New York Daily News

New York City Mayor Eric Adams and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul gathered Tuesday with the city and state comptrollers at the annual state Financial Control Board meeting to paint a picture of a resilient city that’s weathered economic shocks but remained far away from the sort of fiscal spiraling that characterized earlier eras. Not present in person but heavily represented in spirit were the tens of thousands of asylum seekers in the city’s care, for whom costs are projected to run into the multiple billions per year.

While there might be some quibbles about the exact level of spending and the options to minimize that expenditure — moving people more quickly to accommodations less hideously expensive than hotels and pushing to get them faster work authorization, for example — no matter how you slice it, the city budget was not designed to nor can it practically accommodate these billions in spending. Future FCB meetings might not be as chipper.

Much more federal financial assistance will help, but there is a logistical issue here about space, or more specifically, the lack of it. Could New York City keep finding fields, hangars, warehouses and vacant psychiatric hospital grounds to stuff migrants? Sure, it probably could for a while. But this isn’t the ideal solution for anyone, not the city, the state, nor the migrants themselves, who probably came to NYC for the promise of housing and opportunity, not to bunk in a tent in a field.

Yet, it should come as no surprise that a tent in a field is still preferable to the street elsewhere. As recently reported by New York Focus, zero families have been relocated under the state’s Migrant Relocation Assistance Program (MRAP), with only 129 in the case management pipeline to be resettled, a result of bureaucratic hurdles, tight eligibility criteria and the fact that participation is voluntary.

Asylum seekers, many who have traveled thousands of miles through several countries pursuing safety, are going to do what they feel best guarantees stability, and right now, neither the city — with its contentious busing campaign — nor state — with relocation criteria including having already applied for work authorization — have made relocation seem particularly appealing. Yet the only way forward is for the responsibility to be spread around; the city can’t and shouldn’t be left on its own, and so it’s incumbent on Hochul to help build out a system in which areas outside the five boroughs are both equally appealing and committed to receiving migrants as a burgeoning workforce, a win-win.

In fact, this should happen around the country, which puts the onus squarely on President Joe Biden to both finance and provide logistical support for this endeavor, as opposed to the current approach of largely trying to pretend it’s not happening and New York City will be fine without additional support, and without some way to streamline work authorizations for migrants. Let’s read the tea leaves: it won’t.

Yes, the city has received millions of immigrants during the centuries that it has been a global destination, but never before such a volume of people legally prohibited from working and mostly without any existing ties to the city. Without a hand here, our budget balancing isn’t the only thing that will suffer. Tens of thousands of human beings will, too.