Albany has a duty to help ease New York City’s migrant pain, and the more than 40% of the Legislature hailing from the city — including Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie — have no excuse for instead letting their own constituents suffer.
Mayor Adams faces a monster $7 billion shortfall beginning July 1, and he’s threatened all sorts of grim fixes: cutting cops, raising taxes, layoffs . . .
And while the 160,000 illegal migrants who’ve landed here aren’t the only reason, Adams figures the ongoing wave will cost city government $12 billion over three years.
And the state government can do plenty to help.
For starters, Gov. Hochul & Co. need to ensure that migrants are relocated fairly throughout the state — so that every community absorbs its share.
Look: The whole “right to shelter” that’s forcing the city to provide shelter-on-demand to anyone from anywhere in the world is rooted only in a passage in the state Constitution that refers to the Legislature’s realm of action.
The city, and no other part of the state, is only on the hook because of a court agreement four decades ago, followed by added deals in the years since.
Indeed, state lawmakers can and should clarify — via explicit legislation — that no New York community is automatically on the hook.
Albany should also find a few billion more in migrant cash for the city; the $1 billion it’s agreed to so far won’t remotely suffice.
Another vital step: File a formal demand that Washington declare a state of emergency to free up federal resources and funding, such as from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
That would enable the city (and other locales) to use federal sites for the migrants.
It’s insane that New York hasn’t done this already; without such a filing, Washington can’t act.
Yet once the demand is filed, New York has powerful Democrats in Congress — Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — to ensure the feds do act.
Perhaps most important: A federal emergency declaration would be a major, long-overdue admission from Team Biden that the prez’s disastrous open-door border policies have unleashed chaos not just in New York but across the nation.
And that could be a first step in addressing the root cause of the problem.
Action from Albany, in other words, would not only help New York — but all of America.
