In a glaring turnabout in policy, New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced yesterday that the city has begun regarding immigrants seeking asylum. The new policy isn’t for stemming the problem of immigrants streaming across the border – much like we see from Florida lending help to Texas. Instead, Adams is trying to disincentivize potential arrivals from seeking out his city.

He’s now sending representatives from New York are at border-crossing locations distributing flyers that explain New York is not an ideal destination. The city is becoming overrun with immigrant arrivals and is stretched to capacity as far as housing and care, all due to its own declarations and hubris on the issue of immigration. Adams joined a list of current and former politicians who have condemned others for wanting to stem the tide of immigration and built up their own aggrandizement by posing as our moral superiors in welcoming those to their sanctuary city.

To use some of their own language, this is not who we are, Mayor Adams! We are better than this and owe it as humanitarians to lend a hand up! Have you forgotten about the poem at the base of your own Statue of Liberty, sir?

As we have come to learn, those making these boastful lectures change their positions once faced with the reality that their fantasy lectures. Residents of Martha’s Vineyard wailed when Ron DeSantis shared immigrants with their proclaimed open city – and promptly shipped out those arrivals in a matter of hours. Gavin Newsome responded in a similar fashion when he saw recent new arrivals. He wanted to charge Ron DeSantis with kidnapping after having “over a dozen” immigrants sent to his sanctuary state.

Now we see New York is looking to hang the NO VACANCY sign, and it reveals so much about the empty claims and hypocrisy of these politicians. What else can be said when states that are not claiming to have an open-door policy are inundated with new arrivals daily, but those places are expected to grapple with the challenges as locations touting their noble welcoming spirit whine and moan when the reality arrives at their city limits. “We have no more room in the city,” Mr. Adams said during a news conference at City Hall. Hard to feel sympathy when Texas border towns of only a few thousand residents have been overflooded with new humans.

The flyers, perhaps unintentionally, offer a startling admission: In an attempt to dissuade these immigrants from arriving, he paints a picture of a city that is hardly enticing. These flyers not only state the city is a bit of a burden to live within, he admits they have some of the worst conditions in the nation.

Mayor Adams' office is actively discouraging asylum-seekers from coming to New York City – releasing these flyers today. pic.twitter.com/xegNfGeacf

— Jeff Coltin (@JCColtin) July 19, 2023

These flyers appear to actually be in defiance of the city’s own laws regarding taking in immigrants. There is a court ruling from decades back even declaring this to be the case, but Adams might be banking on a technicality. He can possibly state that this is not him actively turning away arrivals from to town, merely an effort to convince them to choose to go to other locations. Even if this dodge avoids legal problems, Adams has been found in violation of his state’s and his city’s sanctuary policies.

As the Mayor has decried those politicians shipping immigrants to new locations it was discovered he was engaged in the very same practice. Politico reported that over the course of a year, Adams oversaw the “resettling” of over a hundred immigrants. This is quite the concentrated serving of hypocrisy from the same man who recently declared that busing immigrants elsewhere as a practice is “behavior morally bankrupt and devoid of any concern for the well-being of asylum seekers.” But it is just fine when he engages in the practice.

All of this flailing behavior is done while ignoring the central issue: Our southern states are being overrun. The problems created are real, and the expenses for states dealing with this surge are crippling, but the reactions are all strictly political. The reason New York is dealing with a crisis today is because our federal government is not dealing with the crisis at the southern border. 

But politicians are more content to point fingers because they need to deflect from the reality that wrongheaded open sanctuary policies lead to these problems. They want to say the right things but do not want to handle the resulting wrong conditions. That is something the states who did not open their doors but instead had them kicked down are required to deal with, not the boastful Samaritans.