From Smugglers and TikTok, Migrants Get a Message: Go to New York

 Since the spring of 2022, New York City officials say more than 130,000 migrants have come through the city’s shelter system, with about half still there. The influx of migrants, which has accounted for about 500 arrivals each day in recent weeks, has overwhelmed the city’s capacity to care for them and, in turn, made New York and its Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, unlikely players in a national crisis.

...Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas has bused more than 20,000 migrants to New York City from his state, saying last year in an interview on Fox News that as a so-called sanctuary city, New York deserved to be “getting a taste of what we have to deal with.”

Mr. Abbott, a Republican, recently told Bloomberg News that the migrants “are given an option about anywhere they want to go,” although in practice, the state only sends migrants to six Democrat-led cities.---“And the No. 1 choice of where they wanted to go was New York City,” he said.

The city has spent more than $1.7 billion on migrant-related costs through July, and Mayor Adams — warning the three-year tab could exceed $12 billion — has pleaded with federal officials for more aid and a shift in immigration policy.

But more than politics is at play.

New York, home to the nation’s largest number of immigrants, has long attracted migrants who come here with connections to jobs, relatives or friends — avoiding the city’s shelter intake centers and public scrutiny.

But many migrants now cross the border without friends or family to take them in, said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute and co-author of a recent study about the rising costs of providing shelter and other services to recent arrivals...more