By: Hadassa Kalatizadeh
On Monday, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that the Biden Administration is finally stepping up to help with New York’s migrant crisis.
As reported by the NY Post, the White House is in the midst of negotiating a lease on Floyd Bennett Airfield in Brooklyn, which it will pay to house some 2,500 migrants. As part of the agreement between the feds and the state, NYS will be spending another $20 million to help the migrants find jobs. This will include more help from the state in getting the new asylum seekers legal work status—a process which currently takes at least 180 days. Gov. Hochul said the state would give NYC another $20 million so more than 30,000 asylum seekers can file for work permits so that they can make it on their own and eventually leave the overflowing shelters.
That $20 million is part of the state’s $1.5 billion commitment approved in this year’s budget, aiming to ease the city’s migrant crisis, as per the governor’s office. “The path out of this crisis is work authorization,” Hochul said in a statement. “New York has always welcomed immigrants and new arrivals — and getting asylum seekers on track to work authorization will help them become self-sufficient and come out of the shadows.”
Hochul has long been pitching the feds the former naval air station, housed in the Gateway National Recreation Area, which boasts 1,300-acre-plus (or 2-square-mile), as a desirable venue for emergency shelter. “This is something that we’ve been hoping for, for many, many months,” Hochul said. “It’s a big step because the answer one month ago was ‘no,’” she added. “I’m viewing this as a significant development by the administration in Washington that we need more help here.” The tentative agreement follows weeks of back-and-forth talks and delays between the state and the White House, over use of the site to provide temporary housing for the influx of migrants, many of whom came seeking refuge from political violence and economic unrest in Central and South America.
As per the Post, over 100,000 migrants have arrived in the five boroughs of NYC since 2022. Half of them are still in the Big Apple’s bursting shelter system—which has seen the size of its population jump to twice its usual size. City Hall has been forced to open hundreds of emergency shelters and use other facilities, including hotels, to lodge the asylum seekers. The city has been straining to meet its obligation, based on a series of decades-old legal settlements, to provide shelter to anyone inside the city who needs a bed. In its overwhelmed desperation, the city has even moved to suspend the requirement, in imposing a 60-day shelter stay limit for single adult migrants.
The federal government’s new funding to Albany, strives to diminish the planned evictions by linking “at least” 30,000 migrants in public shelters with caseworkers working to find shelter residents more permanent housing and, “when necessary,” guide them through the process of filing their asylum claims, as per a press release.
Simultaneously, the city is also working to add more emergency housing. Per the Post, Mayor Eric Adam’s administration is reportedly eying an old Catholic school property in Staten Island. The site, formerly St. John Villa Academy at 57 Cleveland Place in Arrochar near the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, was purchased in 2018 by the city, with plans to convert it into a 1,000-seat public school. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the space was used as a test and tracing site.
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