New York City’s government has distributed $5.5 billion in taxpayer funds to landlords, companies, and city agencies since 2023 to help illegal migrants settle into New Yorkers’ housing, workplaces, schools, and communities.
The taxpayers’ expenses are growing rapidly: “New York City taxpayers have spent $308 million on migrants since July 1,” the New York Post reported on August 15.
That migrant funding is a gusher of cash for the city’s CEOs, landlords, and city employees, according to the city’s “Asylum Seeker Funding Tracker,” which was quietly updated by Mayor Eric Adams on August 15.
The winners include the more than 200,000 migrants — many of whom sneaked past U.S. border guards — and the city’s investor community that celebrates the city’s extraction of poor migrants from their home countries. Meanwhile, the middle-class population share has dropped to 48 percent, down from 61 percent in the early 1970s, which was just after Congress restarted mass migration in 1965.
Since 2022, — or “fiscal 2023” — landlords and the city’s restate industry have raked in $2.19 billion of taxpayer funds via the migrants invited by President Joe Biden and his compliant Vice President Kamala Harris.
Companies offering a grab-bag “services and supplies” took in $2.22 billion, as the migrants crowded into shelters and jobs that would otherwise have helped lift Americans out of poverty.
White-collar city workers and their contractors got $520 million for “IT, Administrative Costs, and Other” work.
Food companies were paid $388 million to help feed the migrants, so nudging up food inflation for the city’s families.
Medical centers got $139 million that otherwise would have gone to sick and ailing New Yorkers.
The vast shift in city spending is also reshaping the city’s jobs away from the high-productivity work that supports blue-collar and middle-class families.
State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli issued an August 15 report on New York’s economy showing a continued decline in jobs related to manufacturing., construction, warehousing and transport, information technology, banking, and professional services.
Jobs in tourism and retail trade also dropped.
But the number of government jobs exploded by almost 20 percent — up to 1.24 million — in the 5 years since 2019.
So government jobs grew from 22.8 percent of the city’s economy to 26.3 percent in just five years, partly because the city leaders welcomed the vast inflow of poor, desperate, and penniless migrants.
Those migrants will also serve the city’s leaders as additional low-wage workers, clients for government agencies, apartment-sharing renters, and taxpayer-funded consumers.
The growing government payroll is also growing the taxpayers’ debt and debt payments, according to DiNapoli’s report. In 2019, the city’s overall debt was $6 billion, but is now roughly $6.7 billion — and is expected to reach $20 billion by 2028.
Much of the funds allowed by the expending debt is expected to flow quickly into the hands of government workers, landlords, and CEOs — but will be paid off by young New Yorkers and their children.
The city’s use of migrants to expand low-wage jobs and government charity is also pushing more middle-class families out of the city.
In December 2023, the left-wing Fiscal Policy Institute put out a detailed report showing that middle-class families are fleeing the city — not millionaires.
“While New York lost 2,400 millionaire households over the past three years (2020- 2022), New York gained 17,500 millionaire households in the same period,” the report said.
The loss of people earning less than $104,000 jumped from roughly 114,000 in 2017 up to 151,000 in 2021 and then 140,000 in 2022, according to the report.
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NYC Mayor’s Office
“We’re seeing a middle-class outflow and we’d likely be seeing a substantial lower-income one too if everyone who wanted to move could afford to do so,” said the December 2023 report by EpiCEnter-NYC.com.
But the 291,000 exiled poor and middle-class families lost in 2021 and 2022 have been replaced by Biden’s 200,000 poor migrants.
“An international migration Ponzi scheme is the only thing that averts a demographic doom loop for cities like New York and San Francisco,” as Americans flee the Democrats’ huge and badly-run cities, Michael LInd wrote in a September 2023 article for Compact Magazine.
Democratic mayors pretend to oppose the unpopular migration while calling for more migrants and more federal funds to help replace the Americans who leave the corrupt, expensive, and badly run cities, said Lind:
There is one thing that Democratic mayors in New York, Washington, and Chicago are not doing — and that is calling for a reduction in the numbers of immigrants waved in under various categories expanded by the Biden administration. Instead, Democratic urban politicians like Adams are merely calling on the federal government to subsidize the costs created by the influx and to make it easier for the migrants to join the urban labor force. To put it another way, Democratic cities want to nationalize and socialize the costs of mass low-wage migration, while localizing the benefits.
“It is time for the euthanasia of the [immigration-addicted] city — by, among other things, stopping the urban immigration Ponzi scheme,” Lind wrote.