Pummeled by the wave of illegal immigrants swamping his city, Democratic New York Mayor Eric Adams rallied with migrants Thursday to demand the Biden administration speed up the process of issuing them work permits, figuring the way to get them off the public dole is to find them jobs.
But the administration says the issue isn’t how fast it’s giving out work permits, but rather that the migrants themselves just aren’t signing up.
After a meeting with New York state officials this week, the White House said less than one in five of the illegal immigrants who have been “paroled” into the country under Biden policies have actually requested the permits.
The White House promised a massive public relations push to try to get migrants interested in legal work.
That didn’t assuage Mr. Adams, who led a pre-Labor Day rally with hundreds of activists saying the feds must “get on the field and fight this battle with us.”
“Let them work. Give them the opportunity to contribute to our society,” he said.
Work permits have emerged as the latest flashpoint in the deepening chaos of the U.S. immigration system under President Biden, where an unprecedented number of migrants have rushed the border, and a record number have been caught and released into American communities.
Once released, the migrants spread out across the country — sometimes with the help of Texas’s busing operation — where they land in communities seeking assistance. New York, Chicago and other liberal locales that promise housing and medical care have become particularly popular destinations.
Mr. Adams says his city is looking at spending more than $5 billion a year to care for the people if the numbers don’t change.
That doesn’t mean he wants to stop the flow. He said he wants the country to contribute more resources to help New York sustain its generous safety net, and for the work permits to help get people out of the safety net faster.
The work permit demand has been echoed in recent days by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, both Democrats.
There’s also support on Capitol Hill, too, where Republicans and Democrats have written or said they back moves to dole out more work permits.
As it stands now, illegal immigrants being caught and released under Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ “parole” powers must wait six months before becoming eligible for work permits.
Ms. Hochul, in New York, said Mr. Mayorkas could grant the migrants a different status, known as temporary protected status, which would make them instantly eligible.
But the White House, after a meeting with Ms. Hochul this week, said the feds aren’t the holdup.
In a statement, the White House said Homeland Security has studied the catch-and-release population and found even those who are already eligible aren’t applying. Nationally, just 16% of those who entered under a border “parole” program have requested permits.
The White House said the answer is a public relations push, sending text messages directly to the unauthorized migrants in English, Spanish, Haitian Creole and other languages, with information about how to sign up. The White House also promised “teams working across several lines of effort to support eligible migrants to apply for work.”
Steven A. Camarota, a demographer at the Center for Immigration Studies, said a “significant fraction” of the migrants who haven’t signed up for work permits are already working, but they’re doing it illegally.
He pointed out that up to 5 million illegal immigrants without work permits were already holding jobs before the current border surge.
Robert Law, a former senior official at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Trump administration, said those pushing for work permits get things backward.
“Sanctuary jurisdictions would rather get illegal immigrants into the workforce than help Americans back into it. Shameful,” he said.
He also said there’s a perverse incentive here, because many of the migrants agreed to pay thousands of dollars to smugglers to be brought to the U.S. border, and they often still owe some or all of that fee.
Giving the migrants a chance to work, then, means the migrants get to pay off their debts to the cartels, said Mr. Law, who is now director of the Center for Homeland Security and Immigration at the America First Policy Institute.
Mr. Adams says more than 100,000 migrants have rushed to his city during the Biden border surge.
He said the city is proud of its generous level of support, and said that will continue, even as it overwhelms New York’s budget.
He called the migrants “asylum-seekers.”
That is true for some subset of the new arrivals, who are indeed fleeing persecution at home. But as the mayor acknowledged, most of them are seeking jobs and a better lifestyle than they had at home. That is not considered a valid reason for asylum under U.S. law.
At one point in Thursday’s rally, a heckler challenged Mr. Adams. The mayor called the man “one fool” and tied him to a broader anti-immigrant movement that he compared to Nazis or segregationists.
“How many people protested against your family when you wanted to come here?” Mr. Adams said.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.