Commentary: New York City politicians have changed their tune when it comes to migrants

Not so long ago, being proudly and even a little brazenly pro-immigrant was a standard Democratic political credo in New York City, perhaps the easiest way to signal that the speaker was standing firm against the encroachment of Donald Trump, the city’s most infamous son, who built his political career and presidential administration in part around assailing immigrants.

In the early days of the Trump presidency, as the chaos of the so-called Muslim ban was unfolding, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio pledged to preside over a city government that “protects its people” and spent much of the subsequent years rhetorically railing against Trump efforts to punish immigrants, saying among other things that it was “un-American to punish families for seeking help, plain and simple.”

Those days are over. Beyond well-publicized remarks about the notion that migrants could “destroy New York City,” Mayor Eric Adams has tossed around the idea of more closely cooperating with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain them, which is both a misunderstanding of the migrants’ current status and a remark that would have been anathema to any New York City mayor less than half a decade ago.

It’s easy to blame the slow collapse of public support for immigration and the growing sense of mistrust for migrants and immigrants writ large on the weaponization of the narrative by right-wing interests. For example, Fox News suddenly made “migrant crime” a daily drumbeat, despite no real corresponding crime spike, but that’s only one side of the coin. That narrative, pushed locally by elected officials like Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, has thrived because of the unilateral disarmament of the other side, leading to a barrage with little pushback.

Democrats have become terrified that voters will punish them for seeming too concerned about a population that itself cannot vote, and which some New Yorkers seem to hold partially responsible for every other unrelated policy failures – including a dearth of affordable housing – which have held up the city’s post-pandemic bounce back. The message has been sinking in. In a nationwide CBS News/YouGov poll of adult voters conducted this summer, 62% supported some sort of program to deport all undocumented immigrants, including a shockingly strong showing of 39% for voters under 30. In New York City, a May poll conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies for Newsweek found that 45% of voters said migrants had affected their quality of life “a significant amount,” an almost entirely narrative-driven perspective, given that few New Yorkers are likely even interacting with new migrants on a daily basis.

Voters hear that the Adams administration cut funding for schools and libraries and that migrant families are getting prepaid debit cards and they default to a “what about us?” stance. In many cases, they won’t hear about how Adams reinstated a lot of the cut funding, or how even in its expanded form, the debit card program will cover only some 2% of migrants and is mainly an attempt to circumvent their ineligibility for benefits like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Someone needs to tell them that, and to more actively make the case that there is a perspective shift here where migrants are not an economic drain but an economic boon, not to mention a cultural one. It shouldn’t be that difficult an argument to make in New York City: a global synonym for the power of immigration to generate a locus of business, art, urban development, education and so on.

The city itself has estimated that around half of the city’s roughly 220,000 businesses are immigrant-owned. Half. Close to 40% of the city’s population is foreign born, as is nearly half its workforce. Historically, every single immigrant group to reach New York has been met with distrust and opposition before eventually integrating. Even if we were to assume that the bulk of the 210,000 or so migrants who’ve come through the city’s care during this latest wave have stayed in the five boroughs – though some proportion have certainly left – that is a 2.5% increase of the city’s population, which isn’t even half what the city lost between 2020 and now. You could forcefully make the case not only that this isn’t an anchor, but a potential lifeline for the city. Yet who’s making it?

I’ve certainly tried, writing in this magazine and elsewhere in concrete terms about the steps the city, in conjunction with the state and federal governments, could take to set up migrant arrivals to more quickly reach self-sufficiency and help reverse some population decline and soothe the labor market. I wrote a report last year laying out specific issues and recommendations around integrating migrants into the workforce. I talked about that, among other things, with Brian Lehrer a couple months ago. But this has to come from elected leadership with the voter credibility and decision-making firepower to counter the torrent of anti-immigrant political spending, rhetoric and organizing on the right, and there seems to be little appetite.

This isn’t to say that there are zero voices with political heft making a case for the value of immigrants, including migrants. Reps. Adriano Espaillat and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have reliably held the line that migrants are regular people forced to come to this country to seek a better life; during a visit to the Roosevelt Hotel shelter last year, Espaillat said migrants were “people that want to work, people that are fleeing violence, people that are fleeing environmental disasters” – a simple reminder of the fact of their status not just as migrants but asylum-seekers, which nonetheless seemed refreshing. New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who is running against Adams in the mayoral primary, has been a consistent voice of optimism on the arrival of immigrants.

At the start of this school year, schools Chancellor David Banks surprised political observers by calling migrants students a “godsend” that was stanching some of the department’s nosediving enrollment. This was unexpected mainly because his boss, Adams, has veered from tepid to hostile on migrants. Even when the mayor has tried to talk about the migrants’ potential, it’s been a bit off the mark, as with the somewhat bizarre contention that they could address the city’s lifeguard shortage because they’re “excellent swimmers,” possibly an apparent reference to the trope of the “wetback” that swam across the Rio Grande.

So far, the electoral terror seems a little misplaced. On Long Island, Democrat Tom Suozzi won by 8 points in what had been seen as a nail-biter race to replace disgraced former Rep. George Santos in the 3rd Congressional District. Republicans had been practically giddy about the prospect of tarring Suozzi with the open borders tag, and GOP candidate Mazi Melesa Pilip leaned hard into the rhetoric with the talking point that migrant arrivals were an “invasion,” which, as The New Republic noted, was a 180 from her position just a few months prior. It didn’t work.

Granted, that race had its own special dynamics, including the embarrassment of Santos’ flameout and Pilip’s relatively low profile. Suozzi was certainly no immigration dove himself. Still, he didn’t play the game of trying to be tougher on the border than his Republican opponent, and pushed back in some concrete ways; in a press conference outside the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center shelter early this year, right after Pilip held her own press conference to bash him on “our border crisis,” he took the opportunity to criticize ICE’s sloppy operations in Nassau County.

At the end of the day, even from a purely strategic standpoint, it doesn’t make much sense to be playing only defense on immigration, ignoring the issue as much as possible and stumbling through it when necessary on terms set by the extreme right. If our political leaders don’t want voters to punish them for the fact that immigration is continuing and will always continue, then they have to actively make the case for immigration, for the potential of immigrants – including asylum-seekers – to contribute as generations of immigrants have before. This must be practical, consistent, and said with one voice from the upper echelons of city and state leadership. You can’t win a messaging war with only one side fighting.