(Originally published in American Thinker.)
It’s interesting how much Democrat New York City Mayor Eric Adams sounds like a Republican when he talks about the effects of illegal immigration on his city.
Unfortunately, he still sounds like a leftist when talking about how to deal with the problem.
Recently, he did it in such a way that if he had been a white Republican, he would have been publicly crucified.
During a news conference where he was asked about rising crime in the Big Apple, he blamed the illegal immigrants who are coming into the city and are unable to work here legally.
“When I talk about the devastation impact that the migrant and asylum seekers, people only think about the volume of people that are coming in. There are byproducts to this, cuts to services, like we had to postpone a police class, looking at some of the budgetary cuts, having a body of people, many young, who can’t work,” Adams said.
This is all correct, although it ignores why so many illegals are coming to the city. It is a lack of border enforcement by the politicians Adams and his administration support. He is part of the reason there is a problem.
He then said, “I mean you don’t even need an imagination to figure out that if you have someone four, five months, and say ‘you cannot work, you cannot feed your family, you cannot provide for yourself,’ what happens? You know, lack of opportunities, an idle mind is the devil’s workshop, as they say.”
This is where he takes it a step too far, at least if he had been a Republican. He blames illegals for rising crime.
The media excoriated President Trump for saying something like this when he was only blaming the worst of the illegals as being criminals, rapists, and drug traffickers. However, when Adams uses a broad brush to paint all illegals as contributing to the rising crime, little is said.
The Washington Post went so far as to run an article in 2018 saying that illegals are less likely to commit violent crime than the population as a whole. Where’s a similar article now from the New York Times?
The illegals are definitely a problem in the big cities because they can’t work legally. Anne Williams-Isom, the city’s deputy mayor for health and human services, said only 2,200 out of the more than 100,000 illegals who have arrived in the city have been approved for work permits.
It is a statistic touted as a reason we should feel sorry these illegals, but the truth is, they are facing just the barest consequences for their actions. They shouldn’t be in this country, to start with. They broke the law to be here. They should not benefit when their first act in entering this country is to show that they don’t believe the law applies to them.
Also, in doing so, the illegals have made themselves the scapegoats for Democrat-controlled big cities. Because they do add to the problems already existing in the cities before their arrival, they have become an easy target to blame for all the city’s problems.
Even if all the illegal immigrants were deported from the U.S. (and they should be), the problems in the big cities would remain because the politicians who run them are can’t govern. They can only blame.
Michael A. Letts is the CEO and Founder of In-VestUSA, a national grassroots non-profit organization helping hundreds of communities provide thousands of bulletproof vests for their police forces through educational, public relations, sponsorship, and fundraising programs.
