Southern Illegal Migrant Crisis Comes To NYC, Pak Hotel Is Hub
NEW YORK, NY (IANS) – The tide of illegal immigrants at the southern border that has roiled the nation’s politics have reached New York City, and a Pakistan-owned hotel is its hub earning the cash-strapped country $220 million.
Some of the migrants are housed in the nearly century-old Roosevelt Hotel, a city landmark owned by Pakistan International Airlines, while others are sent to other hotels or venues.
The Roosevelt Hotel shut down in 2020 during the Covid pandemic and slipping into dereliction was commandeered by the city government to process asylum-seekers streaming in by the tens of thousands from the Republican states on the border with Mexico.
As the city ran out of facilities to house them — and the city’s own homeless people — some migrants have camped outside Roosevelt behind steel barricades bringing with them border squalor.
The liberal, Democratic-dominated New York prides itself on being a “sanctuary city” that is against deportation of illegal immigrants or cooperation with immigration agencies and contrasted itself with the attitudes of the Republican-run southern states that were bearing the brunt of the migrant crisis.
But now New York Mayor Eric Adams, a centrist Democrat, declared bluntly, “we have no more room”.
The crisis is exacerbated by a unique court-mandated decree that requires the city to provide housing for anyone who is homeless — whether from the city or is a migrant.
