Refugee priorities – El Diario NY

How heavy this fall has been for Mayor Eric Adams dealing with refugees, without a homeland or home, who refused to stay at the Floyd Bennett Field airfield in Marine Park, southeast of Brooklyn.

Adams looks for spaces, on every corner, to accommodate families, while facing criticism for the dozens of undocumented immigrants who, without knowing what they were about, arrived at the camp where there are no rooms for children, bathrooms and toilets are outside, there are no kitchens and in an area at risk of flooding, which is also too far from buses or subway stations to reach a work site.

And we believe that part of all these problems would be fixed if the Federal government understood that we need to accelerate the delivery of work permits and for each person to defend themselves to find their American dream.

The situation of these new “tenants of the Big Apple” who are now facing the threat of the freezing winter is so serious that sheltering in a tent seems like a sentence.

And if it rains here in cities like Chicago it doesn’t clear, because there the newcomers even ask to have the option that New York offers, so that they can help them get plane tickets and return to their countries in the warmest area of ​​the earth, close to the equator.

But here, in New York, some were surprised when at the end of the 60 days in a hotel that the mayor now grants, they got on an MTA bus to realize that they were being transferred to a store in the middle of nowhere and that’s why they Immediately with their few belongings on their shoulders, they turned around and returned to the bus.

This panorama looks bad in the image of the United States as a country made up of immigrants, since we see ourselves as a nation with unresolved problems and for the newcomers, because now they want to return to the land where they were born, because they Realize that nothing is so bad that it doesn’t get worse. In their homeland they felt bad, but they already realized that “the American dream” is not as easy as they make it out to be and perhaps returning is a good decision.

And we understand the mayor because managing more than 64,000 immigrants in the city’s shelter system is an unthinkable challenge and the federal government should help.

But, again, in order for immigrants to seek other options and leave the shelter system, they need the law to allow them to move.

If they have already made it this far, the best thing would be to allow them to work, because the Adams administration cannot be a babysitter for adults and children, and it is time to look for their own livelihood.

As an author, Sofía Villa writes this column in her personal capacity and her opinions do not represent Televisa-Univision Inc. where she works as a Writer/Producer.