(Mark Pellin, Headline USA) In the midst of a crushing immigration crisis that has stretched government resources in sanctuary cities to the breaking point, while unleashing waves of homelessness and crime, Democrats in New York City are reconsidering the open-arms welcome they’ve given to illegals.
The city council’s Common Sense Caucus, comprised of six Republicans and two Democrats, pushed back against a plan to fast-track work visas for illegals. The bipartisan group of lawmakers ripped the city’s Democrat Mayor Eric Adams for supporting Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul’s effort to get the Biden administration to rubber-stamp work authorization for more than 100,000 illegal immigrants that entered the state, despite over 380,000 New York citizens currently suffering from unemployment.
“We must expedite work visas,” Adams said at a rally over the weekend. “It’s just common sense.”
In opposing the “common sense” plan, Common Sense Caucus lawmakers argued that providing jobs for illegal aliens would only “incentivize” more to flood into the state and city.
“Like the millions who came here before them, the migrants who have recently arrived in New York City should follow the lawful immigration process before receiving work authorization or other benefits,” the bipartisan group of lawmakers wrote in a statement “Allowing migrants to ‘cut the line’ will further incentivize more to come and exacerbate this already unmanageable crisis.”
We cannot continue to allow our immigration system to be taken advantage of.
Many came to the US legally & are still waiting for work authorization.
NYers are waiting to go back to work after the lifting of vax mandates.
There are other answers to solving the labor shortage pic.twitter.com/lgUnW5oSLR
— Joann Ariola NYC Council District 32 (@JoannAriola32) September 1, 2023
When a NYC Democrat assembly member tried to blame the city’s migrant troubles on governor’s busing illegals to sanctuary cities, Republican Councilwoman Vickie Paladino fired back.
“This is an absolute lie,” she tweeted. “The migrants are coming to New York because it’s now known in every corner of the third world that NYC will provide limitless housing, welfare, healthcare, and a fast track to union jobs to literally anyone who manages to get here — at the expense of our own citizens, even those already in need.”
Paladino had another explanation for the city’s mounting illegal immigrant woes, writing that “It’s easier to blame a border state governor for giving us a small taste of what they’ve been dealing with for years than take responsibility for your disastrous policies in New York or your abject failure of a president who threw open the border the day he took office and essentially ended all immigration enforcement.”
Mark Pellin is an editor at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/sabrepaw70.
