Welcome Mat Politics: NYC’s Reception of New Migrants since 2022

• In Event: Local Organizations and Immigration Political Incorporation

Abstract

In 2023 alone, over 100,000 migrants arrived in New York City seeking asylum and a chance of a new life in the Big Apple. In a city of eight million people, incorporating 100,000 new residents is not an insurmountable task; nonetheless, the rate of arrivals has, indeed, been unprecedented in recent history. The increased rate of migrants is partially due to the actions of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who, in protest of the Biden Administration’s immigration policies, began chartering buses in April 2022 to divert migrants from the southern border to Democratically-controlled cities including New York and Chicago. As such, the present predicament represents a proxy war in a nation increasingly polarized on the topic of immigration.

Migrants from the recent wave of asylum seekers have needs that fall into an array of categories including housing, healthcare, food and nutrition, education, economic support, and legal services. The city’s challenges in meeting the needs of these new arrivals have made national headlines, spurred partially by the actions of Mayor Eric Adams, who declared a state of emergency in response to the recent migrant flows in October 2023. In the months that followed, Adams implemented a series of measures aimed at rolling back the welcome mat for new arrivals, such as limiting migrants to a period of 30 days within city-run housing facilities and imposing curfews at shelters housing migrants. How should we understand the political conflicts surrounding New York’s struggle with welcoming recent asylum-seekers? What do NYC’s response and the surrounding public debates reveal about the current state of immigration politics in the U.S.?

This paper examines the politics of New York City’s reception of new migrant arrivals from 2022 through the first half of 2024 through the methodological lens of Vivien Schmidt’s concept of Discursive institutionalism. The first section maps the landscape of governmental and non-governmental institutions that have taken action to respond to migrants in recent years in order to provide an analysis of the social service infrastructure. To map the terrain, I rely upon interviews with service providers and government officials as well as directly impacted individuals. Second, the paper examines the discourses about the so-called migrant “crisis” by conducting a content analysis of media coverage of the phenomenon in major local and national media outlets and comparing it to the discourses of immigrant service providers interviewed in the first section. Finally, the paper provides an assessment of what NYC’s response to the recent migrant arrivals tells us about migration politics in the United States more broadly.

Author

• Jackie Vimo, Montclair State University