Queens politicians are outraged that their borough is being overrun with unruly immigrants and are calling for other New York boroughs to take in the same number of refugees.
“It’s been a really tough one,” Queens Borough President Donovan Richards said Sunday. “Just because you have a loud voice and you have a lot of wealth doesn’t mean you’re not exercising your fair share of responsibility.”
“What about Staten Island?”
The Post reported Sunday that the poorest areas of New York City’s five boroughs are receiving a disproportionate number of immigrants from the migrant influx into the city, with Queens in particular bearing the brunt.
Queens is home to 70 of the 193 taxpayer-funded shelters (36%) being used to house the more than 65,000 immigrants still residing in the city.
Long Island City alone is home to 23 government-run shelters, 12 percent of the city’s total, and Jamaica and Briarwood are home to 13 of the borough’s shelters.
A total of more than 206,000 migrants have passed through the city so far, with arrivals now rising to about 1,000 per week, according to city data.
“We’ve been dumped here,” said City Councilman Robert Holden. “How long are we going to let this continue? These shelters aren’t doing anything to serve the neighborhood.”
“They just bring crime,” Holden added.
City Council Member Vicki Palladino criticized progressive lawmakers for pushing right-to-housing legislation “without restrictions.”
“You get what you vote for,” she said. “Ask any Democrat if they support New York becoming a sanctuary city. They all do. This is what progressives want.”
The migrant unrest that has upset neighborhoods was evident on Sunday at one of the Long Island CityOne shelters, where migrants have allegedly formed hostile cliques with Latin American nationals and African asylum seekers, even going so far as to form “fight clubs.”
Haircuts and even tattoos are sold on the sidewalks of Austell Place.
“This place has been slowly declining and now it feels like the Third World,” a 31-year-old local told The Washington Post.
“That’s the best way to describe it,” said the woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “You can’t walk down this street and not see it. The sidewalks are full of guys getting their hair cut and getting tattoos. It really looks like prison tattoos.”
“This place turns into a fight club at night,” she added. “A few nights ago you could hear it from half a block away.”
Local residents say many of the migrants are refusing to eat the food handed out at evacuation centres, instead cooking their own food outdoors over open fires that sometimes flicker dangerously between and under parked cars.
“They’re going to blow up someone’s fucking car,” said Marin Hernandez, 19, who rides his bike past the shelter every day. “They’re starting fires in the street. The other night they were starting a big fire with poles and lids and all sorts of things.
“I asked [one migrant]”They said, ‘Why are you doing this?'” the man from Morocco explained to me that people in West Africa can’t eat the food in the shelters, Hernandez said. “They were saying the food is inedible, it doesn’t taste like anything, or it’s dead or something. He kept saying that food tastes dead to people in West Africa.”
According to city hall, immigrants from Latin America make up more than 70 percent of the shelter’s population, with data showing that 38 percent of all immigrants are from Ecuador and 19 percent are from Colombia.
However, currently 13% of asylum seekers in the centres are from African countries.
