New York City Comptroller Brad Lander specializes in self-serving politics at the expense of average New Yorkers.
His latest stunt: a pointless meeting with fed officials in DC about the migrant crisis in New York.
The (Other) Dope from Park Slope said he felt “encouraged” by his meeting with flunkies from the Labor Department, the Department of Homeland Security and Tom Perez (now a senior Biden adviser, always a slimy Dem apparatchik).
We bet he did.
Lander, like the president and his enablers, wants more, more, more migrants.
No matter how devastating the fiscal blow their arrival has inflicted on the city becomes.
He doesn’t even pretend to care about the humanitarian catastrophe Biden’s caused at the border.
September alone saw a record-breaking 269,000-plus encounters there, plus countless gotaways (i.e., illegal migrants the feds spot but don’t stop).
And the more that flow over the border there, the more end up here.
So far, the city’s drawn more than 140,000.
The cost, projected through the end of fiscal 2025, will top $12 billion.
It’s already necessitated cuts to essential services and will cause more and worse pain down the road.
But for Lander there’s no question of putting on the brakes.
No: What he wants is “workforce development” and “support in case management” — i.e., yet more bureaucratic/non-profit infrastructure to help migrants as they look for work at the expense of taxpayers.
Pure absurdity.
First, the migrants don’t want to work.
Only 2% of the 140,000 who’ve arrived have filed for work permits since the start of the crisis. Since June, only 1,400 have been filed — half the number who land in the city’s care each week.
And if they did want to work, they’d have to wait a looooooong time: The permit-processing backlog stands at four years and rising.
But even if that problem could be magicked away, others can’t.
Like the fact that low-wage jobs (those the migrants would likely be limited to) are already scarce in New York. Our COVID-wrecked retail sector, for example, may never fully recover.
Bringing in new competitors for those spots is going to hurt — guess who! — less affluent black, Latino and Asian New Yorkers the most.
Look, it’s clear that Lander went to DC not to help migrants or New Yorkers but to help himself by upping his public profile.
And sure, politics ain’t beanbag.
Especially in Gotham.
But the city is groaning under a crisis caused by the policies that progressives like Lander screechily demand, with real, bad and ongoing consequences.
For Lander to take this opportunity to showboat is beyond disgusting — it’s not the first time — and all New Yorkers should take careful note.
