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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now we'll turn to the New York City implications of the political stunt that Texas Governor Greg Abbott and now Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are engaging in, busing or flying migrants crossing the southern border, seeking political asylum in this country, from the border states to places like New York and Washington and as of yesterday, per Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to Martha's Vineyard. DeSantis tried to sound like he was helping the migrants.

Ron DeSantis: Our message to them is we are not a sanctuary state, and it's better to be able to go to a sanctuary jurisdiction, and yes, we will help facilitate that transport for you to be able to go to greener pastures.

Brian Lehrer: More than 10,000 have recently been sent to New York, in need of housing according to Mayor Adams, who, on one level, affirms that New York is a greener pasture for them.

Mayor Adams: We are not going to be like those municipalities and states where we fly people to Martha's Vineyard, where we put people on buses and have them fail to get the basic items they need.

Brian Lehrer: The mayor is also struggling with how to provide those basic items, including the very basic item of shelter. New York City has a right to shelter law, but the mayor suggested this week that this unexpected large influx of people might make him reassess that. Wait, does that mean no more right to shelter, perhaps, for homeless people in New York City? The mayor's chief counsel Brendan McGuire sought to give that notion a friendlier face at a news conference yesterday.

Brendan McGuire: We are not reassessing the right to shelter, we are reassessing the city's practices that had developed around the right to shelter.

Brian Lehrer: What does that mean and where does this all stand? We'll talk now with Errol Louis, host of Inside City Hall on Spectrum News NY1 and a New York Magazine columnist. Last week, Errol wrote a column called New York's Leaders Are Sleeping Through a Housing Emergency. Always good to have you on, Errol. Welcome back to WNYC.

Errol Louis: Great to be with you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Let's start with the Ron DeSantis clip about sending the migrants to greener pastures like Martha's Vineyard in New York, that have sanctuary city designations. Some have even been dropped off in front of Vice President Kamala Harris's residence this week as if the southern governors weren't making their point directly enough. Why are they doing this?

Errol Louis: Well, it is a political stunt, just as you suggest, Brian. The kindest interpretation would be that it's an act of government-driven or politician-driven civil disobedience to try and disrupt the system and get the attention of Washington, and maybe get some kind of comprehensive immigration reform out of it. That's the nicest interpretation. More realistically, it's just intended to try and bump up an issue which polling shows works for Republicans. They're heading into a midterm election that is not going as well as perhaps they would have thought.

The Roe vs. Wade nullification by the Supreme Court has really energized Democrats. By a number of different indicators, it looks like Democrats are going to do better than expected in the midterms and so they have seized on this issue, trying to sort of break the system or point out what they consider hypocrisy or inconsistencies among sanctuary jurisdictions like New York. It seems to be failing spectacularly by the way.

It does not seem to be working. For New York, even a place that has a lot of complainers, people complain about the traffic and the noise and the trash and everything imaginable, there hasn't been a big organized reaction to us absorbing 11,000 people. I think that's a sign of both the politics and the values, as well as the reality that New York is just a very, very big place where 11,000 people can show up and not spur that much of a ripple.

Brian Lehrer: Do DeSantis and Abbott have a certain point here about the border states? Thousands of migrants keep arriving every month in their states and there is a financial and services burden on them disproportionately just because of where they are on the map and if the Biden administration won't take action to stop the arrivals at that pace or have a federal system for burden sharing around the country, then they'll make that point more loudly like this, those governors will.

Errol Louis: Well, maybe they have a point, but they have nullified that point by this political stunt. If you want help from the Biden administration, sending a group of unannounced migrants to the Naval Observatory, which is the residence of the Vice President, that's a pretty good way to make sure you're not going to get much of a hearing from that same administration. If they wanted to make common cause, even with, say, Mayor Adams, with the governors and mayors and county executives of northern states, that could be an interesting conversation. That can even be a compelling coalition that might force action out of Congress, but that's not what either of these people are up to.

It's not what Ron DeSantis is up to. He's running for reelection. That's not what Governor Abbott is up to in Texas. He's running for reelection. At least one of them is actively seeking the presidency. They're trying to score cheap points, they're trying to divide the country, they're trying to embarrass the Biden administration and the worst thing of all, of course, is that they're doing this using women, children, families, people who are desperate and in need of assistance, using them as pawns and not even giving them any help by way of a thank you for serving as pawns in their political battle.

Brian Lehrer: So many who are arriving are children. Sometimes that gets lost in the political discussion. On the greener pastures aspect of DeSantis, it may seem obvious to you and I that it's wink-wink to the anti-immigrant Republican base like, "We don't want you people here," regarding the migrants, but is it also true on one level what he says, "We're sending you to places where you're more welcome.

You're not welcome here. They do have more open arms in a place like New York City," at least in our politics, while Texas and a lot of Republicans denounced them as invaders in various places and yes, we do have a right to shelter law, while Texas doesn't. So migrants probably would rather be here than there in the main if they have a choice.

Errol Louis: Sure. Listen, this is interestingly and in an unanticipated way, I think, from their point of view, it's proving the competence of some of these northern jurisdictions. Ron DeSantis's stunt in trying to send people to Martha's Vineyard, well, what did they do? They immediately found a place to take care of 50 of them, gave them access to all kinds of services and a good meal and they're now, my understanding is, being bused over to a better facility in Cape Cod, which is on the mainland, where they're going to be taken care of. Look at what we did here in New York. We absorbed those people without batting an eye.

I got a lot of family in Florida. I go down there few times every year. There are very few jurisdictions down there that could have handled this in the way that they handled it up in Martha's Vineyard or here in New York City. It's something that the largely urban base of the Democratic Party should be aware of. The Democratic elected officials around the country, the urban managers, it's become part of the values and even the ideology of the Democratic Party that we know how to run cities.

It's something that has played out in election cycle after election cycle, is the Democratic base skews more and more urban in every passing cycle. That causes a number of other sort of problems like a lack of understanding outside of cities of how to run a good city, but right now, I think, they've really proved the point.

Yes, if you have a bunch of people who have showed up at the border, and they really need a lot of different help, educational, health services and so forth, the last place you want to put them in is a low-tax southern conservative jurisdiction where they don't even take care of their existing residents, much less provide services to people showing up.

Brian Lehrer: 212-433-WNYC. Jim in Huntington has a question about this. Jim, you're on WNYC with Errol Louis from New York Magazine and NY1. Hi, Jim.

Jim: Hi, guys. I wanted to ask, how is it that Governor DeSantis and Abbott can divert people under false pretenses, tell them that they're going to a better place or how can they not be guilty of human trafficking and kidnapping by putting people on a bus or flying them to someone's home?

Brian Lehrer: Yes, this is a question that a lot of people have Errol and I haven't been able to completely ascertain for myself. Tell me if you have whether all the people being flown or bused or in the case of Martha's Vineyard, I guess, boated to these destinations are by doing so voluntarily. I think, basically, the people who are coming, have said that they will get on these buses and planes and boats, but I'm not entirely sure.

Errol Louis: Yes, there's a lot of confusion here. There have been reports that some of the Texas buses before getting on, people were wild getting on, people had to sign non-disclosure agreements so that they wouldn't say whether or not they had been tricked, or whether they had agreed to do this. In other cases, apparently in the Martha's Vineyard stunt, which I think was carried out by playing actually, apparently, they were told that they were going to go to Boston, and of course, they did not go to Boston. There's any number of different things.

I think the caller is on the right track. I was struck by this upfront, not so much the criminal statutes, but I'm just wondering about basic interstate commerce and other kinds of federal statutes that prohibit you from-- For example, it is unconstitutional, it is absolutely not allowed under the Commerce Clause, for us as New Yorkers to say, if you come from New Jersey, and we find that you're from New Jersey, we're going to charge you an extra 5% sales tax on anything that you buy in New York.

We don't put up tariffs between our states. Something about the logic of taking a person in need of social services and simply transferring them to another jurisdiction, it struck me as the kind of thing that would be right for a legal challenge. I don't know if human trafficking, it's a hot button statute and logic to it, but whether it's that or whether it's one state suing another, or suing them if nothing else than for compensation, if you're going to dump a financial burden on a neighboring state, perhaps that neighboring state might try and recoup it. I don't know what's going to happen, but I'm a little surprised that the lawyers haven't gotten a hold of this yet.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, I guess I should clarify that yes you are right, of course, that the migrants going to Martha's Vineyard, were flown to Martha's Vineyard. I guess, it's just those of them who then went on to Cape Cod had to do that by boat, but anyway, nevertheless, here they are. Mayor Adams says, if we've had 11,000 come recently, which is his number, then that is putting incredible stress on the shelter system because that's, according to his numbers, tell me if I've got this right, the number he says are coming without housing.

There are more who are coming, who actually have people here, who they can go and stay with? It's the number that needs city-provided shelter that is something in the 11,000 range, and yes, that's a big, big number. It made the mayor say that controversial comment this week, that maybe it's time to assess the right to shelter law. What did he mean?

Errol Louis: Under New York law, any person who shows up and needs assistance has a legal right to get shelter. It's a very specific right that they have. There's more than one way to make a law. It's not like the state legislature passed the law, this is a pursuant to a consent decree that dates back to 1981; Callahan v. Carey. That was Governor Carey. Six governors ago. It's been in effect ever since with a few modifications that are mostly expansions.

The first consent decree just dealt with homeless men, subsequent ones added families and so forth children. It's very specific about what you're entitled to. You're entitled to a bed of a particular size, the inches, and so forth. I read back through the consent decree because there's really no wiggle room here for the mayor to say that the law ought to be changed.

At best, the city might go back to the court and say, and this is the state's highest court, there's no further place to go, go back to the court and say, "We need to maybe adjust this consent decree and make it so that we have a little bit more time or that some of the types of housing again," which are really very particularly specified in the consent decree, "that you got to give us a little more time. You got to give us a little more wiggle room. You've got to give us an ability to carry out how this is going to work under these extraordinary circumstances."

Brian Lehrer: Let me replay the clip from yesterday's news conference of Brendan McGuire, the mayor's Chief Counsel trying to clarify the mayor's original statement.

Brendan McGuire: We are not reassessing the right to shelter. We are reassessing the city's practices that have developed around the right to shelter.

Brian Lehrer: Errol, is it your understanding that for people who may have been alarmed initially by what the mayor said, people who might be skeptical of whether he's serious about taking care of homeless people in New York City because of some of the other things that he said, and done the sweeps of encampments, the clearing of people more aggressively off the subway, if they'd been sleeping there, people may think that he's not got all that much sympathy for unhoused people in New York.

Maybe they were ready to hear this in the most negative light, which would be, "We just going to try to undo this right to shelter in New York City." Never mind anything about migrants, it could also apply to people who were here already. Then there was that attempt to clarify it or soften it yesterday. How do you see that whole sequence of events?

Errol Louis: Yes. It's good that the Mayor's Council stepped forward and said what he did because just as I said, this is not optional. Frankly, this is not the first mayor to complain about it. There's a famous, might even have been on your air where he said it, but there was a famous interview with Mayor Bloomberg, who said, "Hey, somebody could get on a plane at a luxury resort overseas, fly into JFK, take a limousine, to the Department of Homeless Services and ask for shelter, and we still have to provide it."

It was a grotesque kind of an example to give, but there was an underlying truth to it, which is that, without regard to the cost, the logistics, the availability of space, or anything else, New York has to provide this. That's what it means to have a court-ordered right, and that is what our right to shelter is about.

Lest anybody think that the mayor's actions in breaking up homeless encampments and so forth, would leave him say, to go to the state legislature or the city council and change the right to shelter law. That's just not how it works. They'd have to have a quite complicated and probably unsuccessful dialogue with the court that ordered this in the first place.

Because the right springs from the New York State Constitution, unless you're talking about a constitutional amendment, this right is not going anywhere. That's not something worth spending a lot of time on, I don't think for people who are worried, but what we should worry about, are the practical cost implications and logistics of taking care of thousands of people. What if it becomes tens of thousands? What if it becomes hundreds of thousands?

There were some people who were thinking it through. I heard at least one interesting suggestion from Senator Kirsten Gillibrand saying, "Well, listen, let's figure out a way to get some of them upstate, to some of these smaller towns, where they probably welcome a little bit more population." We've already seen that some immigrants, including refugees, are really revitalized parts of upstate New York. Perhaps we could keep that going. It's a very interesting thought.

Brian Lehrer: Very interesting thought. Let's take a call from Huddy who says they go back and forth between New York and New Jersey. Maybe Huddy is calling from the middle of the Hudson River, I don't know, but Huddy you're on WNYC. Hello.

Huddy: Yes, sir. I see these poor people with a blank stare on 42nd Street with their kids. They have not been absorbed. They are suffering immensely. I see them every day. Yesterday, I saw a woman with a little kid with no shirt, and they were just sitting there with a blank stare. It got tears to my eyes.

Brian Lehrer: You have reason to believe these were among the people who got bussed or flown from Texas.

Huddy: Yes, because they all sit around in clumps selling fruit, they can organized food carts. They're selling them [unintelligible 00:19:10] and fruits and whatever, and they were all sitting together with a blank stare. It's just heartbreaking. I can not describe it.

Brian Lehrer: I don't know exactly who those people were, but I'm glad your heart is open to suffering when you see it on the part of others because it's so easy to get into or to all that in New York City and just walk on by. John in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, John.

John: Hey. I spent a lot of time in Western Massachusetts and I just got back from Martha's Vineyard. Hiring a tradesperson in Massachusetts takes a year at best and costs a fortune. Why not train these people, give them ESL training and allow them to work and make a living. There's certainly seems to me demand and not enough supply at least in Massachusetts. It seems like the Democrats could be smart here and-

Brian Lehrer: And serve everybody's interest with a lot of job training. Well, funny enough, Mayor Adams addressed something along those lines yesterday, he though was complaining about red tape from DC that prevents him from doing something like that quickly. Here's the mayor again.

Mayor Adams: Six months, you are having people just sit idly by waited so who's supposed to pick up the tab for that? If the federal government is saying that for six months, you can't work, then the federal government should be saying for six months, we going to compensate you because someone has to pay for that.

Brian Lehrer: Errol, do you get this federal government saying for six months you can't work?

Errol Louis: Oh, yes, sure. Depending on what market you're talking about and right now we're, there are job shortages in many different areas, the building trades in particular like the caller said but as a general proposition, people are not supposed to come here and be able to find work while they're waiting for say they're asylum application to be processed. It's not supposed to work that way.

Here we are stuck, where people are supposed to be waiting for their cases to be adjudicated or for some other kind of statutory waiting period to pass and what are they supposed to do in the meantime? They're going to sit around and it's not ideal. It's not a great idea. Sooner or later, we know how this works in New York City, probably better than most places people are going to find work, whether it's selling Choros or working at the local car wash or whatever it may be.

My understanding is that from the minute they step off those buses at port authority, when asked what they need aside from absolutely urgent things like medical care or a place for their kids to sleep, the very next thing people are asking for is work. That's hopeful, but it's also something where we've got to update our systems and our thinking and perhaps even our laws to make sure that we have a smooth transition. What I see happening here, Brian, is ultimately this may prove to be a very inefficient, but effective way to deal with the border crisis.

People show up at the border, cynical politicians transport them to urban jurisdictions, where people actually have some competence and some compassion and have an ability to get them settled. Then we move them into depopulated areas and into the job market. It would be better if Congress did it and properly funded it, and we had a national debate about it, but we may end up in a place like that, where people end up doing what it is they wanted to do and what the nation needs for our arriving migrant and immigrant neighbors to do. Along the way, there'll be a lot of politics and a lot of costs to we the taxpayers, but perhaps this could all work out in the end.

Brian Lehrer: Although another complication with this particular population, I think, and correct me if I'm wrong is that since most of them are not here as regular immigrants, but people seeking political asylum from extreme conditions or political threats to their lives in their home countries, they have to go to court to get permission to stay here on those grounds and I believe that the large majority of them get denied and sent back.

Errol Louis: That is correct. Coming here with an asylum claim is no guarantee that you're going to end up here with a Green Card and a, and a new home and a new life it does not work that way. Just as you say, most people don't succeed, it can take up to a year though. It may be a look, it may be an indication of desperation, Brian, that people are saying, well, listen, it I have a very slim chance, but I will take that very slim chance and in the meantime, the year that I spend in perhaps less than comfortable conditions in the United States is better than whatever it is on fleeing. You have to assume that people are making rational choices about what's going to work for them and that may not mean a permanent stay in the US, but it still could be a rational improvement over whatever it is they're running away from.

Brian Lehrer: This is WNYC-FM HD and AM New York, WNJT-FM 88.1, Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcong, and WNJO 90.3, Toms River. We are New York in New Jersey public radio in live streaming at wnyc.org. Few more minutes with Errol Louis from New York One and New York Magazine on the 11,000 migrants, Mayor Adams number who've arrived recently, bused from Texas for the most part who need housing and that's stressing the shelter system in New York City to the breaking point and some of the underlying issues that go with that. Alexandra in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Alexandra: Hi, thank you for having me. I want to say that I am one of the volunteers with organization called Team TLC in New York City. It's an organization that says volunteers to the bus stations where these migrants are arriving to, and I volunteered a few times during the afternoons or the evenings, and none of those times I have seen any representative from New York City providing any basic information or any service whatsoever to these migrants.

Then this week, the mayor came out with a statement saying that this administration on its own has been providing shelter, healthcare, education, and other services. I'm a little frustrated by the lack of recognition that a lot of the non-profit organizations on the ground have been providing, and also by the fact that the city should really be trying to be on the ground providing those services that other organizations are having to sit for them.

Brian Lehrer: I'm glad you elevated that issue. In fact, Errol, didn't the mayor say something this week asking people to step up and volunteer to help, I don't know if, what take migrants into their homes or volunteer in some way?

Errol Louis: Yes. He's been making general appeals to the public. I think I interpret it as frankly, an appeal for volunteers, for sure, but also for some patients for the administration, as it scrabbles to try and get its act together. He took the press on a tour of one of these sensors yesterday and we certainly aired it. What I saw on the footage was lots of different tables, the education table and the social services table and the housing table and the health assessment table and the idea was you would just go from one place to the next, now who was actually behind those tables?

Were those city workers? Were those volunteers? Was it the red cross? Were the community organizations? Was it walking individual? Completely unclear to me, but from the point of view of the migrants, it doesn't even matter, it should be a relatively seamless to the extent possible extension of assistance and letting people know what their options are and getting them to food and shelter as quickly as possible.

Brian Lehrer: I don't want it to get lost here. How much of a problem there already was with unhoused people in New York City and how questionable the effectiveness of the government of the city and dealing with it was, you talked before about how this is such an opportunity for Democratic mayors to strut their stuff about how they are competent at running cities and Republicans, for the most part, don't run cities, but New York City already had a big problem with people who are unhoused. That brings us to your article from last week in New York magazine called New York Leaders are Sleeping Through a Housing Emergency. How are they sleeping through it?

Errol Louis: The Genesis of it, frankly, was there was one too many stories that I was working on that involved a huge pitched fight, in this case, it involved threats of physical violence against the city council member over 350 apartments in a section of the Bronx, in an area that had steadfastly refused to take any kind of affordable housing. It was a per looked like a perfectly good program. You could certainly complain about it, but it's like 168 subsidized apartments, 100 of them or 99 of them set aside for senior citizens, 22 for veterans, a supermarket recreational space, all of the things that you would expect and want.

There was this six-hour hearing and there's this rally, this counter rally with the mayor on the steps of city hall. I just struck me that we're burning up all of this time, energy, and we are thousands of units behind where we need to be just to try and accommodate the many, many thousands of families that are currently living in shelters. We're just not getting this right. Until somebody repeals the law of supply and demand the elaborate structures that we have in place, the uniform land use review procedures and the lawsuits and the fights and the rallies and the two years that it takes to build anything of any scale in New York, we're going to just keep falling behind.

I feel like we're not addressing that core reality. Until we do, we're going to just continue to fall behind. With Renton Manhattan over $5,000 a month now on average, I don't know how much higher it has to go before, the class of elected officials say, we've got to stop with the bickering. We've got to find a different way to get as many affordable units online quickly as we possibly can.

Brian Lehrer: Hasn't Mayor Adams taken out the following turf on the housing crisis in New York City that he's not going to do what de Blasio tried to do, what Bloomberg tried to do and add hundreds of thousands of units and come up with a big number goal for preserving or adding affordable housing. Rather he's going to focus on the quality of housing hasn't he said something like that, which I don't even know what that means when there's such a shortage of numbers?

Errol Louis: It's a good point. I don't know what it means either. I was hoping for a number just because accountability starts with something that you could measure and then come back to a little bit later. The reality, of course, is that when de Blasio said he was going to build or preserve, that, or preserve is a bit of a loophole there. 200,000, and then he later bumped that number up to 300,000. That sounds great but that was over a 10-year period.

If you take the total number of apartments that we started with, you're talking about like maybe a 1%, 1.5% increase over a decade, that's just not going to cut it. Politically, 300,000 sounds great. Politically, 200,000 helped him win the election back in 2013. I think Mayor Adams is right not to focus on a number because numbers can be deceiving in this case. If somebody said, "Hey, I think we're going to build 300,000 or preserve 300,000 affordable units over the next decade." That would sound like, "Hey, wow, that's a great number." It's not enough. We're still not getting there.

Brian Lehrer: How do we get to such a bigger number than even those we were just talking about, where's the money going to come from if we want so many of them to be below market rate, it's such a financial and overwhelming financial demand on the government to do it that way. That's why Adams and de Blasio and everybody say, well, we can't just build huge housing projects. Like Nicho like they did in the 1930s and just keep doing that because we don't have the federal money for doing that. Like they did when FDR was president. How are we going to even accomplish this?

Errol Louis: Well, look at least, I think a solution starts with at least asking the right question and you are asking the right question. How do we do this? It's the difference between saying I can't afford a new car and saying, how can I afford a new car? If the question is, how can we build this new housing? To me, there's some fairly obvious very expensive, very complicated solution, strategies that are at hand. One would be to look at the density and look at changing those where necessary so that certainly is definitely near transportation hubs, you can increase the density and build tall buildings near where people can move in and out of the urban core and get where it is they need to go.

This fight up in the Bronx and Throgs Neck that I refer to in my article is a prime example of what happens when people have a very organized, specific neighborhood strategy of keeping density low. We'll never get out of this if we allow that to predominate in the many neighborhoods around the city where, frankly, it's already zoned into place, low-growth, low-density areas have been enshrined in the code. That stuff just got to get undone. That's one thing.

Then also transportation generally, really is a partial solution. When I run into young people who say, I can't find any place to live, I say, well, I could find you a place today that you can afford. It's not going to be that pleasant, and it's not going to be that close. You're not going to be living in Soho. You're going to be living in Elmont or Portchester, you're going to be on the train quite a lot but that's okay.

I think, to be specific about it, there's a big project that has already been started by Metro-North, where they're going to be building stations from hunts point all the way up through the east Bronx. That is an amazing opportunity. If you could imagine, and this is where essentially we're talking about strategy. Imagine three or four more co-op cities along those routes, with train service that could get you into Manhattan relatively quickly. Now you're talking about making a dent.

Now you're talking about something that could work. That, to me, is the level of planning and thinking some of it regional, some of it going outside, the five boroughs that I think we have to have if we want to get serious about it now. If we don't want to be serious about it, we can continue to just have rallies on the steps of city hall and complain every time somebody wants to build 150 units. We really have to get past that if we want to keep the city affordable.

Brian Lehrer: It's such a huge underlying issue that pits New York or against New Yorker, unfortunately, on which something big needs to be done in order to solve. Hey, let's close this by just coming back to one fact check on something that the Republican governors and their allies keep saying with respect to moving the migrants to New York and DC and Martha's Vineyard, they keep using the term sanctuary city. DeSantis said it in the clip we played. Former secretary of state for Donald Trump Mike Pompeo said on Fox that places like New York are sanctuary cities. Therefore, well, have been sanctuary cities before this crisis, because we have the luxury of not having as many migrants. Here's a short clip of Pompeo.

[start of audio playback]

Mike Pompeo: These are all sanctuary cities until they're in their sanctuary. I doubt they'll embrace them.

[end of audio playback]

Brian Lehrer: Is the term sanctuary city even relevant here? That's my question, Errol. Isn't that just about the city not cooperating with immigration officials on deporting people who commit relatively minor crimes here, it's not a more global statement of anybody can come?

Errol Louis: That's exactly right. Look, this is what in poker you would call they tell. This is the right-wing tipping at hand, that this is not about actual border policy. This is about attacking democratic jurisdiction where the pro-enforcement policies that the Republicans have favored are being nullified, or at least are not being taken seriously. It's pure politics. It's just pure politics. It doesn't hurt or add to the burden one bit of anybody in Texas.

If New York chooses not to cooperate enthusiastically with ICE in trying to chase down people who may be out of status in the five boroughs, it doesn't hurt them one bit. Yet they are building up this entire political spot, all of this rhetoric. That self-satisfied chuckle from Pompeo, it makes clear among other things that he has no idea what goes on in New York City. He just has no idea. They have no idea that 40% of the city was born outside of the United States. They have no idea that the chaos that they want to believe springs from having people here who are out of status has not crushed New York. In fact, it's been a source of great vitality. They don't get it. They don't want to get it.

They are hoping with this stunt that New York and other jurisdictions are going to suddenly turn on our immigrant neighbors suddenly demand that they be expelled or put up walls and barriers and complaints. Perhaps they even want to see rioting in the streets, I don't know, but we're living two very different realities about the very same issue. It's a shame really because we should be making common course and trying to find some national solution to what is, in fact, a national problem.

Brian Lehrer: In fact, as you know, a majority of people who live in New York City are either immigrants or their children. We leave it there with Errol Louis who hosts Inside City Hall, weeknights at 7:00 and 1:00 on Spectrum News, New York One and is a New York Magazine columnist, his column on this last week, New York's leaders are sleeping through a housing emergency. Errol, we always appreciate your wisdom. Thank you very much.

Errol Louis: Great to be with you, Brian.

 

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