New Yorkers’ compassion put to the test by migrant crisis

The pavement outside Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan is teeming with traffic, much of it streaming to and from nearby Grand Central Station. But Giselle Rondon is oddly stationary.

That seems fitting since Rondon (36) is trapped in a kind of purgatory.

For the past six weeks, Rondon, her husband and two children have been living at the Roosevelt. The 1920s brick behemoth closed during the coronavirus pandemic, but it was given new life last year as a processing centre for the tens of thousands of migrants streaming into New York from all corners of the globe.

Rondon and her family began the journey that brought them to the Roosevelt in 2018 when they fled their home in Aragua, Venezuela, as their life there deteriorated. They are now desperate to check out and begin a new life in the US. But that is difficult without jobs, and for that they need work permits – something that may take a year or more to secure.

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“We don’t want clothes, we don’t want food. We want the opportunity to work,” she says.

Her broad-shouldered partner, Isaac Ramirez, is keen to work in construction. “If we could work, we could move out and pay rent and someone else could stay here,” he says. “But without papers ... ”

The family is one snapshot from a slow-building migration crisis that city officials say is threatening to overwhelm them. Since last spring nearly 100,000 migrants have arrived. More than 57,000 asylum seekers, such as Rondon, are under the city’s care, straining a shelter system that was already struggling to cope with a homeless population inflated by the pandemic and a chronic shortage of affordable housing.

The crisis seized public attention last week when hundreds of destitute asylum seekers were found sleeping shoulder to shoulder on the pavement outside the Roosevelt because there was no space inside

The crisis seized public attention last week when hundreds of destitute asylum seekers were found sleeping shoulder to shoulder on the footpath outside the Roosevelt because there was no space inside.

The footpath was soon cleared but mayor Eric Adams, who has pleaded for more federal help, was far from reassuring. “It’s not going to get any better,” he told citizens, as officials announced that another 2,300 or so newcomers had arrived the previous week. On Wednesday, Adams predicted the city’s bill for feeding and sheltering so many asylum seekers could exceed $12 billion (€11 billion) by July 2025, saying: “New Yorkers’ compassion may be limitless but our resources are not.”

The city’s latest gambit is to displace recreational football players and picnickers to open an emergency shelter for roughly 2,000 adults on Randalls Island. In what was either a ploy to awaken the public – or the truth – officials have not denied reports that Central Park or Brooklyn’s Prospect Park might be put to similar use.

Many of the asylum seekers are coming via Texas, put on Manhattan-bound buses by the state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, in a calculated act of border state resentment.

That is posing a particular challenge for a city with a unique legal obligation to provide shelter, and a liberal self-image as a metropolis built by immigrants. Or, as Anne Williams-Isom, the deputy mayor for health and human services, recently put it: “We are the beacon and an example of what is possible.”

In what may become a Republican talking point, one Fox News commentator, Dagen McDowell, disputed that. “I have zero sympathy for people who are upset about this,” she said of liberal New Yorkers. “This is what they vote for.”

Trailing in their wake come a mother and daughter from Nebraska, taking a break from their summer holiday to hand out sacks of McDonald’s chicken McNuggets

On the ground, some New Yorkers are trying to make good on the city’s promise. Josh Jordan and Josh Ferguson, two aspiring Broadway actors, pass by the Roosevelt on a recent afternoon to hand out bananas, crackers and other goods they have bought at a Target shop. They have been moved to do so after seeing a report on TikTok about the migrants’ plight.

“I figured at least being seen by someone was important,” says Jordan (21), who moved to New York only two weeks earlier from Nashville. Arguably, that makes him less a New Yorker than many of those he is trying to help.

Trailing in their wake come a mother and daughter from Nebraska, taking a break from their summer holiday to hand out sacks of McDonald’s chicken McNuggets. Volunteers from a church in Queens are fishing for souls. Burly security guards man the Roosevelt’s doors. Just across the street is the Charles Tyrwhitt shop and an oversized advertisement of grinning men in bespoke dress shirts.

Elsewhere in the city, there are signs of patience wearing thin. In Sunset Park, Brooklyn, hundreds of residents – many themselves immigrants – protested last Sunday at the administration’s plan to house dozens of asylum seekers in their recreation centre. They carry placards that read: “Stop Stealing Our Park” and “Save Our City!”

The strain is spreading to an array of social services. Some public schools, for example, are waiting to find out whether they will need to expand their capacity or even convert to bilingual education, according to Andrew Heinrich, founder of Project Rousseau, a charity that has helped migrant families with everything from food and children’s summer camps to legal advice.

“The purgatory feeling is very expansive,” says Heinrich. Of the migrants his group has interviewed, he estimates about half have credible claims to asylum or other forms of immigration relief.

Stu Loeser, who was a spokesman for former mayor Michael Bloomberg and now advises technology and financial services companies, sees peril for Adams. “New York isn’t nearly as deep blue as it looks,” he says. “He knows people need to see him fighting on this.”

“From Mexico City on, it’s horrible,” says Maldonado, recalling a five-month journey that began in Valencia, Venezuela, wound through Central America and paused for a month-long detention in Mexico

Adams has met resistance from other parts of the state when trying to shift migrants. A leafleting campaign at the border intended to dissuade migrants from coming to New York does not appear to have borne fruit.

Beneath the swirl of politics, many of the Roosevelt’s new residents sound resolved, viewing this as another chapter set against the much larger journeys they have made. In the meantime they seem grateful for whatever assistance they are receiving.

“It’s a roof,” says Yineth Palencia (24), gazing at her three-year-old daughter, when asked about the hotel’s conditions. She and her partner, Robinson Maldonado (27), did not choose New York, they say. Rather, they were given a plane ticket to the city by the Sacred Heart church in El Paso, Texas, after spending five days there.

“From Mexico City on, it’s horrible,” says Maldonado, recalling a five-month journey that began in Valencia, Venezuela, wound through Central America and paused for a month-long detention in Mexico.

Their friend Carlos Gutierrez has come to New York by bus from Texas. He tried to sell bottled water on the footpath outside the Roosevelt but the authorities put a stop to it. He is loath to work illegally, he says, for fear of putting his immigration claim in jeopardy.

Even though he has no clear path forward, Gutierrez appears perplexed when asked if he might go home. “People who make it to this country have dreams,” he says. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023