You can say this for the migrants demanding more free stuff from City Hall: They’re fast learners about the new American ethos of endless entitlement.
Schooled and led by far-left activists, they arrive here within days of illegally crossing the southern border and claiming asylum, then start agitating for better accommodations in pricey neighborhoods.
Tents in the Bronx, barracks in Brooklyn or homeless shelters anywhere are not good enough. Only first-class Manhattan hotels, where the city pays upward of $500 a night per room, are acceptable.
The welcome wagon comes with free food, free cellphones, free transit passes, free school and free health care.
Unfortunately, the booty is not free for taxpayers, which brings us to the slow learners in the sad saga.
That would be the gang at City Hall that is hell-bent on proving once again that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The open-ended promises are a prime example of how Eric Adams missed key lessons at mayoral school.
His predecessors learned that if you say “Come and get it,” people will come and get it, especially when it’s free. Adams apparently believed his election had changed human nature.
Mixed messages
Recall that he loudly embraced New York’s status as a sanctuary city and urged the Democratic mayor of El Paso, Texas, to send 200 migrants a day to Gotham. In one of his many mixed messages, Adams opened that door even as he denounced Texas’ Republican Gov. Greg Abbott for sending busloads of other migrants.
And he said nothing about the secret nighttime migrant flights to area airports arranged by the Biden White House. Are only migrants sent by Democrats welcome?
It was the exact wrong way to look at the problem. Abbott and other border-state leaders, frustrated with being ignored by President Biden as more than 5 million people have crossed the border, were legitimately trying to spread the pain in hopes of making Adams and other Dem mayors allies for securing the crossing points.
Nonetheless, by October, some 17,000 migrants had arrived here, with most living in crowded city shelters that already housed nearly 60,000 homeless people. With a clear change in tone, Adams suddenly declared a state of emergency and said the city had no more room at the inn.
“New Yorkers are angry,” he said. “I am angry too. We have not asked for this.”
Actually, he had. But he was also banking on fellow Dems in Albany and Washington delivering financial aid.
First he said the cost would be $1 billion, then he said $2 billion.
No matter — the result was the same: zero. That’s how much help Adams has gotten from his friends even as the number of known migrants approaches 45,000.
Gov. Kathy Hochul also snubbed his modest request to scatter 500 around to upstate cities.
Meanwhile, Adams’ supposed allies on the City Council undercut him in a different way. They demanded he take down tent cities, put migrants in hotels and give them permanent housing.
So here we are, and the soaring cost is only part of the problem. There is an immediate impact on the city’s already declining quality of life.
Take the mess at Midtown hotels, which The Post’s Tuesday front page smartly labeled “Inn-Sane!” The three-star Watson Hotel on West 57th Street would normally be a mecca for big-spending tourists, but instead the scene is chaotic with some migrant refuseniks pitching tents on the sidewalk in a bid to stay at the hotel instead of being shipped to a cruise ship terminal in Red Hook.
Never mind that the city filled the cavernous Brooklyn space with cots, pillows and blankets and provided large communal toilets and showers.
“The cruise ship terminal is not as good as the hotel,” a 42-year-old Venezuelan man told The Post.
There you have it — more entitlement than gratitude. In a heartbeat, that migrant’s mindset has gone from dreaming of freedom in America to demanding luxury accommodations in Manhattan — for free, of course.
The chaos is not limited to the Watson. The Post, acting on information and photos provided by a whistleblower employee, reported three weeks ago about the unfolding disaster at another Midtown hotel leased by the city for migrants, the Row Hotel on Eighth Avenue near Times Square.
“Nearly a ton of taxpayer-provided food gets tossed in the trash every day,” the paper said, because the migrants would “rather secretly cook their own meals on dangerous hot plates.”
The photos showed garbage bags full of unopened sandwiches and a room littered with empty beer cans.
The employee, Felipe Rodriguez, said there was a “dramatic” change when the city took over the hotel in October.
“There are some nice migrants in that hotel looking for that American dream, that second chance to make it in society,” he said. “But there are a lot of migrants there that are causing chaos. We have a lot of fights, a lot of drugs, a lot of sexual harassment abuse.”
He said there was no supervision for migrants who were supposed to be quarantined for COVID, chicken pox and other infectious diseases. An NYPD source confirmed to the paper that cops have responded to numerous incidents at the Row, formerly known as the Milford Plaza.
Obviously, the crime element is not something the city needed to import. It’s got more than enough of the homegrown variety and, while murder and shootings are down, too many streets and neighborhoods remain haunted by menace and violence.
To be clear, the migrants didn’t invent the entitlement approach. They are taught to demand what they want by open-border activists who won’t be satisfied until New York looks and feels like Caracas. Nor do the leaders care that the lack of serious vetting provides an open door for drug smugglers, gangbangers and sex traffickers.
Operating through lawyers and charities, and often with government funding, the activists denounce American society as racist, which is both outrageous and ironic. After all, the supposed racism doesn’t curb the desire of tens of millions of people from around the world to come here.
That’s small comfort for taxpayers, nor is it helping Adams look like the mayor he promised to be. On election night, he vowed to be the new face of his party and show America how to run a city.
If this is what he had in mind, heaven help New York.
RX for ‘docs’
Reader Dick Gardner makes a point about classified documents, writing:
“Classified material is signed out like library books — only stricter, and each document has a serial number. There should be a list of everything that’s missing and both Trump and Biden should have been told years ago to turn them in.”
Stop zinging the ‘blues’
Ruth Cohen is repelled by events in Tennessee: “If they keeping making the police profession miserable, only scoundrels and felons will apply. Then we will all have to seek protection from sadists, as we saw in Memphis.”
