In a clear sign that “let them work” was always a red herring, not a real answer to the city’s illegal-migrant crisis, news broke at a City Council hearing last week that barely over  2,100 migrants in the city have applied for work authorization — with none yet winning an actual federal OK.

So much for Gov. Kathy Hochul’s boasts after she (and others) got President Joe Biden to expand Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelan migrants.

City officials say they’ve submitted 444 work applications; federal workers in Lower Manhattan, another 1,700.

More than 160,000 migrants have landed in the city during the crisis, with roughly 65,000 in the city’s care.

Some are clearly working off the books, while no one really knows how many actually qualify for work permits — the law requires most to file other paperwork first, and then wait months to apply for legal-work rights.

And of course most migrants are clueless about how to work the bureaucracy.

Mayor Eric Adams insists the city will expand its efforts to help out with the applications, and thunders that the feds should too, since it’s a “national crisis” — a fact that Biden still won’t admit, since he caused it.

But in the same remarks, Adams noted, “We’re getting now close to 16-17,000 a month. So as fast as we’re moving people out, we’re seeing people come into the system.”

As fast?

In fact, they’re arriving faster than ever — and holding out the promise of help in getting work rights only encourages them to come.

A full-throttled push to utterly end the “right to shelter” might slow the tide coming to New York City, but Adams and Hochul refuse to go there; they’re only asking the courts to limit it for the “asylum seekers.”

That term is itself deceptive, since most migrants aren’t so much escaping oppression at home (they cross other countries on their way here, after all) as seeking better economic opportunity in America, and only say “asylum” to get in.

Nationally, September set yet another new record (269,735) for the numbers arriving at the southern border, so it’s no wonder the city’s seeing a continued increase, too.

And Biden’s plan to get Congress to OK another $14 billion for border security won’t change much, either: Until he stops waving most illegal migrants on in, the nation’s burden, and Gotham’s, will keep growing.

But that’s another thing Hochul and Adams don’t dare say outright, so the red herrings will keep on coming, too.