The Migrant Crisis Did Not ‘Destroy’ New York. But Challenges Remain.

It’s been a year since Mayor Eric Adams made his ominous prediction. City officials should treat the arrival of migrants as an opportunity rather than a catastrophe, advocates say.

It was a year ago this month that Mayor Eric Adams announced at a town-hall meeting that the migrant crisis would “destroy New York City.” Since they were first bused from Texas in the spring of 2022, more than 216,000 migrants have passed through New York, though their arrival may not turn out to be the most damning crisis of the Adams era.

The mayor outlined his doom scenario long before his administration began to unravel under the scrutiny of multiple federal investigations — before the police commissioner was forced to resign; before the mayor’s chief counsel quit, explaining that she could “no longer effectively serve”; before two former fire chiefs were arrested on bribery charges.

The influx of so many people fleeing various oppressions in Latin America and West Africa, all coming in such rapid sequence, has placed enormous burdens on the system, but it has not wrecked it. From the very beginning, the crisis revealed the willingness of ordinary New Yorkers to generously extend themselves, even as the rhetoric out of City Hall, steeped in resentment and a sense of futility, hardly encouraged it.

By December 2022, to cite one example, a woman named Ilze Thielmann had grown a network of volunteers from 10 to 800, most of whom were meeting the new arrivals at the Port Authority Bus Terminal every day and helping ensure they had hot meals, T-shirts, fresh underwear and transportation. Ms. Thielmann put $50,000 worth of pizza, doughnuts and bus tickets on her own credit card, she told me recently, before she had much sense that she would be reimbursed through grant money coming from organizations like United Way.

In a place the mayor frequently exalts as “the city of yes,” the political response lacked a comparably welcoming energy or enthusiasm. One year after his dispiriting comments, it is easier to see the dissonance in his administration’s handling of the situation, which City Hall has simultaneously treated as an emergency and as an intractable problem for which, Mr. Adams has said, he sees “no ending.”

In the administration’s defense, the mayor’s deputy press secretary, Liz Garcia, pointed out that thanks to its case management and “resettlement efforts,” more than 150,000 migrants have left New York’s shelter system since the beginning of the crisis “and taken their next steps toward self-sufficiency.”

What that self-sufficiency looks like is hard to know. Last October, the city announced a new rule requiring migrant families to leave their shelters after 60 days (for single people, it is 30 days) and reapply for temporary housing. But a report from the office of the city comptroller, Brad Lander, released four months ago, bluntly stated that the city “does not track any outcomes relating to stable housing or self-sufficiency.”

In an email, Ms. Garcia maintained that the city “continues to lead our humanitarian response with care and compassion, and as a result of our measured approach, no families with children have been forced to sleep on our streets.”

While laudable, this ignores the fact that plenty of single adults have spent nights outside. And how should we weigh the avoidance of certain negative outcomes against the possibility of a full-throated attempt at assimilating thousands of desperate foreigners into the city’s economy and life — in the way New York, guided by moral urgency, has done for generations?

Ruth Messinger, the former Manhattan borough president who is now in her 80s, was meeting migrants at the Port Authority in the earliest days of the crisis and has pressed for history to inform policy. As a board member of the Interfaith Center of New York, she has become an unofficial migrant czar, regularly meeting with city officials and reporting what she is seeing on the ground.

“When you take a case or a problem to the city, they very often respond and are helpful,” she told me recently. “But every time we take something to them, it’s a small piece of a huge problem that requires a systemic response.”

At the logistical level, apart from the obvious language barriers, migrants face three primary obstacles to integration: securing housing, getting work permits and getting their children into school. All of this requires paperwork and access to replies that come not via Gmail but through the U.S. Postal Service. There are now about 64,000 migrants living in the city’s shelter system, but few of them have actual mailing addresses. The shelter rules dictate a considerable amount of moving around. Many churches and synagogues have allowed people to receive mail, but Ms. Messinger has argued that it would be much more efficient for the city to designate central locations.

“We’re not talking about getting a birthday card from your cousin,” she said. “You may be getting a letter from the D.O.E., saying, ‘Yes, your kid can have special ed,’ but you never find out.’”

The shelter rules also disrupt education, even though the city tries to make sure that when a family with children reapplies for shelter they are kept in the borough where the youngest child goes to school. Naveed Hasan, a member of the city’s school board who also oversees volunteering efforts for migrant families as a co-founder of a group called D3 Open Arms, said teachers were struggling.

“They dealt with Covid and remote learning,” Mr. Hasan said. “Having a changing roster and turnover — that instability makes it impossible for a school to perform its basic function.”

Crises create opportunities. Fourth-year medical students, for example, were rushed to the front lines during the height of Covid. Zellnor Myrie, a lawyer and state senator from Brooklyn who is challenging Mr. Adams in the 2025 mayoral primary, had an insight into how to address the persistent problem of fast-tracking work permits for migrants.

Federal approval for work permits takes a notoriously long time, even as the city needs workers and even as so many migrants are very eager for jobs. Mr. Myrie proposed a plan last year that would allow the city to create its own permits.

“I thought that we had some legal ground to do this, to say that this is an emerging challenge for the city, and we’re not getting much support from the federal government,” he said. “The city’s response was muted. There wasn’t an attempt to figure out how we could get this done.” According to City Hall, the idea was, in fact, explored but was shelved, basically because no other city had tried it before.

Innovative solutions would seem to first depend on a reframing of the migrant crisis as a value proposition rather than an immobilizing catastrophe. It would be helpful, Ms. Messinger said, if the mayor spent more time highlighting immigrant success stories.

“Something like a third of the City Council has immigrant roots,” she noted. Messaging costs almost nothing. Mobilizing people to help can also cost almost nothing. For instance, some of those coming to the city from Gambia, Senegal and Mauritania speak no French, Spanish or English. They speak Wolof or Pulaar, which makes getting through the bureaucracy even harder. “All the mayor has to do is go on NY1 and ask for people who speak those languages,” Ms. Messinger said.

A crisis can also serve as a convenient excuse. “This group of people becomes a scapegoat for everything,” Ms. Messinger said. “When the mayor has to close a firehouse in Queens, he can go there and say, ‘Well, immigrants and the budget.’” The city budget is $112 billion. “Can we use any part of that to implement ideas that are forward-thinking?”

Our Coverage of the Adams Administration

• Adams’s Foreign Ties: Federal prosecutors investigating Mayor Eric Adams and his 2021 campaign’s ties to Turkey issued subpoenas for records related to five other countries.
• Federal Investigations Swirl: The inquiry into the mayor and his campaign is among several federal corruption investigations that have reached people in Adams’s orbit.
• Stop and Frisk: The N.Y.P.D.’s discipline for illegal street detentions is lax at every level — a failure that reaches all the way to the top of the force — according to a review ordered by a federal judge.
• Health Commissioner Resigns: Dr. Ashwin Vasan, who led the city out of the pandemic, is the third top Adams administration official to quit in recent weeks amid the investigations of Adams’s inner circle.
• The Migrant Crisis: It’s been a year since Adams made his ominous prediction that the migrant crisis would “destroy New York City.” It didn’t, but challenges remain.