On Wednesday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul met with Biden administration officials to seek help for her state in dealing with a deluge of illegal immigrants in recent months.
She claimed that she left that meeting “with a sense they are committed,” the New York Post reported the following day, and that White House officials had assured her of a “surge of resources” in the near future.
What she got instead was a suggestion that New York City-based companies be asked to provide services to immigrants in the process of seeking asylum in the U.S., the Post said.
Free services, that is.
Among the services the federal government suggests private business provide at their own expense are legal advice and guidance on how to navigate the governments byzantine work permit application process.
Biden’s team said it would request $600 million from Congress to assist the city in providing necessities like food and shelter to those individuals who have entered the country illegally after President Joe Biden’s steadfast refusal to complete the wall at the southern border.
That amount, however, would represent only a drop in the bucket of the total costs associated with the Biden border crisis that New York City has to bear.
The city has already received $146 million from the federal government to address the crisis, but the city has seen more than 100,000 illegal immigrants arrive in about 18 months. If that were the total amount spent, each illegal immigrant would get getting about $4 per day for food and shelter. Even adding the promised $600 million would only bring that number up to about $20 daily.
According to the Post, the city has already spent $5.2 billion trying to address the problem; the administration’s promises amount to picking up less than 15 percent of the tab.
But it gets worse, as Mayor Eric Adams has previously said that he expects the city to have to shell out more than twice that amount — $12 billion — before 2025 is out.
Despite all that, Hochul claimed that the administration “understand[s] that a lot of time has passed and that this situation has only grown more dire,” according to the Post, even though a “liaison” between the city and the Department of Homeland Security promised on July 27 still hasn’t been named.
Hochul also said that DHS workers were going to be headed to the city to help — although neither the number of workers nor the timing of their arrival had been announced.
Hence the request to private businesses.
Hochul wrote a letter to the Biden administration last week, blaming the president for his failure to address the problem of illegal immigration. A number of business executives from the city did the same thing Monday, arguing that the problem is clearly a federal responsibility, according the Post.
They also blamed Hochul and the state government for not doing more to alleviate the problem.
Even Mayor Adams, a Democrat like Hochul, has blamed the administration and federal legislators for not stepping up.
“We are sending a clear and loud message and joining the message of others: The Biden-Harris administration and Congress must come up with a real solution,” he said, according to the Post.
Now, the blame game is apparently coming full circle, with an administration request for free services from private businesses that it can in turn later blame for not doing more to address the issue that the administration is legally responsible for.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
