New York City boasts of a migration model having received and integrated more than 200,000 irregular immigrants in the last two years, but complains about the null support received from the federal government of Washington, trapped in an electoral logic where the migration issue has become political dynamite.

“Our support network is better than the one they find in any other city and state, and we are proud to have been able to specifically support all these people, who already total 202,000, but the burden is only ours and we do not see enough support from the federal government,” the city’s Immigration Commissioner, Manuel Castro, says in an interview with EFE.

Castro embodies like few others the famous ‘American dream’: he arrived in New York from Mexico as undocumented at the age of only five, and three decades later, after a youth dedicated to activism in favor of asylum seekers, he became the top immigration leader of New York, the city “raised by immigrants,” as he himself remembers.

Two years ago, the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, devived the ‘bus strategy’, which consisted of filling these vehicles with newly arrived immigrants from Mexico and sending them to what he called ‘progressive cities’ with the promise that they would receive accommodation and food there. It was not a lie in the case of New York: a rule from 50 years ago forces the city not to leave anyone homeless.

In the following months, New York declared a ‘humanitarian crisis’ but it did not stop providing assistance to the thousands of people who arrived not only from Texas, but from other states attracted by the generosity that the city deployed with immigrants: roof for everyone, school for minors and medical expenses.

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CEL

The attention to all these people made the city calculate an extra expense of 10 billion dollars between 2022 and 2025, which it faced “without the support of the federal government, even though it should be a responsibility shared with the other cities and states,” Castro recalls.

The city was “obliged” – in the words of the Commissioner – to limit the stay in public shelters to one or two months, depending on the circumstances, through an exceptional judicial remedy, but guaranteed that families with children were not evicted in any case.

However, and as EFE has been able to verify in the giant camp of Randall’s Island, where adults without a family are sent, the law is applied in a very flexible way and there are several tenants who have been looking for more than four months, while looking for a work permit that never arrives.

And it is that another of the problems they face is the enormous slowness of bureaucratic efforts to obtain asylum status and/or a work permit, which usually takes more than 12 months, and that forces many immigrants to fall into the underground economy, usually in street sales or as delivery people of food on a bicycle.

“The emigration system doesn’t work,” Castro reflects. There is a great demand for jobs and it would be logical for us to support them with a work permit. We have been without a solution to these problems for decades, it is an inadequate system and Congress should act,” he insists, although he recognizes that the proximity of the electoral appointment complicates everything.

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Castro regrets that all the attention paid to immigrants is now the victim of two opposing narratives: “On the one hand, they tell us that we are not doing enough for immigrants, that we have a moral obligation not to abandon them; on the other, they accuse us of giving them too much, and the more we give them, the more they will come,” he explains.

“It is symbolic of what is happening in the country, there is too much political division,” he believes, recognizing that in the year of elections the issue has become especially thorny, with a Republican candidate like Donald Trump who “with his threats of mass deportations is generating a huge fear and uncertainty,” and makes some immigrants not dare to go to a health center or a police station for fear of expulsion.