How will the migrant crisis affect the 2024 election?
Bags containing a pillow, towel and sheets are placed on cots in a dormitory tent during a media tour Tuesday of New York City's housing for migrants in the parking lot of Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital in Queens. Credit: AP/Mary Altaffer
The special election held Tuesday for a vacant Queens Assembly seat was widely watched for signs of how an unwieldy influx of migrants and asylum-seekers might hurt Democrats in a blue state.
The hype quickly fizzled. The results are a bellwether of nothing. Moderate Democrat Sam Berger beat Republican David Hirsch with 55% of the vote in the 27th A.D., including communities from Kew Gardens to Whitestone. Enrollment there is 55% Democratic. No surprises.
Looking ahead, however, it would be delusional to think the political alarms now sounding over the throngs coming here from Africa, Venezuela and elsewhere will fade. This latest episode in a decadeslong crisis in handling immigration, and its impact on labor, housing, and public order, still stands to sway upcoming elections.
Because borders are now and forever a national issue, its electoral relevance should be greatest in federal races. Second-year New York City Mayor Eric Adams knows this. True to his style, Adams has been the most hyperbolic of the Democratic elected leaders, from Los Angeles to Chicago to Boston, who are signaling distress and urging immediate action from the Biden administration.
"Never in my life have I had a problem that I did not see an ending to — I don't see an ending to this," the mayor said at a Manhattan town hall on the migration crisis. "This issue will destroy New York City."
With non-progressives applauding the mayor’s words, aimed in large part at President Joe Biden, City Comptroller Brad Lander accused Adams of “fanning flames of xenophobia by slashing services and blaming the newcomers.”
Lander’s job isn’t to virtue-signal but to assess with evidence just how efficiently — or not — City Hall is mobilizing to meet the influx. Lander’s proper role also is to accurately describe the impact of Adams calling for agencies to prepare cutback plans due to the draw on government services.
These days the most modulated and sensible appeal to Washington comes from ex-Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who at different points in his life has been a Democrat, a Republican, and party-free.
In a New York Times opinion piece, Bloomberg says asylum-seekers should be getting work authorizations right away, rather than waiting a year or longer. Otherwise, he writes, “how are asylum seekers expected to pay rent and feed themselves and their families?”
Bloomberg says the system should prioritize asylum for those fleeing war and persecution, reward only those waiting their turn for visas, provide the public resources to process asylum claims, and let New York City out of its consent decree requiring shelter for all who demand it.
“The White House ought to recognize the political damage the crisis will do to Democrats up and down the ticket in 2024 if it doesn’t take swift and decisive action,” the ex-mayor warns.
In the past two years in New York, Republicans effectively took advantage of a rise in crime to slam Democrats who had supported bail reform. That's an Albany issue, though it bled over to House and local races. As a federal issue, controlling the impact of immigration would most directly raise its head in the 2024 race, just as Democrats are trying to recoup House seats they lost in 2022. Then the question is whether resistance to a Republican Party still under Donald Trump's influence would offset general blame against Democrats for the migration flap, at least in New York.
Columnist Dan Janison's opinions are his own.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
