President Trump’s New York
In January of 2025, President Trump took office. The week of January 13-20, Brooklyn was still in chaos. So was Manhattan. It was a chaos I have sought to describe in past essays, but things had reached a crescendo.
All of the world, it seemed, had descended upon the Five Boroughs.
From the floodgates that opened in 2022, and right up until Inauguration Day, Brooklyn and Manhattan had been under siege. I had never seen anything like it.
Due to the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of illegal newcomers, with thousands more arriving every day, the city had been transformed. There was no coherent culture, social contract, understanding of how one gets through a day. It was a circus of confusion, entitlement, aggression and chaos, all of it performed upside-down.
These millions had been ‘magicked’ to this city, then housed, cosseted, clothed and fed, on the dime of the Biden administration (meaning: on our taxpayer dime) and with the funding of the United Nations.
Manhattan and Brooklyn had been thronged with strangers – -people who were not the usual newcomers to the city who arrive legally, have family or business here, and then set about soberly to learn the language, seek out a job, pay taxes, raise kids, and settle into an American life. Legal immigrants in the past have been self-selected; they have thought for a long time about immigrating to America, taken steps to do so under the law, planned and prepared. They have been self-selected in the past, too, because it is their own drive or initiative, without external assistance, that led them to make it lawfully to our shores.
In contrast – and this is not a racist or even ethnocentric observation; it is about people differently situated, differently motivated — the millions abruptly, unlawfully streamed among us, were indeed deeply, truly strangers. Unlike earlier waves of legal immigrants, these folks were not self-selecting, self-propelled, or self-assisted in their journeys. They were people who seemed to have been scooped out of whole villages far elsewhere; people who had been doing other things entirely, making other plans altogether; and who then had been simply lifted up into space, transported, transplanted. They were indeed hoisted up out of other lives, other communities, other sensibilities, virtually other timelines, and transported hither, via the immensely powerful assistance of some of the most massive forces on earth.
Given the massive apparatus built up on three staging nations in order thus to transport this tide of humanity – that is to say, the immense powers and the millions of dollars deployed by the US State Department and by the UN, which I chronicled in my essay “What is a Culture?” — this sense of chaos and alienation that engulfed the city was not surprising.
Their arrival created an immense cultural strain. According to “City & State: New York”:
“More than 210,000 migrants have arrived in New York City since the spring of 2022, many hailing from countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, though a significant number have also come from China and countries in Africa. City officials, advocacy groups, school communities, nonprofits and a bevy of elected officials have mobilized to welcome the ongoing flow of new arrivals, but it’s been a massive – and costly – undertaking.
In those two-and-a-half years, Mayor Eric Adams’ administration has stood up more than 200 emergency shelter sites, enrolled tens of thousands of migrant children in schools, gone to court to amend its right to shelter obligations, fought for federal and state funding to help handle the costs of providing services, and sued bus companies sending migrants from the border.”
The numbers involved in funding this transfer of humans, were staggering: In 2023, Mayor Eric Adams planned to spend $4.3 Billion of the city’s budget, in just one year, on “welcoming” the illegal immigrants. The Biden administration poured Federal money into the effort as well, in astonishing amounts:
“June 7, 2023: Building on the roughly $30 million in federal funding offered in May, the Biden administration agreed to provide the city with an additional $104.6 million to help officials manage the influx of migrants through the Federal Emergency
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