Preet Bharara:

From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is Stay Tuned in Brief. I’m Preet Bharara. Since last spring, over 113,000 migrants have arrived in New York City setting record highs for homeless shelter occupancy in the city. Many of the asylum seekers are fleeing political chaos in Venezuela and what the UN Refugee Agency has called the second largest external displacement crisis in the world. Many also come from countries in Africa, so why the sudden influx in New York? Texas Governor Greg Abbott made political waves last year when his administration chartered buses to send migrants to the Big Apple. But the trend extends far beyond the Republican governor and even beyond New York. Migrants are arriving in other cities, including DC, Chicago, Philly, and LA. But New York’s Right to Shelter law, which guarantees anyone who needs emergency housing will get it is one of its kind in the US. City, state, and federal officials are figuring out how to address the influx and they disagree about the approach.

I’m joined by Errol Louis, a New York City-based journalist and the host of New York One’s Inside City Hall. He’s been reporting on these issues and speaking to local politicians about their policies.

Errol, welcome back to the show.

Errol Louis:

Great to be with you, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

So this is an incredibly important issue and it’s causing a lot of controversy. Can we just start at the beginning and take it from the top? Why is it that at this moment we have so many more migrants coming into the city than ever before?

Errol Louis:

That’s a great, great place to start. The reality is this is a global phenomenon, Preet. There’s something like 100 million refugees moving all over the world, and so you pick a corner of the world and find a conflict or a climate disaster or humanitarian disaster or genocide, and you’re going to find another flow of people who are trying to leave one country and enter another, and a lot of them end up here. There are people who were fleeing literal slavery in Mauritania. There are women who are trying to avoid female genital mutilation in Africa. There’s a whole string of countries across the Sahel in Africa that have had coups. There’s no government in Haiti right now. There’s a civil war in Venezuela, on and on and on, and all of this has set people in motion. How and why they end up at the Mexico border and then in New York is where we usually confined the story, but it’s really important for context to understand that there are people who are fleeing … Ukrainians, a couple of million Ukrainians cross the border, mostly into Poland and Germany, but a fair number are ending up here as well.

In the context of that major global phenomenon, a lot of people have figured out that if you can get to the Mexico border, and some of this has been turned into a commercial enterprise, there are people who will help you cross the border. Then a peculiar combination of policy choices and political reality and law enables you to sort of perhaps find your way out of a desperate situation, even on the other side of the world, if you can just get to the United States.

Preet Bharara:

Could you explain what the scope and scale of the problem is? I mentioned something on the order of 113,000 migrants in the last year or year and a half. How much is that costing New York?

Errol Louis:

Well, as with everything involving money in New York, there’s a dispute. There are conflicting numbers, but in the short term, what the mayor’s office has said, and again, there’s some disputes about this, but the number that nobody seems to really disagree with is approximately $4 billion per year over the next three years if it continues at this pace. You do the math, you’re talking about something like 40,000 per migrant. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that for a lot of people who come here, they don’t stay here. While over a 100,000 have arrived, something like 60,000 are in city shelters and hotels and other locations right now. What that means is that 40% have either moved on or didn’t want to be here in the first place, or perhaps have vanished into the gray economy, but it’s believed that people either didn’t want to be here in the first place, or they just needed to catch their breath and get their things together and then found relatives who are in Miami or some other part of the United States.

Preet Bharara:

But it’s still a large number, a very large number.

Errol Louis:

Yes. Yes. Look, it’s more than the city can comfortably handle. The dispute is over whether or not we can handle it. The reality is we can, we have. That $4 billion number that I gave you, it only sounds like a lot until you compare it to the annual city budget of $107 billion, so it’s a little under 4% of the budget, and we’d rather spend that money on something else, but it is not an existential threat to the city or anything like that. There are other places in this country that would’ve been overwhelmed by these numbers, but in our city of eight plus million … If we didn’t report that this many people had come, I’m not sure most New Yorkers would’ve realized it.

Preet Bharara:

Well, so let’s talk about what some of the reason is for the strain, budget and otherwise. As I mentioned at the outset, New York City has a unique law, the Right to Shelter law. Can you explain what that is and why that’s an issue financially for the city?

Errol Louis:

Oh, sure. In fact, I always wish I had you with me when this question comes up because many, many, many, many people, including a lot of pundits who ought to know better, go around talking as if the Right to Shelter law in New York was something that was passed by the state legislature or the city council and signed it to law and ought to be amended or repealed, and nothing could be further from the truth. What we call the Right to Shelter law is in fact a series of consent decrees that go back to the 1980s, and they involve an interpretation of the state constitution. The New York State Constitution holds that the care and support of the needy, the public concern, and shall be dealt with by the state. I’m paraphrasing, but that’s essentially what it says. It’s a Depression Era provision in our state constitution.

In the 1980s, there was a case called Callahan versus Carey, Callahan was a homeless man, and Carey was Governor Hugh Carey. That lawsuit was resolved with a consent decree that is really the core of the Right to Shelter. They were going to take that to trial, it looked like the city and the state were going to lose, and Mr. Callahan, who by the way, died on the streets, this was not resolved in time to help this unfortunate man. But what the decision was was that anybody who shows up looking for help, needing a bed, needing a meal, it will be provided by the city and state of New York. Then there have been subsequent amendments and extensions of that consent decree and the policies that surround it, that it started to include families, it started to include children.

I guess one other thing I would say at the outset, Preet, is that it’s a very specific right. It’s not that you have a right to get a cut someplace in the city. It’s very detailed. It says you have to have a lockable place where you can put your belongings. You have to have a certain amount of literally inches of feet, space to yourself where you’re not crowded and sleeping on top of someone else. Subsequent amendments have included a provision that women and children, families cannot be in congregate settings, that’s found to have been dangerous for their health and their safety. It’s evolved over the decades into a series of court rulings and policy decrees from City Hall that taken together amount to the Right to Shelter.

Preet Bharara:

Right. Hearing you speak for people who are not from New York and for people who are from New York, they might have the question, “If New York has this very generous provision in its law, no matter how it came to be, the Right to Shelter law, why is it that we see lots and lots of people who are homeless or unhoused on the streets of New York?”

Errol Louis:

You see some. You don’t see as many as you would in a place like Los Angeles or San Francisco or Portland or frankly, almost any other city, Philadelphia. We go out of our way to provide something, even if it’s kind of a rundown hotel or an apartment building that you wouldn’t necessarily want to stay in very long. We do a pretty good job. But when you do see people, and there’s an estimated, I think, 3000 people who are what they call unhoused, meaning they have turned down each and every opportunity to go into one of the shelters, one way to interpret that is that’s a referendum on what those places are like, where people will say, “You know what? I’d rather stay on a park bench than go into some of these places.”

Preet Bharara:

Right, so they can’t be compelled.

Errol Louis:

No, that is correct. They cannot be. In fact, they can only be cajoled and coaxed and offered different things, and we’ve occasionally had TV cameras there recording some of those kind of interactions. There’s a belief in some cases that there may be mental illness or addiction issues that prevent someone from seeing clearly what might be in their best interest, but at the end of the day, there’s a presumption that people have a right to their own choices and their own bodily autonomy, and you can’t just grab people and throw them into a shelter just because it’s unsightly or disorderly.

Preet Bharara:

What’s the thinking about the Right to Shelter law that you referred to earlier with respect to changing it or modifying it or passing a new law? Is that even feasible? Is it on the table? What’s the thinking?

Errol Louis:

It is on the table. I have to say it’s been on the table for every mayor ever since the consent decree was signed in the 1980s. There was a somewhat famous or even notorious line, I think it was done during a radio interview where Mayor Bloomberg, a multi-billionaire, the richest person in New York City at the time, said that, “You could get on a private plane and fly to New York and have a limo take you to a social services office, and we would have to provide you shelter.” His point, although it was a pretty crass thing to say by the richest man in the city, was essentially correct. We provide shelter for whoever without regard to citizenship status, citizenship in New York or anywhere else or in the United States. Now the current state of play is that the current mayor, like all of his predecessors or his last five predecessors, is trying to get it amended.

As you know, you can’t just decide you want to change a couple of lines in a consent decree, you’ve got to go to court, you’ve got to make a case. In New York’s case, you’ve got judges who are notoriously unsympathetic because again, it is the state constitution. Either the provision means something or the provision means nothing, and they tended to interpret it as, “Well, sorry, but you’re going to have to comply.” Right now what the mayor is trying to do is enter into some kind of conversation with his adversaries because this case was brought by the other parties to the consent decree, include the Legal Aid Society, the Coalition for the Homeless, and they’ve engaged in a kind of a conversation to try and make sure they preserve the core of the right without completely overwhelming the city. You have to be somewhat practical about this, and so right now they’re in these discussions. We understand there may be some amendments coming that a court might approve sometime in the near future, but the wholesale abolition of the right is absolutely not going to happen. I would confidently predict that. I don’t think any judge is going to say, “You know what? There’s too many people here, this is too tough, those constitution writers in the 1930s had their heads up their behinds, and we’re going to go in a different direction.” That’s just not going to happen.

Preet Bharara:

Can you describe, notwithstanding that, what the state of public sentiment is in New York City and the direction in which it’s moving? You point out 4 billion is not a lot compared to the $107 billion budget for New York, but it’s not chump change, and at a time when people think our schools need improvement, we have dilapidated subways, and all sorts of other problems, boy, we could spend that 4 billion better on people who chose to live here and are dedicated to the city as opposed to recently arrived migrants. What do you say to them?

Errol Louis:

Well, there’s a lot of talk along those lines. The problem with that case, the people trying to make that case is that they can almost never point to a specific problem, a but for case where they say, “But for these migrants, I would’ve had X, Y, or Z.”

Now, there are a couple of cases like that. There was a decision to put migrants on Randall’s Island, and they took over some sporting fields in order to put up some makeshift tents and fill them with cots and so forth and it turns out that these were the fields where a lot of New York kids had their practice fields. The problem or reality is that it tended to be fancy private schools that were using these fields, so there wasn’t that much of a public outcry. There are a number of cases in certain neighborhoods where people say, “We don’t want this shelter here,” but that was going to happen anyway.

The complaints are not budgetary so much as, “Why are these people here? What’s going on?” Those who are raising the budgetary issues tend to be in city hall because the real bulk of the financial or the fiscal impact has not fallen yet. It’s going to happen in next year’s budget. In March or April, going into the June 30th deadline next year, that’s really going to be where the rubber meets the road, that’s where the pain is going to be felt, where city services are going to be dialed back for certain. The mayor has already tried to, I guess, get people acclimated to the new reality by ordering 5% cuts from all agencies. They’re all supposed to submit plans to reduce budgets across the board, and that’s gotten the conversation started, and of course, it’s a very angry conversation.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Look, part of the reason we’re having this discussion is I know people obviously in federal government, also state government, who are not happy and who are upset and are irate, and they have some justification for being irate, do they not?

Errol Louis:

I’m not sure what people are upset about because it all starts to … I cover this from day to day, there are people who are upset because the federal government hasn’t written a check, and this is ultimately a federal responsibility. That’s one category of complaint. There were other people whose complaints are just frankly based in, to be polite, ignorance when they say, “These are illegal immigrants,” that kind of a thing. You explain it to them over and over again, it’s like, “It is legal to show up at the border and request asylum.” It’s an important law as a matter of fact. I ticked off a couple of the kinds of cases of people who could clearly establish that they have a well-founded fear of persecution and that they are why we have a law that accepts such persons, so there’s that level of complaint.

There are the people who complain because anything that changes in their neighborhood is just automatically assumed to be negative, and then frankly, Preet, some of this is just racism and xenophobia where people are making incredible derogatory statements and assumptions about are these people criminals and on and on and on and on. You have to sort through a lot of it. There’s, I think, a broad coalition that has formed if people who pick from the laundry list of reasons that I just cited and altogether, just say, “Somebody please just make all of this go away.” Of course, policy is not made that way in New York or anywhere else.

Preet Bharara:

You may have already rebutted this or responded to it a bit in this interview, but the mayor of the City of New York, Eric Adams, recently and famously said, quote, “This issue,” the one that we’re discussing, “This issue will destroy New York City.” What’s your reaction to that statement?

Errol Louis:

I wrote a column about it because I was so bothered by the statement. First of all, it’s simply not true, so then the question becomes, why is the mayor saying something that’s clearly not true? It ends up, you get into an analysis of is this hyperbole intended to …

Preet Bharara:

Is it to get a check from the federal government?

Errol Louis:

Yeah. Well, exactly. The mayor has operated on the assumption that if he and others scream loud enough and in unison, that alone will compel a check from the White House. I regret to inform City Hall that that is simply an unrealistic assumption. The mayor acknowledged in an interview with CNN that he has not spoken personally with President Biden in more than a year. In fact, he was dropped from the president’s, on the political side, he was one of the surrogates who was supposed to help the Biden ticket as it moves towards reelection, they dropped him from that ticket because of his derogatory comments about the administration and his complaints about their lack of energy and fiscal support. There are parts of this that the White House can fix. They mostly, however, don’t involve money, although they would really alleviate a lot of the fiscal burden on New York.

Preet Bharara:

What’s the outlook for the future? We have 113,000 or so in recent times. Is that pace continuing? It’s one thing to have a $4 billion burden based on this number of migrants, but if that repeats itself every 18 months, the numbers really add up. Where do you think we’re going from here?

Errol Louis:

I think we’re going to hit a level where we level off. It’ll be higher than anybody wants. It’ll be more expensive than anybody really wants to pay, and then we will have to do what we should have done all along, which is build out an infrastructure to absorb people. We have something in New York State government, it’s tucked away in the Secretary of State’s office up in Albany called the Office of New Americans, and it really tries to do systematically what you and I have just been talking about, which is a migrant comes here, he or she has got a whole host of issues, and it’s bespoke. You can’t just assume that all 200 people who arrive today from Venezuela, shall we say, all have the same needs. Even if they’re from the same country, they might qualify for different programs, they might have different needs, health needs, education needs.

In some cases, they might be eligible for asylum on an expedited path, especially if they’re under 21 years old. You really have to figure out how to get people slotted and directed to the place where that will do them the most good. That’s not in place right now. We’ve been so busy trying to simply find beds and shelter and food for people who are arriving at a rate of something like two to 3000 every week that the administration is not really caught up with this idea of building out an infrastructure, but I think that’s where we’re going to end up, and it’s only a question of whether we do it intentionally and systematically and logically, or if we just build it under emergency conditions, a piece at a time, which is probably the most expensive and ineffective and inefficient way to do it.

Preet Bharara:

Errol, Louis, thanks for covering the issue and thanks for your insight. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks so much.

Errol Louis:

Great to be with you, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

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If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me @Preetbharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The editorial producer is Noa Azulai, and the Cafe team is Matthew Billy, David Kurlander, Jake Kaplan, Nat Weiner, Namita Shah, and Claudia Hernández. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.