Tuesday, April 16, 2024
Year : 2, Issue : 16
For one 29-year-old Venezuelan woman, who left her two children and partner behind in her home country to embark on a six-month journey to New York City, America represented hope. There, she thought, she would find safety and the opportunity to make a living. But four months after arriving in the U.S., she says it’s nothing like she had imagined.
“It’s too difficult to come to a place where you don’t know the language,” the woman, who agreed to speak anonymously to protect her safety, told Yahoo News.
Speaking in Spanish, the woman had been standing along the granite wall of a bustling midtown Manhattan restaurant attached to the Roosevelt Hotel, which in recent months has been transformed into the city’s migrant intake center.
The woman explained that Venezuela’s corrupt and repressive government had left her with few options at home. She embarked on the dangerous journey to the U.S. by herself, traveling through the perilous Darién Gap that connects Colombia to Panama, then multiple countries including Nicaragua and Honduras, by foot and public transportation. Since arriving in New York, she’s struggled to make money and obtain basic necessities while navigating the city’s shelter system. Eventually, she says, she hopes to bring her family to America, but she’s unsure how she will make that happen.
“I just want a job,” she said. “It is very difficult to get to a place when you have nothing.”
The woman is just one of an estimated 57,300 migrants currently seeking shelter in New York City. Thousands of them have been bused in from Texas, a political move by Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to force the federal government to tighten border security. Others have made their way to New York on their own.
For most migrants, the prospect of finding a decent job and safety is enough to justify the arduous, and often dangerous, journey to the United States. But now that they’re here, some say the U.S. is nothing like what they had imagined.
“I thought of New York differently, but now I also see that New York is in chaos,” said a 48-year-old Ecuadorian woman who was also staying at the Roosevelt. The woman, who declined to give her name, told Yahoo News that she, her husband and their 2-year-old child escaped violence in Ecuador, traveling for two months before they eventually reached New York.
“In my country right now they are stealing, they are killing and there is no longer security, just desperation,” she said, rocking her child back and forth in a stroller on the sidewalk.
MIGRANT CHALLENGE IN NYC
In the first week of August alone, nearly 3,000 migrants entered the city’s shelter system. With up to an estimated 1,000 migrants arriving each day, city officials say it costs about $10 million a day to care for all of them.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams has said that without significant financial assistance from the state and federal government, in addition to policy changes, the city’s migrant issue will soon become a disaster. At a press conference earlier this month, Adams estimated that caring for asylum seekers may cost the city more than $12 billion over three fiscal years.
“The city is running out of money, appropriate space, and personnel” to care for migrant families, the mayor told reporters. Since 2022, he added, nearly 100,000 migrants have arrived in the city. And though thousands have since moved elsewhere, many remain in the city’s care.
Adams and other city officials have vowed to not turn their backs on migrants that need aid, but in recent weeks hundreds of migrants have been photographed sleeping on sidewalks because, the city says, there is nowhere else for them to go.
Source: Yahoo News
