Mayor Adams says federal barriers on work authorization for migrants are 'anti-American'

Mayor Eric Adams on Sunday pleaded for White House officials to expedite work authorization permits for migrants, arguing that barring tens of thousands of new arrivals in the city from legal work was “anti-American.”

The heightened calls for state and federal support comes as Adams and city officials say they’ve run out of space to house asylum seekers and migrants with nearly 60,000 people in the city’s care. Many migrants say their biggest challenge to moving out of city-funded facilities has been getting a permit to work legally.

“What is more anti-American than when someone comes to this country and they cannot work?” Adams said on his call-in radio show “Hear from the Mayor” on WBLS.

“When I look at the full immigration migration experience, if it's my family migrating from Alabama, if it's my Caribbean diaspora, my African diaspora, my Irish, my Italian, my Jewish … Every immigrant that has ever come to this city and participated in an American dream wanted to have the ability to provide for themselves,” Adams said.

Nearly 3,000 people entered the city’s care last week, according to city Emergency Management Commissioner Zach Iscol – bringing the total migrants in the city’s care to nearly 60,000 people, including nearly 20,000 children.

“The dam has burst,” Adams said on Sunday.

Adams met with White House liaison Tom Perez at City Hall on Thursday morning, which came after the mayor had for months called for federal officials to help the city manage the surge of migrants.

Gov. Kathy Hochul pledged more than $1 billion to the city for migrants in next year’s budget. She announced on Saturday that she released $250 million of that money. The governor said she will meet with the U.S. Department of the Interior on Sunday to consider federal properties in New York that could be used to house migrants.

But city officials say that’s not enough to foot the projected $12 billion bill they’ll run by June 2025. Iscol said the city has been left to flounder without federal support that was extended during other historic migration events.

“Whether it was Vietnamese in the '70s, European refugees after World War II, Cubans in '79 and '80, Haitians in the early '90s … Every time there was a huge robust federal government program run by the president to help with resettlement and processing of folks,” Iscol said on the show Sunday.

Representatives from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency tasked with processing work permit applications, did not immediately respond to an inquiry.