“Migrants and Refugees Flock to New York, Posing Challenges for the City”

LETTER FROM NEW YORK

Gramercy Park is an upscale haven of peace in lower Manhattan, so chic that the tree-lined park is enclosed and private, reserved for local residents. Just a block away, outside a disused police academy, a few people languish, badges around their necks. Javier Fabre Suarez, a 20-year-old migrant, left Ecuador in April with his mother and sister. Three weeks traveling north. “The hardest part was Guatemala and Mexico, because we were robbed and attacked”, says the young man, using his smartphone to translate Spanish into English. Then he crossed the Rio Grande, between Piedras Negras and Eagle Pass, Texas, ” the feet in water “, he says. Finally, he requested asylum from the border police and was flown from Houston to New York on Friday, May 5.

The young man lives in the huge gymnasium converted into a dormitory of the former police school, of which he shows us a photo. A few steps from him is Irakli Pestvendize. Originally from Georgia, this 37-year-old transgender person arrived via Turkey and also requested asylum. “I would like to stay in a roomhopes Irakli Pestvendize, who suffers from this promiscuity. I go to the women’s bathroom, but they look at me strangely. » A little further, at the office of the American Red Cross, we meet a Senegalese who passed through Mexico and California before taking the road to New York, because there are acquaintances. He is currently staying in Brooklyn.

Migrants and refugees are flocking to the New York metropolis, and their ranks are expected to swell further with the abolition of temporary provisions that allowed asylum seekers to be sent back to the Mexican border under the pretext of the Covid-19 epidemic. They are thus more than 60,000 to have arrived since the spring of 2022, of which 37,000 are still the responsibility of the city, a figure which should increase to 70,000, according to the projections of the municipality, by the month. from June 2024.

“It destabilizes our city”

Their presence is not very visible, because unlike the rich and democratic cities of the Pacific coast, the law obliges New York, since 1979, to offer a lodging to all the homeless people. The tents that have colonized downtown San Francisco, Seattle or Portland hardly exist in New York. But the Democratic mayor, former African-American policeman Eric Adams, is overwhelmed and constantly finds the culprits: the Republican authorities in Texas who send migrants to him by bus, the Biden administration which does not show itself to height, the neighboring Republican counties of New York to which he would like to ship asylum seekers.

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