Editorial credit: NYC Russ / Shutterstock.com
By America’s Voice | February 9, 2024
New York, NY — A recent article in The New York Times highlights how New Yorkers are helping migrant families find housing and ensuring their children have access to basic needs.
New Yorkers understand the mutual benefits behind helping migrants and that if the state wants new arrivals “to be successful New Yorkers, we need to make them a part of our communities and to not ignore the community bonds that they’ve built over the last few months.”
The article “underscores the many unseen and unheralded gestures that average New Yorkers are making every day to help ease the migrant crisis that has roiled the city budget and its politics over the past year.” As the New York Times reports, New Yorkers are “reaching into their wallets, opening up their homes, buying groceries, digging through overstuffed closets, giving rides, donating their time — even providing medicine.”
At a time when real solutions and expanding work authorizations would significantly benefit new arrivals, new arrivals instead face “looming evictions” and “the mayor’s ‘cruel changes to N.Y.C.’s right-to-shelter laws.’”
According to Murad Awawdeh, Executive Director, New York Immigration Coalition:
“For generations, New York has welcomed immigrants – and we will continue to do so now. New Yorkers are working to ensure that migrants and asylum seekers have the support they need even as the Mayor implements cruel policies that hurt migrants and our communities. I’m grateful for the many New Yorkers who are welcoming migrants, and we need our elected officials to follow their lead and do the same.”
What happened next underscores the many unseen and unheralded gestures that average New Yorkers are making every day to help ease the migrant crisis that has roiled the city budget and its politics over the past year.
They are reaching into their wallets, opening up their homes, buying groceries, digging through overstuffed closets, giving rides, donating their time — even providing medicine.
Migrant families living in tents at the Floyd Bennett Field shelter have received essentials like a baby stroller through a WhatsApp group and gotten help navigating some indecipherable corner of the city bureaucracy. Other New Yorkers have opened their kitchens so migrant women could make arepas to sell. A Mexican eatery in the South Bronx gives hot meals to asylum seekers.
“We’re fulfilling basic needs,” said Carrie Gleason, who recently revived a pandemic-era GoFundMe for Flatbush families to now help migrants. “It feels like there’s a humanitarian crisis down the block, and I think the reason why so many people have shown up is because they couldn’t live with themselves knowing the suffering that’s happening.”
Suddenly, in this Central Brooklyn bubble, New York parents were confronted with the real-world implications of Mayor Eric Adams’s shelter eviction policy, which forces families to reapply for shelter after 60 days.
A group of parents started a winter clothing drive and signed up for meal train duty to compensate for inadequate food at the Brooklyn Vybe.
“School is an essential oasis — they are the centers of our communities,” said Holly Spiegel, a P.S. 139 parent and one of the migrant assistance organizers. “If we want them to be successful New Yorkers, we need to make them a part of our communities and to not ignore the community bonds that they’ve built over the last few months.”
That gave organizers time to start a GoFundMe page entitled “Help Shelter Families Secure Housing!” that blamed the looming evictions on the mayor’s “cruel changes to N.Y.C.’s right-to-shelter laws.”
The Adams administration and some top Democrats oppose applying the law to recent migrants. It has been interpreted to mean that anyone who requests shelter can get it.
But among the parents of students in Camila’s second-grade class and many others, the fund-raiser struck a chord. Two days in, on the eve of the eviction, the fund had pulled in $15,000.
The next day, three migrant families walked out of the Brooklyn Vybe and into the awaiting cars of school parents.
ICYMI — New Yorkers are Stepping Up to Support Migrants Where Elected Officials are Failing added by The Immigrant’s Journal on
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