Feds, NY can't pass the buck on asylum-seekers

The urgent need to shelter and process tens of thousands of asylum-seekers from Latin America, West Africa and elsewhere has sent elected officials statewide appealing for help — and scrambling for political cover — amid the fiscal and logistical challenges thrust upon them.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams wants to roll back a unique 42-year-old consent decree obligating his city to shelter anyone who asks, as previous mayors tried and failed to do. The city already has sheltered 101,200 asylum-seekers, some with families, most eager to earn their keep. It’s a problem distinct from the homeless population of single men addressed in the 1981 agreement.

Gov. Kathy Hochul aligns with the mayor most of the time. Together, they’ve tried to prod the Biden administration to speed federal work authorization for the newcomers. And she’s allocated funds. Now, she and Adams are at sharp odds. Hochul’s outside counsel in the shelter case — retained after Attorney General Letitia James declined to join in — faults Adams for choosing to “send migrants to counties and localities outside of the City with little or no notice to or coordination with the State or those counties and localities.”

The point isn’t that either side is wrong. Adams has reason to demand flexibility. But Hochul is justified in pushing Adams to up his operational handling of the problem. The city’s $430 million hiring of a private contractor to relocate migrants outside the five boroughs has proved flawed and inadequate.

Posturing and inertia have spread. On June 7, Adams sued 31 municipalities for allegedly trying to “wall off their borders.” Previously, Riverhead Town Supervisor Yvette Aguiar issued an emergency order to block Adams from sending people to local motels. Then Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone barred such housing contracts without county approval.

Even within the city, with its network of migrant shelters, there’s opposition from neighbors of the Creedmoor grounds in Queens and Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island. Recently, City Hall moved migrants from a Coney Island public school’s grounds amid protests. This week, Queens Borough President Donovan Richards urged use of the vacant Nassau Coliseum, prompting a hard "no" from the county.

All of us should help. We are one nation. But it's a disincentive that the challenge is amorphous. We don’t know how permanent the facilities must be, and more critically, where and how schools can adjust. How can communities plan — and for what numbers?

Ultimately, this requires federal leadership. Why, for example, isn’t the U.S. using the expansive federal Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn for shelters? Also, what's the progress on work authorizations? Hochul calls this the subject of "a daily conversation between me and the White House for months. They know the sense of urgency."

Muddled voices in Washington will not get the reluctant and the defensive in New York to make the effort to do this right.