New York plans to spend billions more on migrant crisis
New York state officials said they would direct another roughly $2 billion to fund the cost of caring for migrants in New York City, adding to the fiscal toll of a crisis that has overwhelmed the city’s normal network of homeless shelters.
Both Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York Mayor Eric Adams on Tuesday will unveil proposed budgets for the next fiscal year. Particularly in the city, the cost of caring for tens of thousands of migrants who have come to New York, usually after crossing the southern border illegally, has come to dominate municipal spending calculations.
The extra state funding from Hochul will be welcomed by city officials, who project the cost of providing food, shelter, medical care and other services to the migrants to reach around $10 billion through the summer of 2025. The number of people in the city’s care has steadily increased to around 69,000 since Republican officials in border states began sending migrants north on charter buses in the summer of 2022.
Adams faces a $7.1 billion deficit that he said was exacerbated by the cost of caring for the migrants. In November, the Democratic mayor announced budget cuts that forced the closure of libraries on Saturdays and would have reduced the police force through attrition.
Adams on Tuesday is set to provide details on restorations to some of those cuts. The mayor last week said that the city was able to reduce the projected cost of migrant care by more than $1 billion, in part by kicking people out of shelters after a period of 30 or 60 days.
“We are in a tough financial position and have to make hard choices,” Adams said Sunday in a post on X.
Adams will negotiate with the city council over a final spending plan, of roughly $114 billion, for the city fiscal year starting July 1. He has repeatedly called on the state and federal government to provide funding to cover the city’s costs related to the migrants. New York has helped migrants file 23,000 work authorization, Temporary Protected Status and asylum applications, Adams said in December.
Hochul, also a Democrat, will include at least $1.9 billion of migrant spending in her budget for the state fiscal year beginning April 1, state Budget Director Blake Washington said. State officials approved a similar amount of funding for migrants last year. The money will pay for tent cities on Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn and a state psychiatric hospital in Queens as well as work by members of the National Guard, he said.
The governor will propose a $233 billion budget that closes a $4.3 billion deficit. Washington said that estimates on tax revenue have ticked up since the state’s most recent projections in the fall, covering some of the shortfall. Hochul will also propose to scale back planned increases in aid to school districts, to reflect declining enrollment and cash balances that some districts are holding.
Hochul isn’t proposing any income-tax increases, Washington said. Progressive members of the Democrat-controlled legislature have already begun pushing for additional taxes to increase spending on healthcare and climate programs.
“We’re using the resources that we have on hand to address a humanitarian crisis,” Washington said. “We’re taking the facts as they come to us, not as we wish them to be.”
