In early October 2023, Eric Adams conducted a tour of Latin America with a critical message in tow: “New York City is at capacity. Migrants: do not come here.” The tour brought the New York mayor to Mexico, Ecuador, and Colombia, and in particular to the Darién Gap, a stretch of land between Colombia and Panama considered especially deadly on the long journey to the United States.
The stated objective of the mayor’s trip, to dissuade would-be migrants from embarking on their travels, was grounded in the narrative that “misinformation” and “propaganda” were driving people to make risky decisions. Throughout the trip, the mayor attempted to set the record straight on the city’s dwindling resources regarding shelter, jobs, case management, and other vital support to migrants. This language, however, did not capture the precise concerns of people who try so hard to enter the United States and who set their sights on New York City for complex reasons.
Nearly two years have passed since New York City declared a state of emergency over the influx of more than 175,000 illegalized migrants and asylum-seekers that have entered the municipality since spring 2022. Despite the mayor’s highly publicized message, the number of asylum seekers in the city’s care has only grown since the October 2023 trip.
This “crisis” has become the subject of a number of policies, some genuinely innovative in the field of migration governance and others more problematic. Efforts to provide new arrivals to the city with debit cards for food or to lobby the federal government to expand access to work authorization and other regularization mechanisms are probably helping to relieve some of the burdens faced by illegalized migrants.
On the subject of shelter, the results have been much bleaker: a “tent city” on an island in the East River, a highly controversial court case to suspend the city’s mandate to provide shelter for all, and an uncertain plan to resettle people to other towns in New York state. Long-ignored public housing infrastructure has contributed to a toxic political situation. Without a flexible or resilient shelter system, the city was unprepared to accommodate influxes from what has been, by most estimates, the largest ongoing displacement in the world.
The mayor’s constant references to financial burdens has helped pit New Yorkers living in poverty against illegalized migrants for municipal resources. Local right-wing news outlets have contributed to a general sense of insecurity with their reports on scenes of perceived distress and disorder at public locations like shelters and intake centers. When public officials insist that everything’s under control when it’s not, fears surrounding an uptick in migrants can turn into reactive rage.
In New York City, the municipal government toes a very sensitive line. It has touted its migration governance as a model for the world even as it has constantly undermined its own efforts by crying “crisis” to the press. This apparent self-sabotage underscores the delicate political dance the administration is attempting to conduct on migration, wanting to be seen in turn as a compassionate liberal leader and also as a tough and honest immigration truther, as though that has ever been a vanguard position.
At Risk or As Risk?
Throughout last October’s tour of Latin America, Mayor Adams and his administration spread the word to Spanish-language media that, because New York City is “at capacity,” the American Dream has become the “American Nightmare.” This narrative puts New York City—and its greatest symbol, the Statue of Liberty—at the historic heart of the American Dream. It also imagines that previous groups of immigrants always found immediate dignity upon crossing this country’s borders and did not take the same risks people on the move take today.
Attempting to instrumentalize women’s and children’s vulnerability along migration journeys, Adams emphasized the violence that threatens these groups at and beyond the Darien Gap, in particular sexual violence. Gambling with this kind of danger, the mayor suggested, was not worth the ultimate discomfort awaiting them in New York City, where many families would find themselves sleeping on cots in institutional settings and enduring bouts of houselessness, with no ability to work or otherwise earn a living.
After seeing the Darién Gap firsthand, Mayor Adams expressed compassion, saying, “Human beings should not live this way anywhere on our planet.” Numerous academics have demonstrated that this “politics of compassion” serves as the public face of a system that remains deeply rooted in colonial and imperial ideologies. Compassion works in political symbiosis with domination, whereby the disadvantaged is the subject of policies and practices that shift between feelings of sympathy and a concern for maintaining order. Importantly, a politics of compassion and pity disarms discussion of justice, equality, or rights and frames illegalized migrants as both “at risk” and “as risk.” In other words, this population becomes understood as both extremely vulnerable and extremely dangerous.
During his trip, the mayor advocated for an organized plan, potentially involving international cooperation, that aimed at “stabilizing the situation” and “deterring dangerous, non-legal migration.” Having painted a picture of the “American Nightmare” experienced by illegalized migrants in New York City, the mayor even suggested that the violence of the Darien Gap could soon make its way further north:
What I don’t want is what I saw on the beach area [of the Darién Gap] in Colombia to play out on the streets of New York City. That is where we are right now. And for some reason, I’m not sure if everyone is understanding that we’re dealing with a global crisis. This is not the time for us to play politically correct word games and continue to attempt to nitpick on small parts of this.
With this public message, the mayor has employed a fear-based information campaign as a strategy for migration suppression.
Migration experts have shared doubts about the effectiveness of attempting to wage such an information war. Once established, a migration pathway tends to take on a life of its own. When people hear of a family friend who managed to get established in New York, they indulge in wishful thinking. Even when they know intellectually that the trip will be dangerous, perhaps even as dangerous as what Mayor Adams describes, they hold out hope that they might be the exception.
Especially difficult in today’s information age is any attempt to segment one’s audience. Adams convinces no one when he lauds liberal urban ideals on immigration to one audience, especially about the resources the city is making available to new arrivals, while warning another audience about the existential doom awaiting the city.
Municipal Alternatives
Globally, migration governance is a growing field, and municipal governments have been at the forefront of establishing working groups and networks to address migration. The increasing significance of city networks in global migration governance is a story that experts like Colleen Thouez and Benjamin Leffel have been documenting. During the monumental negotiations for the UN Global Compact for Migration and the Global Compact on Refugees that happened in 2018, cities cast themselves as problem-solvers on migration in a world where the nation-state may be losing its grip. This vision of municipal strength is best communicated by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who declared, “While nations talk, cities act.”
So, for instance, when President Donald Trump withdrew from the Global Compacts negotiations, American cities, led by New York City, swiftly responded by committing to contribute to, sign, and implement the Global Compacts. Numerous city networks and global municipal-level fora on migration have sprung up in the last decade. Cities 4 Action is one of several coalitions of American cities working on more humane migration policies. During the Trump years, cities across the U.S. became “sanctuary cities,” banding together to adopt policies of non-cooperation with federal immigration policies.
The UN-affiliated Global Forum on Migration and Development has been convening its annual Mayoral Forum since 2013. There, engaged municipal governments participate in peer learning workshops and technical exchanges and solicit global support for local agendas and action plans back home. Undoubtedly, the city of New York could have made a compelling contribution to the Forum this past January in Geneva, which discussed environmental and cultural dimensions of migration, but it does not appear to have publicly participated.
The Mayors’ Migration Council (MMC), based in New York City, is a coalition of over 200 mayors and municipal leaders from around the world that facilitates both practical exchange and collective advocacy on migration and displacement. Currently, the MMC is collaborating with another influential city network, the C-40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, presided over by former Mayor Bloomberg, to develop municipal policy responses to migration provoked by climate and environmental change and to engage with emerging global governance on this topic. In 2021, the MMC activated a coalition of 15 U.S. mayors and local government networks to pen an Open Letter to President Biden on the urban dimension of climate migration. The Open Letter helped secure an investment of $5 million to support migrants affected by climate change. Former New York Mayor of Bill de Blasio was a signatory of this letter, but Mayor Adams appears to have scaled back the city’s participation in the MMC’s work. It is puzzling that, what with past successes, the use of collective open letters such as this one has not been leveraged during this two-year state of emergency.
This is not New York’s only missed opportunity. Consider this alternative approach to Mayor Adam’s overtures to local governments in Latin America. A group of mayors, governors, and other elected officials representing communities along mobility corridors in the Americas come together to support migrants and demand better conditions not only for their constituents but for all individuals passing through their care and responsibility. A genuine collaboration among local governments to exert pressure on the international community would have been a much more forward-thinking response. It would have conveyed a similar message about needing more resources but with greater dignity.
Similar collaborations are happening around the world. Take, for example, the extended partnership between the mayors of Freetown in Sierra Leone and Milan in Italy to create a new model for African-European relations on the topic of migration. Or, the work of Los Angeles to secure USAID grants for its sister city, Lusaka, in Zambia. On a more technical level, the EU’s approach to accommodating refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine has seen an enlightened mobilization of cities and regions acting in solidarity. The launch of a centralized Info-Support Hub for local governments has helped to coordinate efforts to house, employ, and otherwise respond to the needs of Ukrainian refugees. This Info-Support Hub stands in contrast to the informal communication and collaboration that currently takes place between cities in the United States and across Latin America.
So, while the Adams administration argues that New York is doing everything it can on migration, this is clearly not the case. The city’s contradictory stance—touting progressive policies while empowering right-wing media to fear-monger about newcomers to the city—can only serve to muddle public perception and distract from possible solutions. Effective migration governance demands bold leadership. A more strategic approach that would make better use of New York City’s sway on the global stage would involve robust cooperation with other local governments. By leveraging municipal networks, New York City could be better equipped to manage migration challenges and be a more credible partner to cities along the Darien Gap, the U.S. border, and around the world.