’s a frustration.”
For many New Yorkers, the migrant crisis was once an abstraction
— something they saw on the news or heard about in budget
statistics. For Aruna Raghavan, who lives near the Brooklyn Navy
Yard, the abstraction became real in late summer, when the city
opened a shelter for as many as 2,000 single men a few blocks from
her home.

Aruna Raghavan, who lives near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, says she and her neighbors
were caught off-guard when a shelter housing thousands of men was opened without
warning. James Estrin/The New York Times

happened overnight,” she said. “Nobody was consulted.

“It just
There was no heads up to the community.”
She noticed more litter on the street and men hanging out under
the elevated highway; stores in the neighborhood complained that
foot traffic would drop because people were afraid to go near the
shelter.
But she said the problems that many neighbors predicted had not
materialized. The men she passes on the street have been “very
respectful,” and the ones she speaks to say they just want to work
but are prevented by regulations. If they were loitering outside
buildings, she said, it was in search of free Wi-Fi to better their
circumstances.
“Iunderstand people being concerned, but it’s important to have a
personal engagement with the people, rather than just chatter
about it because it seems to be the topic of the day,” she said.
But she added that the city and its business sector were failing
both the migrants and the people living around them.
“I don’t understand why we’re not getting more corporate
involvement from big companies that can afford it,” she said. “It
would take nothing for large corporations to set up basic
infrastructure within these shelters, to help with their application
process and their job search. It takes nothing to sponsor a room of
10 computers connected to the internet where they can actually do
some work to get out of the situation they’re in.”
Mayor Eric Adams has said that the migrants will cost the city $5
billion this fiscal year, and warned that the influx “ will destroy New
York City .” But by many measures, the city was fraying well before
the migrants started to arrive last year. The coronavirus pandemic
emptied much of Manhattan, gutting retail businesses and city tax
revenues and leading economists to warn of an “ urban doom loop .”
Repeated sightings of rats on the streets and emotionally disturbed
people on the subways contributed to a sense of a city unraveling.
The surge of migrants, federally barred from working for six
months, exacerbated frustrations that were already building.

A protest this September against a migrant shelter at St. John Villa on Staten
Island. Stephanie Keith for The New York Times

In College Point, Queens, a working-class neighborhood near La

Guardia Airport, Jennifer Shannon, 53, said she believed in helping
those in need, including the women in a homeless shelter that
opened there in 2019. But after a respite center for migrants
opened in July, Ms. Shannon was livid.
“We just added 500 more people to a community that’s already
falling apart,” she said.
During the early days of the pandemic, Ms. Shannon started a
neighborhood association to support food pantries and provide
meals to emergency medical workers, earning citations from Mr.
Adams — who was then Brooklyn borough president — and State
Senator John Liu.
But now she says the migrants have devalued life in the
neighborhood.
“We have people sitting all over people’s private property,
drinking, smoking marijuana, hanging out until 4 in the morning in
the municipal lot, blasting music,” she said. “It’s a disgrace.”
“It’s not everybody in there. You have people who are genuinely
just trying to get away from hell and make a better life for
themselves. But that’s not who you see sitting in the park benches
at 11 o’clock at night, with their friends, men urinating in broad
daylight. That’s what we’re seeing.”
She said her opposition to the shelter was not racial, pointing out
that her husband is Mexican. “I’m not against helping people. But
what’s going on in our community is unacceptable.”
Mr. Liu, whose Senate district includes a large immigrant
population, said many of the complaints about migrants were not
coming from areas that have been traditionally anti-immigrant.
Instead, he said, protests followed the shelters, so “even in parts of
the city that tend to be very pro immigrant, many of those
residents are up in arms.”
Jaslin Kaur, 27, saw frustrations rise in her largely-immigrant
neighborhood in eastern Queens after the city opened a 1,000-bed
tent shelter at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens Village,
where hundreds of people have converged to protest since August.
When Ms. Kaur organized a small counter-demonstration
supporting the migrants, she said, opponents screamed at her and
posted her identity and home address on social media.

Jaslin Kaur said she was screamed at when she organized a

protest to support migrants in Queens. James Estrin/The
New York Times

“To see this kind of backlash against people who look like me and
have really horrible stories about what it took for them to get to
this city — it’s not the neighborhood I know,” she said, “not the
neighborhood I grew up in.”
She said migrants were being blamed for fiscal problems created
by years of government neglect. She recalled the period after Sept.
11, 2001, when her father, a Sikh, stopped wearing his turban in his
taxi to avoid being attacked. “So it’s really hard to see immigrant
communities facing this kind of hatred all over again, but for a
different reason,” she said.
A flashpoint of conflict is the school system, where plans last
spring to press gyms and auditoriums into service as emergency
shelters sparked an angry backlash. In Astoria, Queens, Shabbir
Suhal, 40, an accountant with three children in public school, said
he was alarmed by published reports of students from shelters
being permitted to attend school without being immunized against
polio, measles, chickenpox and other diseases. Under state law,
students in temporary housing have 30 days to start the process of
getting immunized.
“I don’t think it’s safe for my kids,” Mr. Suhal said. “I don’t think
this is right.”

Shabbir Suhal, an accountant from Queens, said New York

can longer afford to be a sanctuary city. James Estrin/The
New York Times

Mr. Suhal, whose family immigrated to the United States from

Bangladesh when he was 12, said New York could no longer afford
to be a sanctuary city. It particularly galled him to see migrants
housed in a local building called the Collective Paper Factory a ,

“hipster hotel” that he and his family cannot afford.

But he said he hesitated to voice his views in public.
Supporters of the migrants “have become successful at making
people afraid to speak their minds,” he said. “It’s everywhere. I’m
sure a lot of politicians want to say the right thing, but they can’t,
because the No. 1 message is that he’s a racist, he’s anti-immigrant.
We shouldn’t be afraid to speak our minds.”
A lifelong Democrat, Mr. Suhal said he was now becoming more of
a Republican, and a conservative one.

On a balmy afternoon in late September, Debra Michlewitz, 71, a

retired public school teacher, worried about pending cuts to the
school system, which is already strained by the surge of migrants
and the effects of the pandemic shutdown.
“It would be unrealistic to say that New York can absorb every
single person that needs to come right now,” she said.
But when she looked at the indigent migrants, she thought of her
own parents. They came to New York after World War II, after
President Harry Truman issued an executive order that opened the
door to Jewish refugees, against opposition from Congress. Like
the current arrivals, Ms. Michlewitz’s parents slept and ate their
first meals in facilities for new migrants.

Though she worried about the financial strain posed by the recent
arrivals, she said, New York was resilient. It survived the crises of
the 1970s; it would survive the current challenges.
“I think we have no choice,” she said. “It’s the right thing to do. I
would feel terrible telling anyone I don’t think we should make
room for them. That’s selfish. People didn’t want to make room for
my family, and it was only when a president made it happen that
they came here.
“It’s personal for me. And there are other people who have stories
like this, and if they’re not remembering that their families were
immigrants, it’s not right. They need to have empathy.”
In the meantime, as the city continues to add more and larger
migrant shelters, tensions will likely spread to more communities.
Ten thousand more migrants are expected to arrive in the next
month.
John Leland a Metro reporter, joined The Times in 2000. His most recent book is
,

“Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons From a Year Among the Oldest Old,” based on
a Times series. More about John Leland

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The Migrant Crisis in New York City

The arrival of thanmore 100,000 migrants over the past year has become a crisis
for the city’s shelter system, schools and budget.

The Crisis Explained: Why are large numbers of migrants coming to New York
City? And how is the city responding? Here is what to know .

An Escalating Emergency: The migrant crisis has strained city resources and put
pressure on local leaders Now, angry anti-migrant protests appear to be reaching
.

a fever pitch .
A Political Problem: The influx of migrants could become a potent weapon
against Democrats in House races next year and could derail the future ambitions
of Christine Quinn the politician-turned-advocate who still wants to be mayor.
,

The New Ellis Island: The Roosevelt Hotel, the city’s main intake center for
homeless migrants, has become a symbol of the crisis and the faltering
government response.
How Migrants Are Faring: As politicians grapple with the crisis, the new arrivals
are beginning to integrate into the city and carve out communities in unexpected
places. Experts say that in the long run, the influx could be good for New York .

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