What Mayor Eric Adams is doing is precisely how you keep those suburban counties red.
Big blue cities have an almost limitless capacity for alienating their neighbors because of the inherent unsustainability of their own policies. The suburbs have to live with the consequences of policies they don’t get to vote on. Inevitably, this produces periodic backlashes. Witness the latest turn in the debate over illegal immigrants and unadjudicated asylum seekers.
Asylum seekers are the gray zone of immigration: They are in the country neither legally nor illegally. Until their applications are decided, they have no legal status. The Trump administration required them to wait outside of the country until allowed in; this “Remain in Mexico” policy was justified on the grounds that the vast majority of asylum requests fail to meet the legal criteria for asylum. The Biden administration reversed that policy, producing a crisis of people surging into the country. Northern blue cities such as New York, D.C., and Chicago piously lectured border states such as Texas, Arizona, and Florida that they should be more welcoming, then screamed bloody murder when asylum seekers were shipped into their cities. Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot, for example, now says that her city is “tapped out.” With migrants sleeping in police stations and continuing to arrive by the busload, the city now seeks to house them in park buildings and abandoned schools. That hasn’t gone over well inside the city:
In South Shore, where community leaders have spent the better part of a decade fighting to get the old school building repurposed, the sudden move to place incoming migrants there feels like a slap in the face. “We’re very active and engaged in this community and it just doesn’t fit well to have a group of migrants to descend on this particular area because it’s a transient situation. We have stability here. We’re not comfortable with the crime on 75th, but to add migrants to that, it’s overwhelming,” said Natasha Dunn of the Black Community Collective. At a meeting with city leaders in South Shore Thursday evening, residents responded with resounding rejection. “While this may constitute an emergency for the city of Chicago it does not constitute an emergency for me and the 8th Ward,” said Ald. Michelle Harris. City leaders could barely eke out a word of the details about the proposed respite center before attendees started booing and demanding to vote. They expressed concerns about whether migrants have had background checks, considering there are some home daycares in the area…
A plan is also in place to move some of them into Park District fieldhouses, like one at Brands Park in the 3200-block of North Elston Avenue. The problem is that the families that use fieldhouse services, like for daycare and summer programs, were not informed. Parent Michael Busking said when they asked, “The staff here was given virtual no notice. They were told at like 1 o’clock to clear your stuff, we are sending migrants to your facility.”
New York mayor Eric Adams has a different idea: How about instead of alienating his constituents, he has the city send the migrants to the suburbs? Rockland and Orange Counties aren’t taking this sitting down:
Mayor Eric Adams on Friday announced a new strategy: The city would begin paying for shelter at two suburban locations outside the five boroughs. It took less than a day for the plan to hit a wall. Officials in one of the two counties strongly rejected the city’s relocation efforts and declared a state of emergency to thwart the attempt. . . . The city intended to house about 300 men in two hotels in Rockland and Orange Counties, north of New York City. . . .
“It felt like they were trying to do a Friday night drop,” said Teresa Kenny, the town supervisor of Orangetown, who said she learned about the plan only hours before Mayor Adams announced the move. “I feel like the mayor called me to check a box so he couldn’t be criticized for not talking to us.” The Rockland County executive, Ed Day, said he was stunned by Mr. Adams’s plan, and moved quickly to find a way to stop it. He issued the state of emergency order on Saturday, declaring that no municipality could transport or house migrants in Rockland without his permission. “Whatever we need to do to stop this, we will do,” Mr. Day, a Republican, said in a phone interview on Sunday, adding that the county is prepared to issue fines of up to $2,000, per violation, per day, to any hotel that accepts asylum seekers from the program. “They’re basically dumping them into a county where we’re not prepared for them,” he said. . . .
“This came out of left field,” said Steve Neuhaus, the Orange County executive, adding that Mayor Adams told him the Newburgh hotel would receive about 60 migrants. Mr. Neuhaus, a Republican, also questioned how the county would handle the newcomers at the Newburgh hotel, which is on a commercial strip next to an ice-skating rink, a gym and not much else. “We are maxed out with the homeless in the county,” he said, adding that he is also considering issuing a state of emergency to block the move.
On a political level, with a deep-blue mega-city and sparsely populated red counties upstate, much of the political balance in New York resides in the populous suburbs that ring the city. It was Republican strength in those counties — driven by crime and other urban-decay issues as well as the Cold War — that made New York Republicans and conservatives competitive statewide when winning presidential races (behind Richard Nixon in 1972 and Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984; the state was also competitive in 1968, 1976, and 1988), Senate races (behind James Buckley in 1970 and Al D’Amato in 1980, 1986, and 1992), and gubernatorial races (behind George Pataki in 1994, 1998, and 2002). In 2022, Lee Zeldin carried Rockland by twelve points, Orange by twelve, Nassau by ten, Suffolk by 16, and Staten Island by 33. It wasn’t enough, due in part to Kathy Hochul’s hanging on to Westchester by 22 points. But what Adams is doing is precisely how you keep those suburban counties red.