Suffolk County Republicans stepped up to the plate this weekend to announce that they will be seeking to hire counsel to assist the county to prevent New York City Mayor Eric Adams from sending New York City’s illegal immigrant arrivals to Suffolk.
This paper editorialized last week that it is incumbent upon all elected officials on Long Island to stand strong and take every legal measure possible to stop New York City — a self-proclaimed “sanctuary city” — from unloading on neighboring counties a problem that it created.
New York City officials, including the mayor, proudly virtue-signaled to the leftist progressives in New York how welcoming they were to illegal aliens.
Well, they made their bed; now they have to lie in it. They should not welcome all of these tens of thousands of illegal aliens into the city and then complain that they are overwhelmed logistically and financially. They cannot seek to shift this burden onto neighboring counties.
The answer to this problem is not more resources from the federal government or for suburban communities to take in thousands of illegal aliens, but rather for the Biden administration to do one simple thing that could end this problem tomorrow: Re-institute the “Remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers.
There is a new game being played by the progressive, open-border advocates, as well as the liberal mainstream media, and even — shockingly — by some Republican elected officials. The game is to no longer consider illegal immigrants “illegal” and instead grant them an air of legal status by simply calling them “asylum seekers.” Mayor Adams has done this, as has the Suffolk County executive, and Republican County Legislator Manny Esteban.
If we are now going to claim that any illegal alien who simply utters the words “I’m seeking asylum” has become a legal inhabitant in America, we will have declared America’s borders open to billions of people around the world. And we mean BILLIONS. This would mean that any one of China’s 1.4 billion people who are living in totalitarian oppression can make it to America’s shores and stay here indefinitely by simply saying, “I’m seeking asylum.”
And it’s not just China. There are billions of people living in authoritarian regimes throughout the world who can do the same thing.
The Trump administration stopped this madness by instituting a Remain in Mexico policy, which meant anyone coming from outside the United States claiming asylum could do so, but had to remain outside of our borders until their petition was deliberated upon.
We know it can take 10 years for these applications to be heard. By now claiming aliens illegally here can be deemed legal by simply claiming asylum, we will allow for a possible doubling of our population within the next decade.
This is not acceptable, and any elected official buying into these Democratic talking points are doing enormous damage.
It’s good to see Republicans — at least the majority of them in Suffolk — standing strong. They should ignore the protests coming from the radicals of the left, such as the Suffolk County Progressives and Make the Road New York, who have become cottage industries in supporting illegal immigration.
These groups get government money to help illegal immigrants stay here on Long Island. Some of these lawyers involved make their living out of supporting illegal immigration.
Long Island should not be fooled by these radical groups claiming to be humanitarian. They are not. They are hurting African-Americans, who are looking for employment. They are hurting veterans, who are looking for housing. They are hurting poor Long Islanders, who will be squeezed out due to an overload on our resources. They are hurting American children, who will get less attention from their teachers. They are hurting our elderly, who have longer waits in our emergency rooms.
Kudos to Suffolk Republicans for standing tall. Let’s hope we can finally convince the Biden administration to end this nonsense once and for all, and to re-institute the Remain in Mexico policy, rather than overwhelm Long Island because of mistakes made by the president and exacerbated by New York’s mayor.