As Mayor Eric Adams concludes his stay-away tour south of the border, migrants continue to pour into New York City.
The excursion has failed because the mayor has done nothing to address the two reasons migrants are coming: the country’s still-lax border policies and the city’s right to shelter.
Even on his four-day tour of Mexico, Ecuador and Colombia, Adams couldn’t stay on message.
When a Mexican news anchor asked him Friday whether the “ideals of welcoming people into the American way of life” have “changed” and “migrants are no longer welcome,” he blinked.
“I think just the opposite. We said give us your tired,” the mayor answered. We “put that call out.”
Well, then.
Adams followed up with a warning about “sleeping on the streets” — but would-be migrants well know they won’t be sleeping on New York’s streets.
The mayor then told anyone listening that New York City has “$30 billion that we can move around to deal” with “poverty,” and “$12 billion is going to this crisis.”
Perfectly reasonable for anyone thinking of making the trek to think: $12 billion is a lot of money. They can shelter one more.
In Colombia Saturday, the mayor lauded that country’s government for working with America to “open offices” in Colombia “that offer a safe and legal pathway from Colombia to the US.”
He continued with a desire to “work together to expand additional legal pathways for migrants.”
Any potential migrant watching the mayor’s message patchily translated into Spanish on social media is going to take away from this exactly what he wants to take away: New York can handle us. The mayor’s got it so together that he came down here to say we are welcome.
Meanwhile, back on the home front, Adams offered no support to President Joe Biden for taking a difficult step, politically, for a Democratic president who needs to keep left-wing voters onside next year: tightening up the border.
As the White House said America would begin deporting recent arrivals from Venezuela and resume building Donald Trump’s border wall, Adams said Tuesday, as he started his trip, that “the borders should remain open. That’s the official position of this city.”
If you’re in the White House, finally addressing the border crisis, and you hear this lack of support from the city most affected by the uncontrolled open border, what are you going to think about the mayor’s casual betrayal?
Last, and most important, is the mayor’s continued position on the supposed city right to shelter.
This right is found nowhere in the state Constitution.
It exists only because the city, under Mayor Ed Koch, agreed more than four decades ago to enter a “consent decree” in the lawsuit Callahan v. Carey asserting such a state-constitutional right.
As City Hall rightly observes now, “the global perception that the Consent Judgment extends a blanket right to obtain City-provided shelter to the world at large” has made the “present crisis” “intractable.”
But Adams still won’t question the right to shelter itself.
He only wants to “temporarily suspend” it for single adults, as his administration asked in court Tuesday.
The city’s legal stance — that this right exists, but we want to suspend it for some people — is incoherent.
If there is an ironclad city right to shelter under the state Constitution, it can’t be suspended because the city is out of cash: A right is a right.
The city government can’t suspend your right to free speech or your right to go to church because that right has become inconvenient for the government for some reason.
No, the only way through this is to challenge the right itself — and get the state’s high court to rule on it one way or the other, as it never has.
If the state court does rule the right to shelter exists, it would exist statewide, taking some burden off the city, anyway.
But as Adams said Tuesday: “To be very clear, the city is not seeking to terminate Callahan,” the case that created the city’s right-to-shelter obligation in the first place.
If you’re thinking of coming to New York and you’ve been paying attention, here’s what you learned this week: The mayor wants the border to stay open, he’s got $12 billion to help you, and you’ve still got a right to shelter.
Six hundred people a day are already hearing this loud and clear.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.