New York mayor offers immigrants tickets to Canada

Montréal. It all started in Texas. Governor Greg Abbott decided to stage a kind of protest performance against New York City: load Central American and Caribbean migrants onto trucks and move them to the Big Apple. In this way, the Texan governor thought, the mayor of New York would stop criticizing him for his anti-immigrant policies.

Little by little, the mayor of New York, Eric Adams, began to face a crisis caused by mass immigration: the shelters filled up quickly and this meant that thousands of people were left homeless.

There was an attempt to set up an exclusive camp for immigrants crossing the border from Mexico into Texas, but it failed due to criticism and rejection. Additionally the place was flooded before it was opened.

Subsequently, those affected rioted in a Manhattan hotel because the municipality ordered their accommodation in an old, poorly equipped Brooklyn port warehouse.

Eric Adams was not too creative to follow in the footsteps of Governor Greg Abbott: he offered free tickets to migrants who wanted to travel to Canada. “We are not going to force them, but we are going to help those who seek to go anywhere else in the process to achieve their dreams,” said the mayor.

The same thing happened to Adams as to Abbott: he asked Washington for financial help, but there was no response.

Many of those interested in getting on the truck to travel to Roxham Road, the busiest border crossing for immigrants who want to leave the United States to request asylum in Canada, return after a few days due to the difficulties of assimilating to the country’s weather conditions: the cold as a disincentive.

Anger

A conflicting element is the Canadian community that lives near Roxham Road. The notable increase in undocumented people arriving from New York has made them angry. “There is no political will to fix this,” Héléne Gravel told The New York Times.

This woman answers to herself the reason for the disinterest of the authorities of the two countries: “Canada is soft, and the United States is not concerned because this is nothing compared to what happens to it on its southern border”, referring to Mexico.

Nearly 40,000 immigrants crossed from the United States to Canada illegally in 2022, more than double the number in 2019.

geopolitica@eleconomista.mx