The Venezuelan Potato Famine
Crying Havoc and Crying Ignorance in New York City
This article was written in collaboration with Anna Pastore, a research intern participating in Earlham College’s Border Studies Program.
“This issue will destroy New York City,” Mayor Eric Adams said on September 6.
The issue that Adams was referring to — what he also called an “unprecedented state of emergency” — was the arrival of around 130,000 migrants, almost all of them asylum seekers, who have come to New York over the past two years.
130,000 migrants will “destroy” New York City? 130,000 migrants are “unprecedented” in the history of one of the biggest cities in the world — a city largely defined, inspired, and run by immigrants?
Oh come the F on.
“The city we knew we’re about to lose,” Adams later squawked.
Like anybody, politicians have the right to say pretty much whatever they want, even if it’s unmoored from history, reality, or basic common sense. But politicians, especially, have a responsibility to be careful with their words. And the media, in turn (as well as voters) have a responsibility to hold them to account. So far, Adams — not unlike another infamous New Yorker — has gotten a lot of leeway to spill a lot of dangerous lies about immigration.
But is Adams lying? Or is he just misinformed? While the melting pot mythos of America puts a shiny veneer on a history crammed with racism and rejection, New York City does largely live up to the ideal of diversity, perhaps more than any other city in the world. Immigration is less existential threat to New York City than it is its very essence.
But even as migrants continue to seek refuge in New York and elsewhere, Adams along with New York governor Kathy Hochul (and many others) have seized onto rightwing, xenophobic talking points and are amplifying them, effectively pinning targets on the backs of already vulnerable people. Adams’s response to the recent arrival of immigrants also shows a pitiful lack of historical knowledge of his very city.
“Unprecedented would be wrong,” Philip Kasinitz put it plainly to us when asked about the current influx of migrants. Kasinitz is the Presidential Professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center and the author and editor of numerous books on immigration, including Inheriting the City, which focuses on the effects of migration in New York City. Kasinitz said Adams’s characterization of the situation “betrays a lack of historical imagination.”
For those worried about the state of New York, the state of the country, for those seduced by the fear-mongering and frightened by immigrants seeking safety and stability, let’s set a few of Adams’s wilder claims next to a bit of reality.
A Famine of History
With bodies filling up dilapidated boarding houses, some of the migrants took to sleeping on the streets, their makeshift lean-tos spilling out onto the sidewalks. Children were left unattended or crammed along with a dozen others into single rooms. On Manhattan’s James Street, one doctor found the corpse of a woman dead of starvation. She was lying on a pile of wet straw, her husband and children moaning in the corner. The family had been in New York City only about three weeks.
With destitute and emaciated families reduced to scrounging and begging on the streets, the New York Tribune asked, “Cannot this be stopped?”
The Tribune ran the article with that question on October 7, 1846. The answer to the Tribune’s question is, and has been for the last 177 years: no.
In just seven months in 1847, about 53,000 Irish and roughly the same number of Germans landed in New York City, which had a population at the time of about 370,000 people. The number of migrants who landed in New York just that year made up almost 30 percent of the city’s population. (The 130,000 migrants who arrived to New York in the last two years, since the beginning of 2022, represent a little over 1 percent of the population.)
Many of the Irish and Germans — fleeing starvation, poverty, and war — got sick on the voyage across the Atlantic. Some were taken to quarantine buildings, or “shanty hospitals,” on Staten Island where they were often assigned to iron-bar beds by “negligent and indifferent doctors” or nurses who “took a delight in abusing and thwarting the helpless,” Cecil Woodham-Smith writes in her book about the Irish famine, The Great Hunger. The food in those leaky-roofed hospitals was “uneatable and conditions horribly unsanitary.”
Struggling to find a concerted response to the increase in immigration, in May of 1847, the city established the Board of Emigration Commissioners “for the aid and protection of emigrants arriving at the port of New York.” The commission described the state of affairs in the late 1840s as “becoming more distressing as emigration grew larger,” claiming that “it even threatened danger to the public health.” Over the next half-century, the Board provided assistance to over one million of the three million immigrants arriving to the city. They promised aid for five years after arrival.
Over the same time period, the population of New York City ballooned by more than a thousand percent as it became one of the world’s most important centers of finance, commerce, and culture.
Over a century-and-a-half later, in 2023, hundreds of migrants, once again, were left sleeping on the sidewalk. Adams and others responded by proclaiming: “There is no more room.” It was later reported that the city had hundreds of beds available.
It’s not that New York is now doing nothing: the city has opened emergency shelters and is on track, Adams has claimed, to spend nearly $5 billion this fiscal year. He has also claimed the city will need $12 billion to properly respond over the next few years.
But those financial challenges have given Mayor Adams the excuse to wonder if the city should continue supporting immigrants.
If “the status quo cannot continue,” as Adams claims, then what to do? How should the city respond? So far, the city and state have mostly sought to house migrants in expensive hotels.
Yael Schacher, director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International, calls this the “hotelification” of immigration policy. In January, New York City signed a $275 million dollar deal with the Hotel Association of the city to house at least 5,000 migrants. As of September 25, the city revised the contract to nearly $1.4 billion over the next three years to cover the fees to convert more than 100 hotels into emergency shelters. They have been spending just shy of $400 per diem on housing asylum seekers — an equivalent monthly rent of about $12,000, more than enough to pay for a Park Slope penthouse.
A Prison for a Home?
Unique among major U.S. cities, New York City guarantees the right to shelter. In 1979, the New York State Supreme Court ruled in Callahan v. Carey that the city must provide shelter for the homeless. That right is not dependent on immigration status. Seemingly irked by such institutional decency, Adams has considered suspending that right, leaving open the possibility that migrants and other unhoused people would be relegated to the streets.
“What he should have done from the beginning was be more conscientious about how he was informing people about their cases when they arrived, and not disperse them to random hotels all over the city,” Schacher said of Adams.
Back in May, Adams floated the possibility of housing migrants in a shuttered Hudson Valley prison, claiming that “nothing is off the table” when it comes to finding additional shelter. Newburgh Supervisor Gil Piaquadio sought to humanize the situation, explaining that “you don’t want it to look like we’re housing people in a prison,” but that doesn’t change the basic fact.
Meanwhile, this summer New York entered into a $432 million contract with an “AI-powered” mobile health company called DocGo with the hopes to “shepherd thousands of migrants through the emergency and help communities that have been overwhelmed by the calamity.” (Emphasis mine.)
Soon after hiring DocGo, the company was criticized for falling short of its contractual obligations and mistreating patients. Security guards employed by the company were accused of “heavy handed treatment and scold[ing] migrants who talk to reporters.” In addition, “no one from DocGo has made an effort to cooperate with scheduling health care appointments for the migrants,” according to a local health practitioner — which is precisely what the company was hired to do.
DocGo isn’t even the most inanely-named company making bank off of migrants landing in northern cities, nor may it be the worst. Chicago, which has also seen a sharp increase in the arrival of asylum seekers in the past two years, has struggled to welcome them. Late this summer, Chicago city officials signed a $29 million dollar contract with a company called GardaWorld to provide temporary housing. Until recently, migrants in Chicago had been sleeping in police stations.
In 2021, GardaWorld came under fire as they worked to house unaccompanied child migrants on a Texas Army Base. Reporting, including from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, uncovered serious deficiencies, including outbreaks of illness, inedible food, and allegations of sexual abuse in the facilities. GardaWorld said of the allegations: “We categorically refute all allegations of unsafe practices or neglect.”
One reasonable (albeit partial) fix in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere, would be to let migrants work. This is a step that both Adams and Hochul have floated, but they need help of the federal government. Currently, work permits are only available to asylum seekers no sooner than 150 days after they formally submit an asylum application. But frequent and confounding bureaucratic delays and the complexities of submitting an application — which, for asylum seekers, can be literally a matter of life or death — often turns that 150 days into a few years. The crawling process forces migrants into black market work, where they are subject to exploitation or abuse. Following the law, in this case, means relying on handouts.
In response to calls for expediting the work permitting process, the Biden administration granted Temporary Protective Status, or TPS, to about a half a million Venezuelans, which allows them to apply for permits sooner. But, as Bloomberg has recently reported, the TPS backlog is currently about 19 months. Not to be outdone in dissonant policy approaches, the Biden administration also recently resumed deportation flights to Venezuela.
As both Adams and the feds continue to flail, the responses have become increasingly unhinged. After calling Governor Greg Abbott a “mad man” for bussing migrants out of Texas, Adams is now embracing the same tactic. He has offered free, one-way plane tickets out of the state. As part of the announcement, Adams compared the congestion in the city to a crowded relative’s house on Thanksgiving, warning that “when you are out of room, that means you’re out of room.”
Except, of course, New York City is not out of room.
What Rhetoric Wreaks
Though politicians may have vastly differing views on immigration, what they say and how they say it has consequences. Adams’s public response — the words he uses, the history he ignores — to the immigration “calamity” that will “destroy New York” has the potential to cause serious harm.
Countless others have seeded similar and unwarranted hate and fear, making the United States a hostile place for migrants. Anti-immigrant spoutings from Texas Gov. Abbott and Trump, for example, were copied practically verbatim by Patrick Crusius, who in 2019 entered a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, opened fire, and killed over twenty people.
Echoing Abbott and others, Crusius scribbled in his rambling manifesto: “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas… I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”
Four years later, this rhetoric not only persists, but practically thrives across the country, including in the city built by immigrants. Leading pundits and politicians today seem to be — in a sort of anti-immigrant leapfrog — copying Crusius.
Some new arepa stands in Manhattan, the establishment of a Little Venezuela in Queens, or Caracas-style restaurants in Chicago — migration is not a threat, but a civic boon.