Gov. Kathy Hochul took a victory lap as she revealed Wednesday that all eligible migrants outside New York City have applied for work authorization — but she couldn’t say how many have actually been approved.
Hochul said the 876 eligible migrants of the 2,100 migrants being housed outside New York City have applied for work authorization.
Several hundred of the 2,100 are children, and others aren’t eligible to work.
“All the individuals who are eligible, who came upstate, working with our partners upstate, every one of them has now applied for work authorization,” Hochul told reporters Wednesday.
“That is great progress.”
But, the state isn’t saying specifically how many of those 876 applications have actually been approved.
Late last month, the Post reported that 2,850 migrants had been approved to work.
That’s of more than 47,000 being sheltered statewide.
Around that same time only 9,000 of the nearly 42,000 migrants in the city’s care had applied for work authorization.
Leaders from both the state and city have pointed fingers at the federal government for not doing more to approve migrants for work faster.
Reardon said that even despite efforts by the feds to expedite work applications, it’s still taking as much as 60 days to process them.
“It is a bottleneck but it is beginning to break,” Labor Commissioner Roberta Reardon said.
Still, Reardon painted the state’s relationship with federal administration officials in managing the crisis far rosier than Mayor Eric Adams.
“The federal government’s been wonderful. They’ve set up sprints to expedite this, but as you can understand, expedited means maybe two months,” Reardon said.
“So the work authorizations are coming in, we’re developing ways to track those authorizations.”
Adams, in comparison, recently called on New Yorkers to march on Washington to demand more help for the migrant crisis.
Hochul and Adams have both insisted that getting migrants jobs is the key to helping get migrants out of state and city-run facilities.
According to Hochul, around 40,000 jobs have been identified from employers around the state who are willing to hire migrants.