 So good morning everyone, thank you for being here and welcome to everyone who's in person and those of us who are joining on the G-SAP YouTube channel. My name is Hiba Barkar and I'm an associate professor in the urban planning program here and at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. I'm also the director of the Post Complex Cities Lab that have been putting some of these events together. First I'm grateful for everyone who accepted our invitation on a relatively short notice to share their experiences and knowledge and to be with us here today. Today's conference serves as a rapid response basically to the migrant crisis, crisis invitation that is unfolding in New York City. It brings together a diverse array of academics, experts, activists, urban stakeholders and individuals with personal experiences and knowledge to help us better understand the obstacles as well as the resources and the communities that are available for migrants arriving in New York City. The conference will particularly focus because you know this is a big topic but we're going to particularly focus on the issues of the built environment and the experiences and rights of immigrants to shelter and housing and claiming space in the city, the right to the city. Coming together as scholars, activists, community organizers is also important giving how the right to shelter that is New York is famous for the mandate is actually also under attack. The right to shelter in the context of New York City refers to the legal obligation of the city and I think some of our guests will speak to this today in the context of New York City refers to the legal obligation of the city to provide temporary shelter for individuals and families who are experiencing homelessness. This concept is based on the understanding that access to shelter is a fundamental human right, especially in locations with harsh weather conditions like New York. Around 118,000 new immigrants have arrived in New York City. It's estimated since April 2022 which according to the city has trained its resources and caused crowding in homeless shelters that are already at capacity and many people eventually have been sleeping in the streets. For example, you can see close to, in Harlem, close to campus on 116 and Frederick Douglass, the people who have to live in the streets. Mayor Adam said the city has already spent around $1 billion to handle the migrant crisis and that the city does not have additional resources to handle the income influx of people that are forced to compete with the unhoused population for beds in homeless shelters. It is a crisis in quotation and parenthesis for many reasons. One of them is the lack of support from the federal government that says it doesn't have enough resources to help the unhoused in general, whether homeless populations or immigrants fleeing hardships from their countries. However, and I have to say that the federal government has allocated $858 billion to spend on the military and defense for 2023 alone to fund wars in the Middle East, Latin America and the African continent and elsewhere in the world. Of course we cannot talk about this without the background that there's something that's happening in the world. So as we watch thousands of immigrants and asylum seekers sleeping on the streets of New York City looking for shelter, we are also watching on our screens 5,000 miles away from us. 2.5 million people in Gaza, 70% of them are refugees on their own land and have been under attack by Israel funded by our federal tax money, which managed to allocate $14.3 billion in emergency funds, plus the $3.8-annual million of dollars that goes to the Israeli defense, which have helped create millions of refugees at the other end of the world in what many scholars are describing as a genocide, as a response to the October 7th cruel attacks. So 1.5 million who are ready refugees are on the move again looking for safe space from shelters and moms and we have thousands and thousands here also looking for safe space and shelter away from violence. So while we're talking about New York City, these conversations are important global conversations as the United States United Nations estimates that there are about 118 million people forcibly displaced in the world right now. Our day will be divided into three panels. We will start with a panel on the urban history of immigration crisis in New York City. We're followed by lunch. Panel 2 will focus on the formal and informal systems of support and care that immigrants depend on to make life in the city. On the last panel, we will focus on the housing question and the right to shelter. Our panels will be moderated by the very capable masters and doctor students from the urban planning program and the Institute for the Study of Human Rights here at Columbia. At noon around afternoon, I guess, a bit afternoon, we will break for lunch. During the lunch break here, the post-conflict city lab is co-hosting a second teaching on what is settler colonialism, where speakers trace the entanglements between indigenous dispossession regimes of US surveillance technologies and Israeli designs and use of drones connecting to the globalized warfare. It's happening in the same building on the fifth floor when our lunch break is happening here. I want to thank the many sponsors that have made this event on the migrant crisis possible today. I want to thank the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, the Society of Fellows and Haman Center for the Humanities, Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Institute of Latin American Studies, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and the Post-Conflict Cities Lab. I also want to thank my colleague Hugo Ceremento for helping co-organize this event and thanks to Kendra Sykes, Stefan Bodicard from GSTAP Events and Chris Day from AV who are helping with this setup and for everyone who is involved in some way. This event would not have been possible without the dream team of students, amazing team. I've been with the pleasure and privilege to work with for the past month. I would like to thank you in alphabetical order to Maria Amaya Morphin, Edalia Gonzalez, Joe Honeykens, Claire, Kenan Kurgan, Naya Deng, Maya Komal, Elizabeth Milagores Alvarez, Daniela Pelschres, Algo Ogas, Mauricio Rada Orelana, Pedro Ramos, Saumil, Sangavi, Samantha, Sauna Sarabia, Mandy Taylor and Kee Sanghi. I want to thank my amazing research assistant, Maryam Mahmood and thank you, Maryam, for juggling with me all these events that we're putting together. I hope you enjoy your day with us. Please grab a coffee if you need more outside and we'll start with our first panel that's moderated by Kee Sang and Elizabeth. Thank you so much. Without further ado, I'd love to ask each of our panelists in panel one on the urban history of immigrant crises in New York City to introduce themselves. I'll start. Hi, I'm Nara Milanesh. I'm a historian at Barnard just across the street. I focus on Latin American history. I'm actually not a historian of migration. I always feel like I have to say that. I became interested in these topics. I mean, I have a long standing interest, but in 2016 I had the opportunity to spend a week in the largest ice detention facility in the country in south Texas. And I subsequently went back many times, including with students. And out of that experience grew an oral history project with Central American migrants. I've also been involved in some of the local organizing activities in New York City regarding the recent migrant newcomers. And, but my focus is really on Latin America. So I'm deferring here to my colleagues in US history. And I guess I don't have to pass the microphone. Hi, Ron. I'm a case on the wall stress. I'm the director of Latina and Latino studies at Penn State University, but also Columbia College class of 1992. So thank you for coming and having me back here. I'm a historian of Latinos in the United States of immigration and the author of a book that I'll be saying more about the subtitle which tells the whole story, but I'll leave that for the talk and turn it over to Dr. Flores. Hi, everyone. I'm Lori Flores. I've just gotten over laryngitis, so I'm a little bit quiet. But I'm an associate professor of history at SUNY Stony Brook. I teach modern America, labor history, immigration and food history. Hi, everyone. My name is Nermin Arestu. I am an associate professor at the CUNY School of Law where I co-direct the Immigrant and Non-Citizen Rights Clinic. There, together with my students, we represent immigrants in all postures of the system, affirmatively applying for asylum, trying to come through our southern border, those detained, those in deportation proceedings, as some examples. We represent people from all over the world. Our express focus in our clinic is really to focus on the most marginalized of the most marginalized. So most recently we focused on the experience of black migrants who are coming through the southern border, youth in Long Island who are subject to pretextual gang allegations, Muslim immigrants and those who are perceived to be Muslim who are subject to post-911 civil liberties issues, and we are just wrapping up a long project looking at the experiences of disabled immigrants and their due process rights. And I've been there about 10 years and I'm really excited to be on this very cross-disciplinary panel. Hi, good morning. My name is Cynthia Santos. I am from Mexico. I am an active faculty at CUNY Journalist School, but I work in the intersection of migration, arts and community organizing. Thank you. Just a quick note, as some of our speakers have already alluded to, we will be using different vocabularies and we understand and recognize that there are several different populations and different experiences being represented today. For the two of us, Elizabeth and I will mostly be using the term migrant as an umbrella term to refer to all these different types of newcomers into the city. But we do want to recognize that there are different experiences, different reasons for coming to the city, that there are people for whom this is not the first time they are moving or being displaced. So we just want to put that out there and without further ado. Hello, everyone. Thank you for being here. Thanks to the organizers. I'll skip all of that stuff so that we cannot spend too much time. This is a conference on migrant newcomers to New York City, but I actually want to start talking about the U.S.-Mexico border. Because the border is 2,000 miles away from where we are sitting in this room, but it runs through the downtown heart of Manhattan where many thousands of people, of course, are living. And of course, it runs through Queens and Bronx and Brooklyn, et cetera. We have migrant newcomers dispersed all over the city. So I want to start with the border because we have the best statistics and best information about the border. And as far as I know, and I would be interested to know if other people in the conference know otherwise, as far as I can tell there are very bad statistics for what is happening in New York City right now, who is here, who is coming, how many people, et cetera. So I think the best we can do is at least to start at the southern border. So in recent years, we have heard this story of migrants crossing the border, which seems to recur periodically in the papers, right? It takes over the headlines, crisis, surge. In fact, this conference is directed at interrogating that whole framing, right? And then all of a sudden it disappears again. Then we don't hear about it for months. And then one day it reappears, right? It is frankly extraordinarily difficult even for people who are really interested in these topics and know a lot about them. It's really difficult to follow what's going on month to month, even week to week, right? And so I think it's really helpful to view patterns of who is crossing the border in a longer term historical perspective. History gives us a framework really to contextualize the present. And I think that's especially useful for an issue like this that seems to be in constant flux. So I want to start with a graph that does just that. And I'm so not a social scientist, but it's kind of fun to every once in a while show a graph. Here is a graph that shows us U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions, which is to say people who are having encounters with Border Patrol from 1947 to almost the present. So we get in a longer term perspective these blue bars that show us how many people are essentially crossing the border, right? So if we look, we have been hearing about a border crisis since about, let's say in the most recent cycles, since about 2014, right? Here we can see this last decade in relation to this much longer history, right? It's this little tail end. Well, if we look at that last decade, we can see that in fact the volume of people crossing the border is smaller by, and I am again not a social scientist, but I would say orders of magnitude from an earlier period in say the 80s, 90s, even early 2000s, right? So this is the graph I want to start with, and I like to often start with this graph to contextualize the last 10 years. And with this graph in mind, I want to argue that the story of migration in the past 10 years is not a story of how many. It is a story about who. Who is arriving and who has changed in ways that lends itself, I think, to this whole framing of crisis. Now you will notice, I should also say that there is clearly an uptick in the last year, and if we had a bar for 2022, it would likewise be high. And I am happy to talk about, I'll mention it very briefly, and I'm happy to talk about it in the Q&A, sort of the post pandemic story. And I will, and I will talk about it very briefly at the end. But I want to talk about instead of how many, which is always the framing of this issue, I want to talk about the who. So what do we mean by who? Well, we might assume this is the US-Mexico border, so isn't it primarily Mexicans, Mexican nationals that are crossing. And historically, that would be a correct assumption. But this has changed relatively recently. In the last decade or so, the numbers of people crossing who are Mexican citizens has decreased. In fact, in 2019, the numbers of Mexicans leaving the United States exceeded those seeking to enter. At the same time, over the last decade, we have witnessed an increase in the proportion of Central Americans who are arriving, and specifically Central Americans from three countries, the so-called Northern Triangle, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala. So we get a shift from Mexico to Central America. And second, we have a shift in terms of the demographic profile of who is coming. Historically, it was adult men who primarily young labor migrants who were crossing the border seeking work. In recent years, we've seen an increase in the numbers of families and children, right? Many of whom are seeking asylum. That phrase asylum seekers that we're constantly hearing now, like where did that come from? That's where it's coming from, right? So we have this different profile of people who are coming under a distinct legal guise, right? We're trying to. There's also a gender element to this shift. Women and girls account for a larger share of crossers today than they did historically. So to summarize the story of the past 10 years is not a story of some unprecedented surge in numbers. It's a story about this shift from young adult Mexican men, labor migrants to Central American families and children who are asylum seekers. Here's a graph. This is only the second one I'm going to show that shows us the uptick in unaccompanied children and children with families. So this doesn't, I could show you graphs of how many families, which would be slightly different. But it would show essentially this similar pattern, which is that it starts slow and then starts to. We have a surge in 2014, which is when we started hearing about children at the border. And there have been various spikes since then. So these are the families that we have heard so much about in the news. I'm not going to talk about why they're coming. Let's see. I want to suggest that, and I'm going to skip ahead here. I want to suggest that that this explains the crisis framing that we have certain ideas about who is supposed to be migrating and who migrants are. And it's not supposed to be children. We have ideas that it should that is adult men, presumably with the kind of paradigmatic migrant, and that that is feeding into a lot of the framing of crisis. Children create and families create a crisis quote unquote. Because they create legal complications for those who would like to detain and deport them. Children for various reasons that I won't go into are harder to detain and deport than adults, Central American children, or even harder to detain and deport. So they create a crisis in that regard. They also, I think, create a political crisis in that children are weaponized in essence in some ways by both sides of this debate. Because there is nothing more powerful than a suffering child, right? If you can mobilize a suffering child to your ideological position, you have a very powerful discursive tool at your disposal. So I think part of the crisis, the framing of crisis is this. It is the framing of, or it is the fact of who is coming and the fact that these are children, and that lends itself to this framing. So I will talk more about that in Q&A. Thank you. Alright, so we're here to offer some historical perspective on migration to New York City. And since I've written this book on this subject with this subtitle, I clearly have some thoughts on the issue. Barrio América is a national study, but one that starts on a quiet street in a Dallas neighborhood called Oak Cliff in a modest yellow wood frame house. That is the headquarters of the Federación de Clube Zacatecaros del Norte de Texas, the North Texas Federation of Zacatecan Clubs. Now the first thing you'd notice entering would be this display between the flags of Mexico and the United States. There's the official steel of the Mexican state of Zacatecas, based on the original coat of arms bestowed by Philip II of Spain in 1588. The display is the creation of the Federation's founder and president, Manuel Rodel Rodriguez. And I began with this clubhouse and this migrante, I'll be using the Spanish term, because they exemplify and help create a series of durable connections between the United States and Latin America, and they constitute a transnational urban system, is what I've called it, one that transforms cities and towns on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. And more broadly, Rodela is just one of dozens of Latin American migrantes that my team and I interviewed between 2010 and 2016. Most importantly for our purposes, the broad historical context, he is one of about 25 million migrantes who moved to or were born in the United States in the past 50 years, and they arrived just when they were needed most, at a time when American cities were in deep distress because they were losing people, shedding jobs, facing fiscal crises and rising crime, and really facing the sense that perhaps the era of the big American city had simply come and gone. I argued that if migrantes like Mr. Rodela had not come, then a lot more American cities would look like the parts of Detroit, Michigan, Gary, Indiana, or Youngstown, Ohio that have become the tragic poster children of urban decay, right, whose abandoned homes, shuttered factories, ghostly office buildings, and empty schools have become, you know, the sort of symbols of urban decay, in books of ruins photography, their entire books published just of images like this. I want to take a moment to emphasize that the work of urban revitalization involved immigrants from around the world. I focused on Latinas because I speak Spanish. I do not know Cantonese or Arabic or Hindi or Korean or Yoruba. I wish I did, but again, this is simply a statement of the migrantes that I have studied who are about half of all immigrants. The other half come from, again, the entire rest of the world. This is an international effort. So let's begin by remembering what the urban crisis was because in this era in particular it's kind of easy to lose sight of it. The urban crisis was a period of about 30 years when cities were in deep trouble. From the 1960s to the 1990s, early 1990s, the signs of distress were all around. People would go to work in the morning and see panoramic views of abandoned neighborhoods, then they'd come home, turn on the TV and see news reports with one story after another about violent crimes in their city. And indeed crime was the most high profile symptom of the urban crisis. Various metrics, homicides, doubled property crimes, tripled, assaults more than quadrupled. I'll just give you one example from this city and I remember it well because I lived here at the time. In 1991 at the peak of the crime wave, there were 2,245 homicides in New York. If you do the math, that's about six every single day. Other cities had similarly horrible statistics. Meanwhile, cities were losing residents, Detroit loses 35% of its residents, Cleveland 37%. Lots of industrial cities say goodbye to about unbalance a third of the people living there. The industrialization and suburbanization meant that jobs were being taken out. So for example, Chicago lost about half of the manufacturing jobs that it had in 1948 by about 1980. So it was a really difficult time. Besides the near statistical analysis of what was going on, there were also a lot of cultural concomitants. And these are movies that I saw when I was a kid, so they mean a lot to me, but they're also very illustrative. There was a sense of a grim present and a bleak future for urban America. If you think of classic New York City movies like The Warriors, which depicted a city dominated by street gangs, 100,000 members strong, the poster said, who formed the armies of the night. The 1981 film Fort Apache the Bronx, where I was born, but it had no real resemblance to the Bronx I knew. It described the borough as, quote, a place where even the cops fear to tread, unquote, if only. But it was the 1981 movie Escape from New York that I think offered the most creative prognosis for the urban crisis. Now the movie took place in the future, right, 1997. The island of Manhattan has been evacuated of its civilian population and converted into a maximum security prison. Inside there are no prison guards, no law or order, only gang warfare and struggle to survive. And every inmate had a life sentence. And before they were sent in, they were offered the last minute choice. They could either move to Manhattan or voluntarily commit suicide. So underlying all of these movies and many others from the era, right, Robocop, after the fall of New York, there are lots of these, Dirty Harry, all five of those. It was the widespread sense that, again, big cities might be doomed. But essentially that is quite simply not what happened. Instead crime rates plunged in this city by about 85 to 90%. Last year there were 433 homicides in New York before the pandemic. It was 318. In a city that grew from seven and a third to almost 9 million people. Again, massive drop in crime. A nationwide one criminologist estimated that today there are about a hundred and something thousand people walking around who would have been murdered had the crime rate stayed where it was in about 1991 or 1992. So, broadly speaking, let me just give you the statistical part of this. Apologies, but just to give you a sense that, again, I based this on Chicago and Dallas, but it works pretty much nationwide. These are two tables from my book that basically show that Latinos and other immigrant stock populations like Asian Americans have repopulated cities hollowed out mainly by white flight. As you can see at the very bottom, the number of white Anglos through 2010 is smaller than it was in 1970. All that slack is taken up by migrants and their kids. It was not primarily the creative class or yuppies who were behind the revitalization for America. So, I just had these for two cities, but thankfully when the book came out, The New York Times wrote up the subject and their incredible data guy, Kwok Trangwe, did 10 more of them. So, you can get a sense. Here, the legend is here. So, Latinos are the orange other. I would have used a rather different phrasing. I think they're supposed to be Asian, African, and other migrants are really sort of taking up, again, that slack leftover. In the Sun Belt, the biggest cities, Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, and Phoenix would be shrinking or stagnant if not for immigrant stock populations. Similar dynamics in older industrial cities. If you look at Milwaukee in Philadelphia, there are people who really are cities that really need more immigrants to stabilize their populations. New York, Boston, Oakland would also be shrinking if not for immigrant heavy demographics. So, let me conclude by saying that anybody who goes around saying that immigrants or migrants are going to be, you know, the destruction of the city is frankly a liar, a lunatic, a political opportunist, or perhaps all three. The problem is really the concatenation of laws that have concentrated particular immigrant flows into this one place, and this one place is the most expensive city in the entire western hemisphere. But really what we need is more housing and nationwide. And of course, Miigrante should be our answer to how to get it. According to the Department of Labor, we have a tremendous labor shortage. We are short about 2.2 million construction workers. Let's just say we know exactly where to get them. They're ready to be here. So if there's a crisis of migration, it's that we need more of them. Thank you so much. I'm just going to stay here and I'll just take five minutes. So, again, I'm a Latinx historian, labor historian, and a social historian who works on food, labor in particular. My first book was about farm workers, citizen farm workers, guest workers, legally contracted guest workers and undocumented farm workers in the U.S. The book I'm working on now is a book about the history of Latinx food workers from World War II to COVID, specifically focusing on the northeast. So New York, obviously a really big center of that region. So I'm just going to say a couple of things about the book and then why it makes sense that worlds of food should be talked about when we talk about the migrant prices right now. So my book is basically about this contradiction we have in the nation. We are a nation that enthusiastically embraces Latin American and Latinx food ways and food cultures, but we have a much more fraught relationship with actual Latin American and Latinx people. And questions and debates and violence that erupts over questions of belonging, I don't think, coincidentally, happens in worlds of food. And so this is a nation that loves to enjoy cuisines and the diversity of food cultures that comes with migration, but it certainly can coexist and we see this all the time in xenophobia. The very same eaters who can enjoy this diversity of cuisine that's brought by immigrants can still hold this form of cognitive dissonance that they want these immigrants to be gone, or they want them to come the quote right way when the structures in place don't allow that right way to happen quickly, in a timely manner, if at all. So my book is, you know, what is it exactly about food realms that allows people to feel like they can consume, that they can extract, that they can digest Latinx food ways, but not give anything to Latinx people in terms of citizenship, privileges, rights, however, that spectrum of rights that people are being deprived of now, and accusing them of being criminal elements, polluters or diluters of American culture. And so my book is about food scapes and the ways in which food labor, because this is often where we see people who are in precarious socioeconomic positions entering the United States economy as often in worlds of food. But these food scapes are often meant to be less visible to us, even if we're trying to be the most ethical and mindful eater. Food scapes and worlds of food are obscured from us in many different ways, either made much less visible or completely invisible to us. So this is everything from farms and barns to processing factories, to the backs of kitchens, to warehouses for all this prepackaged food service boxes that we get delivered to our doorsteps, to food delivery, the deliveries as themselves, are operating in a space and in a realm that's often shielded from us, and that's by design, that's very intentional. So my book argues that historically the pattern that we have gotten into started in the 1940s. It's around that World War II period that the nation developed this tandem appetite for Latinx food and Latinx food labor, and they become mutually constituted of one another this obsession that the United States developed over time. The reason why we get so used to both is that we are participating in guest worker programs that are importing labor from Latin America and the Caribbean, on a constant basis, constantly renewed by Congress. These guest worker programs, the Bracero program, the Migration Division program with Perfum Drico, the H2 visa program, which is basically the Bracero program reincarnated for the present day. And along with those guest worker programs, because they are so limited and because they are costly, the parallel stream of undocumented migration that also forms with guest worker programs. So World of Food have included undocumented labor, asylum seekers, people of precarious migration status or citizenship status for decades in U.S. history. And so this is a phenomenon still happening today. So while consumers might demand and fetishize certain items, certain food waste, certain trendy food experiences, this is happening at the same time that these people are being unseen in various places. So the hyper-visibility of the U.S. and the world, but then there's so much indisputability that is taking place in terms of these people being able to be given living wages, working rights, basic nourishment. Because ironically, food workers, not just migrants, but also citizens, experience high levels of food insecurity as they work to nourish us. They go so profoundly on nourish themselves. But in the book I don't want to paint food workers as just passive victims. There are so many moments in which food workers, from citizen to guest worker, to undocumented, to asylum seeking. Migrants make political moves to make themselves heard and seem and treated better in this country. There are the things we might think of right away, which are union strikes and protests and rallies. But there's also moments of gastro-political demonstration. There are moments in which Latinx and Latin American people ask for better food for themselves while they are working. They withhold food from others in order to make a political statement. They become food entrepreneurs themselves when other workscapes do not serve them in the ways that they hopefully will. So while describing these political moves, what I'm trying to show is that of course these people should not just be seen as labor and laborers for the United States. They are fuller human beings. They have desires for themselves. They are making efforts to nourish themselves in one another. And so I think both are important both to explore the deprivation and then also the nourishment that is taking place in these communities. But the crisis, quote unquote, that we are seeing right now, a lot of these people are actually, we see them blending into worlds of food already. In the subway cars, the selling ends, candy, gum, little things. We see them trying to get work in food delivery, so creating fake accounts in delivery apps that are getting sold to them by other people in order to start delivering food to us. Some seamless Uber Eats, Caviar, all of these apps. And so this is kind of a sphere in which we historically have profited over or off of undocumented labor and all sorts of precarious. And right now in this moment, there is a continuity here that we are still taking advantage of the people in the worlds of food. But they themselves are knowing that they have to blend in in that way in order to both be able to work until they're waiting for their work permits. So thank you so much again for inviting me to this panel. I want to share with you some photographs that I have been taking through different projects about migration. The first one that we are looking is a photo that I took so far from here is this family in 2017 that was living in Sanctuary in Episcopal Church in Washington Heights. And for me, it's really important to create ways to explain migration through art, to photography. Right now I am doing more embroidery. So during the Trump administration, as you know, a lot of families went into Sanctuary across the New York City, but also across the country. So I have the opportunity not just to document their lives, their daily lives in some of these churches, but also to go to the border and to dig in the archives, to dig into the history. Because for me, it's not just what is happening right now. It's like we have to go back to the history and see what was happening in 1980 when Reagan was president in this country. What was happening in Central America? Why these people is coming here? It's not because we want to. It's not because this country is beautiful or give us the opportunity to work. It's because in 1980 it was a war in Central America, mostly Nicaragua, Guatemala, in El Salvador. So we saw during that time, I was kind of born during this time, but our parents saw a huge wave of migration. A lot of indigenous communities. One of the questions of this panel was about raising or speaking about indigenous communities. And we are looking through legal feelings. I see it's more notorious. A lot of native people and Afro-indigenous people from Central America is coming to this country. But that happens in the program, but now it's more visible. So I put this photo of this propaganda to remind us. We have to go back to history because history kind of explains what is happening nowadays. And during this time, during the Stone administration, I started also working through my sanctuary project about collecting stories. A lot of my work is participatory, so I do photography in a participatory way, but also I collect drawing and writing testimonies from the people that I am working with. So this is Daria, who drew her own experience being on the Tension Center and crossing the border. And she was, I remember that I went with my partner that is a Lutheran minister to the above house here, not so far in the Bronx. And these children were without her mother from three months, and we helped them to reunite with them. So we were really close. I was really close with them, not just because I was documenting their lives. It's because also I was trying to help them in many ways to settle and to go to Seattle to reunite with their Salvadoran families, but also they are indigenous. They are Nawaz Pipiles from El Salvador. So I put this collage to show you. They asked me to take them to the Statue de la Libertad. So something that I feel that is important to speak about migration is the tension and new waves and new ideas that the eyes of all these complex has been created creatively to take prisoners outside of prisons, but they still make money of them. And this is a photo that I took also, Ignis Ahuti. He was in Sanctuary in Meridan, Connecticut from 2017 to 2019. He's Muslim and he was part of this Muslim community in September 11, 9-11, who go into the list of Muslims. So if you see the uncle monitor has proven and even though was broken, he was all the time afraid. And one of the things that I want to share with you about people living in Sanctuary, Muslim living in Sanctuary were more afraid that Latinx community because they are Muslims and all the stereotypes of categorization that this country has been creating of them. And this time also I went to the border to see how was the migration coming to this country. And I found not just women's because it's all the time speaking about women's who cross the border with their children. Also a lot of men's crossing with their child and waiting to settle in this country and sending money to their wives to come in a more safer way. So this is Holy Cross Retreat Center close by to El Paso, but it's in New Mexico in Las Cruces. And they have this retreat center and they are Franciscans and they have a huge shelter. They offer their doors and open the doors daily to rescue basically migrants who come out to the Tension Center in south Texas. They pick them in buses and they bring them into this center and they provide them not just food and shelter, but also they help them to go or to reunite with their own families. So this is photos from that time. And this is a collage that I made with a child that crossed the border by themselves. And if you see is a kitchen language testimony for me. This is a program that I have about that is called the Code de la Migración, the migration codex. And I am taking the idea of codex from the pre-Spanic times in Mexico to recreate the stories about indigenous migration. So if you can see the collage, the collage says everything, you know, you can see the mascara, the Maya mass and also the cactus but also the border patrol. This is another collage that I may take in or the inspiration for the stories that I have been collecting in the Tension Centers. Not so far from here, you are crossing the Hudson. You know that is like four jails that serves as a detention center. Three of them are state federal prisons and one is a detention center. And this is part of the testimony that I have been collecting of the experience of these people. I love this one. Because also put how he came, like from Guatemala, Lucas, he dragged to la frontera and he went to Bergen County jail for four months and then he went to Fadar Plaza. And this is like, I have a lot of drawings that I extract for archival testimonies in Arizona states and you can see this is in 1980. So the similitudes nowadays and you put the children now, I have been working through in a program, educational program that we call Sanctuary School, in a church that provides legal clinic every Thursday and I am part of this school program. And we have been working with children and we haven't seen, now they are, most of them are not Salvadorians. Are Venezuelan, Afro-Colombians, a lot of Peruvians, a lot of Equatorians, Quiche, but a lot of Afro communities. So it's like, I think I know that I have to finish, but this also is like from 1919 and a lot of indigenous from Guatemala were coming to the border and this is like a message that one of the activists from that time, Lori, give me to scan and to use for my Sanctuary project and you can read, somebody is giving to her the thanks for all the work that she was doing in South Valley, Texas, but also in Arizona. And also I feel that it's really important to look out the media, how the media language has been changing. Now, you know, after they will call in us aliens all the time and now it's more migrants, they treat us with a little bit more of dignity. We are no aliens, a lot. And this is part of the archival material that I have that I feel that is so beautiful. He, Guadalupe came with a family that during this time was really famous because their own story in Nicaragua. And this is part of the work that I have been doing recently documenting the cultural expression of indigenous communities, mostly Mexican in New York City. This is again an indigenous woman. She crossed the border when she was 14 and she grew up in her own language, also Kiche. It's a huge Kiche community, mostly based in Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn. And I want to show you also like during the pandemic, I was part of the Mutual Aid program. And a lot of the people who were helping were migrants, helping migrants, not just like privileged people who have works, you know, like in their homes. So this is Josefina, she's from Guerrero. You know that a lot of the deliveries are from Guerrero, Mexico, Mixtecos, Nawaz. So I took a photo of her. She wrote also her own testimony and why she was helping or joining this program, Mutual Aid program. And I want to finish with this work that I am doing now that is called Sanctuary School and that I am part of it. And we provide artists, tools and education for children that accompany every Thursday to the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church and their parents to fill their asylum applications. I don't know if this one, this is a video. So yesterday we did this, but I don't know if we can put the video. I feel that, I think there is no going to be play. But we discovered that these children, the Garifonas, the Hondurans, they play the tambores. They start playing with us and it was amazing. So thank you so much. I'm so happy to be able to go last actually and tie together some of the points, excellent points that have been made already today. So yes, this lecture is about the so-called crisis of immigration in New York City, but it's important to start by noting that the systems and sites that we're all speaking about, taken from stolen lands, unceded territories or products of settler colonialism, that have displaced and continue to displace through systematic displacement, extermination, assimilation, deportation, criminalization, cultural appropriations, relegating folks to the margins of society as we saw in some of these drawings and collages, over incarceration, all systems of state erasure and rebranding, right? Systems that we're seeing live streamed again from across the world. So it's not surprising then that this rebranding and this erasure is then enforced on immigrant bodies. We enforced it on the indigenous bodies. We're enforcing it on immigrant bodies. It's been a common refrain, right? In U.S. history, new immigrants arrive at our shores, often trafficked here, or as a result of our own interventions abroad, as just discussed, they're first vilified, then maybe invisibilized, maybe hesitatingly tolerated, and perhaps generations later, depending on their proximity to perceived whiteness, later maybe they're venerated or appropriated for their contributions as examples of the All-American success story. So I really want to start by making those throughlines. How did we treat indigenous populations? How do we treat immigrants? And then how is this relevant today to bodies deemed foreign and who may or may not be immigrants still, even thinking about what's happening on this campus? Right? How are the tools that controlled native populations, then controlled immigrant populations, tools that come from the militarization of our border, like surveillance tools, how are they then used to control bodies deemed foreign, even on this campus? So think about that. All right. So I'm going to go through some of these enduring myths, scarcity, disease, crime, and terror. And quickly, because I know we don't have that much time. All right. So let's start with the myth of scarcity. Right? Immigrants have long been blamed from the earliest days of their arrival right here on Ellis Island as a drain on public benefits. They are taking jobs from U.S. workers. They are draining higher education spaces, exacerbating housing. None of this is new. This has all been there forever. Examples. All right. We have Tyler County, Texas, the superintendent there, who wanted to charge $1,000 where children didn't have a status so they could go and get a public education. Went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1975. We have this major case, which gives children the right to public education despite of their immigration status. But this case shows this common theme of people concerned about the drain that immigrant children bring when they come to the United States, and then enacting state legislation policies, federal policies as well, to limit the rights of those populations. All right. And then this is from the Atlantic in June 1896. This was when there were largely European immigrants coming. But that same concept. How do we protect wages? The American standard of living. The quality of American citizenship from degradation through tumultuous access of vast throngs. Look at the language here. Waves of immigrants, right? Thongs of immigrants from the ignorant and brutalized peasantry from eastern and southern Europe. So this is in the Atlantic from June 1896. Again, these themes are not new. This could be from 2022 from our mayor, literally the same type of language. If you look at it, you have hundreds of articles using the same kind of language. All right. So what I would argue, and I think what all the panelists are saying, are these are really manufactured roadblocks, right? Why is there this perceived idea of scarcity? Well, there are federal policies that deny work authorization to certain and most new immigrants, right? So I'm also coming from a trip to the southern border in May, where I met many immigrants who had just come through Ciudad Juarez into El Paso. The first thing they asked me in that red cross shelter, how can we get work authorization? We want to work. We want to support ourselves. We don't want to be on welfare. We don't want to be in public housing. We want to support ourselves and our family. We're here to work. But there are policies, federal policies, policy decisions that prevent immigrants from getting work authorization. Then they're forced into doing unauthorized work. There's a system there, right? Then a workplace exploitation. There's public charge and admissibility laws. There's requirements for financial sponsorship. Informal systems of fear and isolation that drive undocumented immigrants into underground systems. All federal policy decisions we are making that then we use against these same populations in the name of scarcity. And then, I mean, this is very similar to what my previous panelists talked about, is a little snapshot on this point into New York, right? Refugees in upstate New York. The federal government determines where refugee resettlement occurs. About 6% of refugees admitted to the U.S. since 2000 were resettled in New York State. About 90% of them were resettled in upstate New York. We're right behind California and Arizona. Cinex said the same thing they'd always said, right? On those previous slides. Oh, this is, how are these small towns going to absorb these numbers? Right? What are they going to do? There's not going to be enough jobs. Right? All of this cynicism lingered, right? And what are we going to do? And these are communities of Bengalis, Bhutanese, Bosnians, Burmese, Guyanese, Afghans, Jamaicans, Vietnamese, Syrians, Iraqis, Somalians, Asians. Like a whole huge range, South and Central Americans. And what happened there was similar to what my previous panelists talked about is, well, they contributed to the GDP. Housing values went up. In Utica, New York, for every 1,000 immigrants who moved into the city, housing prices went up by $116 per square foot. They filled both low-skilled and higher-skilled jobs, creating over and saving manufacturing jobs in these cities. So again, fully a myth and there are plenty of jobs in the United States. Right? Okay. So then there's the myth of disease. Right? We don't have to go too far back into the COVID pandemic to see how this myth played out and led to anti-Asian violence in our city. Right? So this idea, and especially in New York, thinking about tenement houses and, again, urban planning, the kinds of housing conditions immigrants were relegated into. The fact that we had quarantine and immigrant detention centers, this is the Marine Hospital in Staten Island and, of course, we have the Ellis Island, the nation's first immigrant detention center and quarantine center. This idea that immigrant bodies are inherently carriers of disease. You see that right again. Migrants bust from the border. It's not just a humanitarian crisis. It's a public health crisis. Okay. So this is just repeating itself as it always has been. All right. But what the reality is, again, it's a theme, are federal policies create these conditions of disease. So, in fact, ICE detention centers, like the ones we just saw in the collage, Bergen County, the ones in New York and New Jersey, they have long been sites of disease. There is report after report about TB. Like, my clients get TB all the time in these detention facilities. We saw during COVID, the pandemic, again, how much these were sites of COVID spread, lack of attention to existing physical and mental health issues. So the ICE detention framework itself as a creator of disease. Our own border policies and restrictions, again, creating disease. So you were talking about Remain in Mexico and these ideas of these tent cities that because of our federal policies, individuals were forced to remain on the Mexico side of the U.S. border for six months, one year, two years, awaiting their immigration hearings in the United States. That was the Remain in Mexico policy. These became some of the largest tent cities, refugee shelters in the world right at our southern border, which of course became sites of disease. And then, of course, I want to flag the disabling experience of migration itself. Again, a federal policy. When you think of the barbed wires that our states are putting up, how are we creating conditions, disabling conditions, how are we leading to PTSD by forcing people through these conditions to come here? And then, I'm going to wrap up with the myths of, and let's put them together, criminality and terror. Right? Whether it was the Irish drunker, the Italian mafia man, the Chinese worker who violated ordinances, the Arab terrorists, this has been as an age old tale in the United States as well. And I just want to flag a few things here and a few really important points and I know my time is up, so I'm going to end here. Regulation has always been driven in part by an image of immigration, immigrant criminality, an image itself that's driven by racism, which I think a lot of these myths are, driven by racism. But thinking about some of these tools that are used to criminalize immigrants, especially surveillance in New York City, for example, thinking about the school-to-ice pipeline in Long Island where school resource officers are then connecting undocumented children to ICE for deportation, and then thinking a lot about border policing, I want you to just really take away this point that these tools that are used to police immigrants are then used on our populations as well. So specifically, DNA surveillance, facial recognition softwares, social media surveillance, and that throughline that I'll leave us with is like thinking about the funding that Governor Hockill just got, billions of dollars really to put into surveillance on campuses. So thinking about where that technology has come from and where it's being used before, and now again how it's being brought to native populations that may or may not be immigrants anymore. I just want to take a second to acknowledge the amazingly brilliant work that you are all doing. Round of applause for our speakers, right? I want to start by asking you guys, I guess contextualize for us from your many perspective disciplines, why are people currently migrating to the city? And why is it being framed as a crisis or an unprecedented thing that the city just doesn't understand? People have always migrated to the city, so nothing of that is new. I think there is definitely, I can just go back to the border. There were a huge period of time where our border was essentially closed, so again my theme is our federal policies have led to where we are. So under during the COVID period and even before that, in the Trump administration first there were these policies that forced people to remain in Mexico. Then COVID happens and then using antiquated public health laws, title 42, there's basically a stop at the border. There is no asylum at our southern border, even right now under the Biden administration. So what's happening is there's periods where some of these policies are maybe lifted for a minute or there's some kind of stay and there's incredible amounts of complex litigation on all of these policies where suddenly people are seeing an entry point and coming. So you're going to see large people come at once where before there was like a constant trickle of people which is perceived to overwhelm systems. Again, these are all perceptions and we are creating systems that cause for this. Yeah, I'm going to add more if other panelists want to. Hello, yes, does it work? Yes, okay, I can't hear it at all. So many things to say. One thing that I just want to maybe point out that I didn't have time to talk about is that precisely this question of what happens after the pandemic and who is coming and how it changes. I talked a lot about and many of us talked about Mexicans and Central Americans, but in the last 18 months, which I suspect is the thing of greatest interest perhaps to the subsequent panels, what we've really seen is a remarkable diversification of the nationalities of people who are arriving, so that where once upon a time we had primarily Mexicans and Central Americans coming over the border, we have this explosion of diverse nationalities, Venezuelans, Cubans, Ukrainians, et cetera, Haitians, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that part of the story of New York, it might be that, and this is purely speculative, but for folks who are coming, for example, Venezuelans that don't have a long history, large Venezuelan communities, a deep history of migration in the U.S., many of the folks that are coming don't have social networks, right? Whereas we saw the long history of Central American migration, for example, when I worked in a detention center, almost every single person who came through that detention center had a cousin or a friend or an aunt or a parent that they were going to be reunited with. And that is not in my experience with the Venezuelans that I have interacted with over the past 18 months. That is not the case for them. So I think part of this is about historically migrant communities receive one another and rely on networks of support and solidarity. And a lot of the folks coming now lack that because they lack the deep history. I mean, history gives us knowledge, and it also gives people support, right? And so I think that explains part of the challenge of this moment, in addition to, of course, the policies, the noxious policies that deny people the ability to work, et cetera. It's also that people are not intending for New York to be their first destination. They've been undocumented in other places in Latin America and they're moved up, but they're just being moved over here by other people, treated like pawns basically. So they're undocumented to like the third, fourth power because they've tried to go through something already in another country in South America or then in Central America or then in Mexico and then in Southwest and then moved up here to the Northeast. And just to answer the crisis question, it's obviously politically beneficial to some people to imagine that there's a crisis. It is purely a hype job. They may be trying to get more money out of the federal government, which is a reasonable thing to ask. They might be trying to persuade people to vote for their party. Might be trying to persuade people to feel fear of others. But as an immigration historian, the continuities are what is really most notable, right? So right about now, there are 13% foreign-born people in the United States. In 1910, there were 14% foreign-born people in the United States. Now, that was a previous peak of the foreign born, but we have been here before and not just once. By the same token, since we're talking about New York City, 36% of all New Yorkers were born elsewhere. In 1910, that number was 41%. So there are a whole bunch of statistics. If you look at them, they're amazingly consistent, whether it's what percentage growth in the U.S. population has been the same for about 70 years, roughly 1% a year. And so just the entire concept of, oh, it's a crisis is fundamentally, truly and unmistakably just wrong, except in so far as, as you pointed out, we have policies that are self-defeating that create problems where there shouldn't be any. Something that I think is important to add is, like, the people is coming in a forced migration. They just, they don't just migrate because they want to and we know it. And it's because also this extracted neoliberal system, if you see the condition of Venezuelans right now or the Haiti people, but also African, a lot of people from Middle East, from Uzbekistan, and also still from Central America and from the Garifuna community, it's because the condition that this country has been creating outside are terrible. Sending guns to Mexico, for example, and creating the drug worm in a lot of territories is really impossible today for people. So they escape, basically. I will say that they just don't migrate. They escape. They don't have another option. So they cross different countries, as you were saying. Some Venezuelans, they first go to, went to Ecuador or Argentina or Peru or Colombia and they see the opportunity to migrate in community, like in Caravans. Now it's a new phenomenon that they saw that migrating by themselves is really dangerous because they have to cross different continents and some of them, they have to be careful with the guns and in Mexico with the narco traffic. So as you were saying, a lot of people have benefit profits in this crisis. That is not just a migration crisis in the city. It's a health crisis. It's a housing crisis. It's a violent crisis. And when the people ask me about this, it's like, what are you expected with this country if this city doesn't do anything for their own citizens? You know, how many people is in the streets right now dealing with mental health, dealing with a lot of things? So I am no surprise that the city doesn't have this infrastructure economically and in different kind of levels. So often conversations about the question of migration dwell on US policy and US law. And it is the case that we have a pretty much unlimited power in this country to inflict harm on newcomers. But we actually have relatively little ability to control who comes and sort of global migratory flows. So I want to really put out there that people don't show up at a border. People don't show up in Penn Station. People don't show up on the subway from Venezuela or Cameroon, you know, magically. They come because, you know, for reasons, right? And those reasons are complex and why they come from Cameroon is different than why they come from Venezuela or Nicaragua. But that is so infrequently part of our conversation and it absolutely must be part of the conversation. We need to deep provincialize the conversation about migration in the US both by recognizing why people come and also by recognizing that New York City is, as several panelists have said, merely the endpoint of a long history of, you know, experience of displacement. Many folks arriving now have been refugees in multiple countries before they ever got here. And so we like to think of, you know, the US is somehow exceptional. We're the ones dealing with a border and a crisis and that. I mean, and the fact is, you know, many more Venezuelans are in Colombia today than they are in the US. So this is, and to speak about the hemisphere and we could speak of this as a global issue of forced migration. So I think deep provincializing the conversation in the US and recognizing the hemispheric and global networks and ramifications and resonances is really critical. Just as a plug for the rest of the day, we've talked a lot about kind of informal networks of mutual care and aid. That's our second panel. The right to shelter is something that is getting a lot of attention in the media and it's part of why New York is often framed as like where migrants should want to go by other political actors. Right to shelter is the third panel. So I hope if you're able to stick around to hear our fantastic panelists on that. I guess the second question that we would like to ask is if there is anything about the history of immigration to New York City that people often misunderstand. I know we talked a lot about kind of the short-sightedness of the current discourse about the kind of invisibilization of our complicity in creating these conditions that are so unstable, so unsafe for people to want to escape, want to move and then being forcibly literally shipped here to New York City, not as their first destination but as their second, third, fourth destination. And if there is any misunderstanding, how that misunderstanding, whether by the public or whether by decision makers, how that impacts this current wave of migration. I can start with that. Just as Andrew was saying earlier, this story is a lot more about continuity than it is about disruption or a different pattern. So Columbia actually played a part in a moment of crisis in the 1940s and 1950s when air travel became easier between the island of Puerto Rico and the mainland. And the Puerto Rico Commissioner of Labor actually hired some researchers from Columbia to prove because it was being said in newspapers and in public discourse that Puerto Ricans were a problem in the city because they were coming in such numbers, even though they were citizens, they were foreignized and racialized in this way that they were seen as outsiders. And these researchers at Columbia produced a report saying that these people really are not a threat, they're not criminal, they are actually contributing to the economy, they have an education, they're coming and sort of disrupting what people's ideas of what this crisis was. I think New York has also been at the center in other northeastern cities, regions all over the U.S. during the Cold War when we absorbed asylum seekers from Cuba, from Vietnam, like people were distributed, received, absorbed. So these waves that happened over time that are framed as crises, the absorptions happen. They just take time. And the way that, like Cynthia was saying before, the way that the media talks about migrants, too, affects so much. So when Trump says they are poisoning the blood of the nation when they are cannibalizing the United States, when he wants to go back to Eisenhower-era operation, went back to start these mass deportations, it's so much about language which then feeds into people's ideas of what's a crisis and what is simply continuity. I mean, like an example of that very recently is just how the tone towards Ukrainian asylum seekers are migrants as opposed to others, right? So the New York City was able to integrate thousands of Ukrainian refugees. There was a very different tone in a matter of weeks because, and a lot of that goes back to a policy choice that the federal government made to streamline these processes that we talked about, get people work authorization, resettle them, support them in different ways. So I mean, like, why are we creating those policies for one group of people and then for other groups of people spending an incredible, inordinate amount of our federal budget on detention, surveillance, border militarization instead of repurposing that money towards some of the needs that we talked about today towards our infrastructure. Yeah, I wanted to go sort of two levels deep with a couple of really basic sort of mythologies of immigration. The one that I'm sure you all know about is the whole, well, my ancestors came here legally and the people now are illegal. Response number one, which I'm pretty sure you also know is that there were lots of laws prohibiting immigration starting in about 1882 if you were Chinese, 1917, 21 and 24 if you were from Southern Europe and the entire time if you were from Africa. So number one, illegalizing certain kinds of migration is what changes that. The second level of that, and this I'm drawing on the work of a historian at Berkeley named Hidetaka Hirota, he went back and found that actually of a lot of the immigrants who were legal because immigration for Europeans was more or less unregulated until the 20th century, lots of them did fall afoul of local rules on being a public charge and they were not deported, right? So I think answer number one should be, well, there was no regulation. Number two is actually a lot of your ancestors, the Irish especially, right? The Italians, people from the Paleo settlement, a lot of those people were technically illegal but United States municipalities and states just by and large did not deport them by choice. So that dichotomy A doesn't work and B also doesn't work. The other, and this sort of comes from a very sometimes different part of the political spectrum is that we do have that all-American success story about the old immigration and it is largely true, right? There's enormous amount of exploitation, enormous amount of mistreatment but by and large social mobility among old European immigrants was remarkable. What is even more remarkable is that and here I'm sort of standing for a book called Streets of Gold by Lea Bustan and Ram Abramitsky that came out a couple of years ago. They're both economists but they actually are good at it which I don't say lightly and they used like some really clever computer modeling and you know when this book first came out I was like, oh, I'm sure they got that wrong and two paragraphs later, oh, they got that right. Ah, but did they think of this? Damn it, they thought of that too. We have the goods to show that the levels of mobility of present-day immigrants are virtually the same as of immigrants in the 19th century and the early 20th century. So even our legitimate concerns about exploitation about people being pushed into the sort of black market of labor, those are real and if we were smart we would immediately regularize the status of 10 million people. I've got a piece in the Washington Post and I don't believe that. But even given the level of exploitation the economic progress of modern-day immigrants is amazingly good by comparison. I was thinking like as an artist I always have questions and how I am going to create projects more creatively to come from all of these categories or ideas and I was thinking in how colonialism has been creating a little vocabulary against us, against brown bodies, queer bodies, immigrant bodies, indigenous bodies. So a lot of the words that we use like illegal, alien, mojado are really like descriptive or oppressed language. So I think that we should retake or remain in these kind of words in order to change the misunderstanding about migration. And also art can help you. I feel like art can help you to confront these ideas because media as I was saying has a huge impact on creating this and also the images that we are looking about migrants. We always see them in a vulnerable position. We always see them like poor people, people who can put us in danger, people who have diseases. So we have to start changing this vocabulary but also representation in media. Getting at one more point it was just also like narratives and like the good immigrant, bad immigrant narrative because I think one thing that we're trying to all be mindful of is like yes, we as advocates like obviously we're talking about the myths and the criminalization but statistics touting immigrant contributions are helpful and valid and real but how do we keep our mind, how are we mindful of entrenched systems of ableism that prevent disabled immigrants, for example, from contributing other societal barriers that many immigrants face. So how are we undercounting actually the contributions or potential contributions of immigrants when we look at our statistics about immigrant contributions? Similarly, our statistics touting the lack of criminality statistics. I put forth two, immigrant communities have less crime, for example, we say that, right? But how do we also say and acknowledge both in court in front of an adjudicator and in our advocacy that, you know, obviously the criminal system is intertwined with racism that a lot of the stops are race-based. So if my client even has a misdemeanor arrest, are they now a bad immigrant? No, they lived in a neighborhood that was overpoliced. So how do we kind of reconcile all of this and be mindful of not creating that this is the good immigrant, this is the bad immigrant, even in our advocacy? Thank you guys. The next question has to do with the management of how the city restrains the mobility of these recent arrivals and particularly in regards to public housing and public space. So I was wondering if you guys could comment a little bit about that. I think it's really like how the city has governed this issue like as a municipality as opposed to at perhaps higher levels of governance. I definitely would be interested to hear what the other panels are going to say about these issues, but I would just say, you know, sort of rounding back to one of the themes of my presentation about families, I think that is a critical piece of this whole conversation. I think politically, I mean I wouldn't put anything past the Adams administration, but I think politically it's probably easier to have young African men sleeping on the street, right, the optics of that versus families and children sleeping on the street. So there are ways in which children and families create a political problem in scare quotes for those who would like to, you know, not have to support them. As it happens, something like 50% of folks crossing the border now are coming in families and in New York I just read the statistic is 72%. So I think that, and I leave it to the housing folks to tell us what that means, but I think that's just a really critical piece of the whole conversation. Both logistically, obviously children and families have particular needs that you know, young people on their own maybe don't have, but it also creates I think political challenges for Adams again, because how will New Yorkers respond to the optics of children sleeping on the street versus adults and I think that that's part of, I think that really plays into the whole framing of crisis that we're hearing from his administration and elsewhere. The city has also, by leaving people out in the open so to speak have created the very informal economies that they then criminalize. So street vending, informal vending of food and selling of food that then they profit off of simply because there's no work permits for those people coming in a timely manner, but historically the city has never given enough permits for people, citizen, migrant, everything in between to be able to defend and to sell and to create food legally in this city. When you leave people out in the open you also leave them vulnerable to hate crimes violence, robbery labor trafficking all sorts of things can result from this lack of true shelter that the right to shelter law on paper looks like this is the place to be, but the city historically and currently is not providing that true protection shelter seems to imply as a word. Okay, thank you. At this point we'll open up the floor to Q&A. We should have someone passing around a mic this mic perhaps so if you have a question please just let it be known. Thank you all for your presentations. My question is also related to municipal governance and specifically what ways in which New York City or any other global city can better align their policies and practices with world institutional level attempts, like the global compact on migration to better address these issues and the influxes of migrants that may or may not actually be causing crises. I can speak to that a little bit. I should say that the very odd stuff that comes out of the mouth of the mayor of New York City should not be taken as representative of municipalities dealing with this issue. Generally speaking the places in the United States at least and I will limit my comment to this country because I don't want to go over broad the places where most immigrants are are the places that are politically most favorable to migration right so the resistance to newcomers is mostly coming from counties where there are none of them or only very few of them so those who sort of know migrantist from anywhere in the world tend to very much like them so if we think back to sanctuary movements in the 1980s if we think about sort of sanctuary policies presently the act of saying we're not going to not just encourage we're not going to permit local law enforcement to do immigration enforcement is really important because it sort of at least potentially removes one level of fear that like well you're going to go out to work and then you're going to be gone the next day and your family is not going to be able to see you any policy which allows through local ordinance workers to have safe places to find people who want to hire them often you know ideally without inquiring as to their immigration status is really important because as you know other panelists have said these are people who unmistakably very much want to work and who have extremely high levels of labor force participation but making it easy for them to have physical spaces again to find people who want to hire them you know they're a number of and then finally obviously representatives from cities we have members of the house and the senate is statewide but to really just militate for a general amnesty because frankly one of the best examples we have is in 1986 the immigration reform and control act had a couple of very foolish provisions and one terrific one which is that it allowed almost three million people to regularize their status and when they did their wages went up 15% over five years and more like 20 over 10 years they began to buy documents because if you're an undocumented person you're not necessarily buy a washing machine because if you have to leave you can't take it with you once people had that security at the economic level right they began to invest in businesses they began to invest in real estate but at the sort of more human level they could go and talk to their kids teachers at school without worrying that that was going to be a site where they go and get grabbed they could go and like you know community colleges and get the kind of training that they needed to do more remunerative kinds of work because they weren't afraid that a local institution was going to check on their status and therefore turn them over so just to refuse to participate in federal level enforcement is really really important yeah I just wanted to underscore that importance of like disconnecting those like local law enforcement federal law enforcement partnerships and just kind of like highlight what's happening in Texas now with the passage of new legislation that just passed the senate yesterday I believe and it's about to go to the governor's desk where essentially local Texas law enforcement even like campus police and school resource officers can enforce a new state law which criminalizes the crossing of a border in undocumented in illegal crossing of a border into Texas so now that's a state crime that state actors can enforce so what does that mean for this environment that you're asking about right and like we're trying to go in that exact opposite direction with disconnecting that kind of enforcement of federal laws and here they're making it a state law and then to the economic policies which also of course that create enabling environments that can provide stability and predictability I just wanted to flag like licensing and professional degrees like it's a hot issue right here in our state like undocumented law students can they practice law how there was a lot of advocacy done at the state level to allow for them to be barred to practice law for example in New York and some of my clients are social workers in their home country the states they live in don't allow them to practice social work with a license because licensure professional degrees are coupled with this idea of status so looking like low into local and those are usually controlled by state entities so thinking about that kind of thing and encouraging those people who do have these professional degrees from their home country to be able to match and do that work here which is much needed work as well especially in healthcare professions and caretaking professions in the United States right now so I know some of you so thank you for all the work I know you've been doing a lot of work on the ground and beyond you know there is this naivete that kind of justifies the terror that is sown by the state but and I often hear that with people who are organizing under you know around immigrant rights but they keep saying that the system is broken the system is broken and I keep you know kind of confronting that and saying no the system is not working there is intentionality or the system to work this way and as long as we keep justifying that the system is broken and that that happened accidentally you know we are not being responsible and I think really deserving the people that we are supposed to be advocating for and working for so this increasing idea that the state can wash its hands from any responsibility it's insidious and it's increasingly evil in many ways so I just want to say that it takes us to the phenomenon of crime migration which is used in many of our circles when we organize which is the intersection and the coupling of immigration with criminalization the mobility of human bodies increasingly being criminalized and that's why I think some of you have spoken about I think all of you have spoken about that but this new phenomenon also that we have you know we haven't had an amnesty or any kind of immigration reform for the last almost 40 years and people like in my church you know I am from Cush Shepard Lutheran church we do a bunch of stuff with asylum seekers but now I am having trouble with the people that have been here and they say what about us nothing has happened we keep being pushed away into the shadows what's happening to us the government has neglected us not only neglected us but used and exploit so how do we deal with that phenomenon in our hands it's amazing now when DACA youth are now parents and grandparents right now it's really shocking I think a lot of it is like people like you said are very intentionally creating chaos in the immigration enforcement and detention regime it's not a bug it's a feature it's built in to the way that people are held because so many corporations are profiting off of people in limba and that is happening in all different ways so the people who get contracts to be these shelters for migrants the people who make the cots the people who serve the food the people who make all the materials that go into keeping people on hold is really just insidious and so taking that apart is just such a big thing and when people say the system is broken they're not even thinking about that whole other realm of it happening I just want to add to this point every one of these things is a federal policy choice it's not a broken system it is the system every one of those myths, criminality, disease everything we talked about scarcity those are choices to create that environment and especially with immigration I'm a law professor I want to say immigration reform I think about this now how do I teach this to students where is our supreme court immigration reform is that really realistic if anything we're going in the opposite direction where there's an explosion of criminalizing immigration status now on the state level like I just talked about in Texas and of course on the federal level so then lawyers have said okay what about access to council there's no access to council in immigration court it's one of the most technical difficult areas of law likened with tax law but when an immigrant goes through the system where the end result could be death by deportation and people you have no right to council you are on your own you are prosa unless you can find in New York there's nonprofit network of organizations to represent you or you hire council given the financial realities that a lot of us discuss that are built for you and that you're forced into maybe you don't even have work authorization yet and you're supposed to hire an asylum attorney for 10,000 dollars to get yourself through that system so is access to council really I don't know is really thinking about the strength of organizing. How do you think about abolition? How do you make these really important points about how this is all framed and foundational, like it's capitalism? Who benefits from an ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey? Looking at the stories of abolition coming out of New York and New Jersey right now are pretty incredible. The closure of multiple federal New Jersey detention centers, those efforts in New York, and then the realities that many of these detention centers shut down and what happened to those individuals they were transferred to shelters and even states further away, further from their systems of care, further from any counsel they might have found. So how do we make these connections nationwide? So I mean, for me, as the law professor, I'm thinking more about organizing, more than legal reform, sadly. There's a really good point, I think, Gloria, you had made about this cognitive dissonance. And for me, there's a question about policy versus politics, because I think we're talking a lot about policy change. But on my social media, I simultaneously get, through whatever algorithm, videos of people going to Queens and really enjoying all the, quote, ethnic food, and how that's an asset to New York. But at the same time, I'm getting videos of how expensive New York City is for tourists because we don't have hotel rooms and of residents griping that we're paying $300 per family to have a hotel room. I mean, some of that's because of Airbnb pushing certain narratives as well. But that there is kind of this long-term image of migrants, new residents of the city are providing this kind of really great benefit. That is part of the DNA of the city. Yet somehow, we can never get through to those, I think, the facts, that long-term they actually provide economic opportunity, benefit, culture, life to the city. How do we think about this role of politics and messaging? Because clearly, facts don't matter to the average person. How much of this is, and apologies for being a little crass about this, we're navel-gazing in a way, talking about politics when this is being fought in the court of public opinion. They're seeing certain images. And our facts aren't getting through. How should we maybe think about it, particularly through a historic lens? We've gone through this. Every generation has had this conversation. And somehow, not that the arc has always bent towards justice, but for some, we've found some type of stasis where they are now living and thriving. How do we think about that through this longer civilizational question, generational question, the urban history question? To me, and this is exactly a pertinent to the facts don't matter observation, it's even stranger than that. Because facts that should comfort people, they don't want to hear those. So when somebody is terrified about the great replacement or white genocide or whatever, and you're like, hey, we've had these fears before. They're unfounded. Here are a whole bunch of trends. The crime numbers head in the right direction when immigrants show up. If it were the case, as you said, that facts mattered, they'd be like, even the most rabid anti-immigrant person I think, oh, well, what is your relief? So if you had a scary symptom and went to your doctor and she examines you and says, hey, good news, you're fine. Normally, you'd be like, great, I'm so happy. These are the kind of people that are told that their fears are unfounded, but they really love to fear the other. I'm not a psychiatrist, so I don't know how to deal with that, but somewhere in the disciplines of anthropological approaches to folklore and group threat theory, the answer has to be there. I think the other thing that I wanna emphasize is we wanna be sure that we don't aggregate public opinion in a way that conceals, again, where people are in favor of generally liberalized immigration policy and where they're not. So people might gripe in New York City, but this is not the problem. All of our members of Congress are out there would favor a much more liberalized immigration regime. Last thing, to try to address your question, remember also that part of the reason we have not had immigration reform is not that people are in a majority necessarily against it, it is straight up manipulation of the system. In 2013, a very, by today's standards, generous immigration law passed the Senate with more than 70 votes. It would have passed the House, but John Boehner deliberately kept it off the floor because he knew that it would pass, right? That should have happened. So I think we wanna be sure we don't walk around imagining that like a majority of the people are against immigration reform. I do not think that's the case from existing polling that often it is specifically the abuse of parliamentary procedure to prevent us from even having a vote on that. Hi, first of all, thank you all for your contributions to this panel and the work that you do more broadly. I'm wondering like a obvious consistent theme of this conversation is about how like there are very intentional structural policies in place to make this issue more difficult to address. And I'm like, especially within like the sort of more formal political space. And in terms of like for people in this room who are here because they're interested and want to engage with this issue, like in terms of like the conversation about how we organize and how like how the system is so broken looking for places or not the system is so broken, but like the system intentionally creates, what we're all talking about. How can we like in your experience have you engaged with like organizations or like social impact programs like here in New York that you think do really exemplary work or like things that we could also get involved in that you could care to highlight maybe to us because sometimes hearing about how difficult it is to navigate the system is like, okay. So where do we look to mobilize? Who can we sort of look to as like leaders in this space? I think that's a great question. You know, is that kind of the kidding involved in a little financial aid, you know, organization of which there are several New Yorkers that are doing this? Yeah, I mean, I just wanted to join in and I'll let you do one Carlos's introduction as the person who we should definitely connect to. But from my end, I just think, so I think thinking about like, first of all, get your direction from the most impacted people is where I would start. So it's like where, who are the community based organizations in like who are authentically representing impacted communities and what are they asking for? So for some of these communities, maybe it's not been some of the things we've talked about in this panel, but it's really, I need an ID. So can you do advocacy so I can get an ID so I can get on Amtrak or go to the library? You know, those kinds of things. There is like, and then you can also think about it as issue area. So for immigration, it's intertwined in almost like every aspect of life in New York City. So there's like a worker's rights angle. There's a housing angle. There's a healthcare access angle. There's a due process angle. There's a mental health. You know, like everything you can think of, there's a connection. So I would also think about like your own expertise and interests and like whatever you're trying to go into, how does that then connect with immigrant communities? And then you find that organization doing that work and kind of using that as an in as well. So there's like a, you know, but really, I feel like if you take your direction from the most impacted of people, that'll like always be a guide in terms of where to do this work in a helpful way. And how? I feel like joining a organization, a community center, but also for so many years, I was volunteer in a legal clinic. Helping people fill their asylum application. And in that process, I met a lot of unaccompanied childrens. So one of the things that I have been doing since that time is being a sponsor, legal guardian. And that thing, I feel impact a lot of adult children that have come to the United States. And nowadays I have many sons or daughters that I say that have their residents, their green car and they are going to become citizens soon. So this is like a thing that a lot of citizens we can do using our privilege as a citizen and has a huge impact in other people. Actually, can I flag one more thing on that question too? It's just like also thinking about, so there's like direct services, you don't think about like do I wanna help an individual, right? And there's that kind of intervention. And then there's of course the policy level changes too. So that's another way to kind of think about and direct your attention. I just wanna thank our panelists again, so much for such a wonderful conversation. For this panel, we're going to be talking about formal and informal systems of support and care. And we wanted the panelists to kind of introduce themselves and give us a brief intro into what they do as well. Hello everyone, my name is Ryan Devlin. I'm an assistant professor of city planning and community development at Temple University. And most of my work is around urban informality here in the global north, focusing specifically on the issue of informal street vending here in New York City, mostly trying to expand the research to Philly as well. Hi, my name is Deb Berkman. I am the supervising attorney of the Shelter Advocacy Initiative and the Public Assistance and SNAP, which is food stamps program at New York Legal Assistance Group, which is a free legal services provider. I'm also an adjunct law professor at Brooklyn Law School and I teach different classes and topics, mostly relating to poverty law, civil rights, that type of thing. Hey, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Marad Oouda. I'm the director of the New York Immigration Coalition. This mic is interesting. And we are the oldest and largest immigrant rights work in the U.S. with over 200 members across the state of New York. And excited to be in this space with you all. Hello, everyone. My name is Sophie Bakriete. I'm the membership and services manager at African Communities Together. African Communities Together, it's an African organization and I can say proudly that's we African who work for Africans. And so we have three chapters. New York is the first one. We have one in D.C., D.C. Maryland, Virginia, and another one in Philadelphia. And we hoping open, of course, more chapter, but we also have a network, you know, organization who we can connect, you know, leaders and other organization. Yeah, we call that LF. So I'm happy to be here. Thank you. Thank you so much, everyone, for joining us today for this panel and on formal and informal systems of support and care. We're going to be following a similar structure to the panel than the first panel. After these brief introductions, we are asking you to tell us more about your work, about your experience. For that, we will have around seven minutes for each one of you. And after that, we will go with some questions that we have prepared to engage with the discussion. So please. Thank you, everyone, for being here. Thank you, Hiba and Hugo, for organizing this and all of the students who've done, I'm sure a lot of work coordinating everything into our student discussions. Look forward to your questions. So I'm, it's interesting. I think I'm the only full-time academic on this particular panel. And as such, I feel I'm probably the least useful to tell you what's going on, on the ground and the work that's being done, though I'm really looking forward to hearing from my co-panelists about their work. And so what I think, the way I felt I would be most useful on this panel is to talk a little bit more broadly about the current moment. I think trying to put it in some theoretical context related to the field of planning and discuss some conceptual approaches to migration, informality and planning that I've found helpful in my own work with street vendors in New York City and that I think have relevance to the current moment of migration here in New York. And listening to the first panel, I wanted to also lay out that much of what I'm gonna be talking about, the framework to be thinking about this is this notion of in the meantime, right? While we wait for a potential maybe better future, a future where our government responds ethically, humanely and openly to migrants, a future where borders aren't what they are today, we, there is work still to be done, right? And so what my work and the way that I wanna be thinking about this is how do we work in this moment in this situation of limbo uncertainty with the idea, stated idea that it is not accepting this as acceptable, right? Knowing that this is still something that needs to change. And I wanna start by proposing that we think critically and intentionally about the generous face nature of the condition of uncertainty, this condition of limbo and how it's both a source of anxiety and stress but can also open possibilities for the formation of informal structures of livelihood. And that this condition of limbo and uncertainty is of course produced by a number of factors, not least of which is the political and legal bureaucratic mess that characterizes the formal space of the US immigration issue. And the formal systems of immigration in this country intentionally or not, sorry, sometimes I start to get loud when I talk, intentionally or not are broken or perhaps working as they were meant to be, but working in a way that has created a lot of problems and a lot of stress for migrants. So in Washington, there's little to no hope of new legislation coming from Congress. We have a president who's unwilling to make any bold moves regarding the situation when he has the power to do things and won't. We have a federal bureaucracy and court system that is unprepared under resource to respond to this issue. And we have a local government that just wants this to go away and administration. I shouldn't say all the people in the local government but an administration that wants this problem to go away in my mind. So my work argues that whenever we see problems of governance that are too complex to sort of solve or resolve, the space of informality opens up to help state actors and other actors manage the issue. And this informal space is one where a number of people, state actors, nonprofits, activists, urban residents work to find ad hoc solutions, workarounds good enough for now fixes. And the condition of informality has a double-sided nature to it because while uncertainty has rightly been identified as by a number of scholars as condition that enables marginalization, a condition that creates client-dependent subjects, govern through anxiety and without the guarantees of the rights granted by the liberal state, it can also be a space of creativity and opportunity. And I'd like to focus on that aspect here in what I'm talking about today. And I think it's evident in what we see around the city as migrants themselves approved resourceful, innovative, resilient, the state of limbo that they've been placed in by the form of bureaucracy has not been a state of stasis or paralysis. Migrants have found ways to create informal infrastructures of livelihood and support. This despite constant low-level harassment by enforcement agencies, particularly the NYPD, who do everything from hounding candy sellers in the subway to confiscating e-bikes and scooters. Even the most recent that I've seen in my neighborhood, putting up police barricades around the spaces in which delivery drivers tried to just stop their, park their bikes, eat lunch, speak with each other. And so also I wanna go on, before I go on, I wanna also state something extremely clearly that it is important not to romanticize these practices or to see them as simple ready-made solutions that absolve the state and the broader society from any responsibility of support and care. The state, the federal government, the state government, local government, they are the locus of material resources and funding that have a clear role to play and we still need to hold them to account to provide those funds. But at the same time, recognizing these informal practices as valid problem-solving methods in and of themselves, recognizing them as dare I say planning from the bottom up, is a critical component of any sort of empathetic, inclusive response to the current migration moment. And here I'd like to draw on the work of a number of people from outside the United States and as I've been living in this city, and living in a neighborhood health kitchen where we have a high concentration of hotels where migrants are staying and living and trying to work, particularly delivery workers. I've thought about and I've been reading a lot of, particularly scholars like Mona Fawaz, someone who writes about and studies and works with and in refugee and migrant spaces in Beirut and a number of scholars who have worked in these spaces, I think including Mona and Hiba, I have a number of lessons for us and I wanna just quickly go hit on two. First, and this is actually something we've been talking about, that it's just not a crisis, right? It's a crisis, the word crisis used to describe migration is a misnomer in the sense that a crisis is seen as a bounded event, right? And this is obviously reflected in the fact that we have quotes around the word crisis even in our program here, right? The current wave of migrants are entering the city, it's a crisis in the sense that it's not new, right? That it's in more of an amplification or pre-existing challenges and problems. So the current wave of migrants enter a city in which newcomers have long struggled to find safe, affordable housing, decent work and have had to fight for the access to public space and resources. Even before this current wave began in 2020, roughly half a million undocumented immigrants called New York home and had struggled in these informal spaces of undocumented living and that's a conservative estimate. So that's a city of undocumented people bigger than the entire population of Atlanta or Oakland or Minneapolis. So there's a continuation and amplification of the challenge, but it's not a new one. And the good news here is that New York City is a city with existing informal infrastructure built by past immigrants, infrastructure that is being used and expanded by current migrants, not without tensions, but a city full of informal ad hoc strategies to manage uncertainty and maintain an infrastructure of hope. All right, and the second lesson basically being that we have much to learn from these informal infrastructures and that planners need to strengthen informal infrastructure that already exists while working to mitigate the negative externalities. So I'll close by just saying this and this is my last page, so I don't have to wrap up. That this requires a new kind of planning or a different kind of planning rationality, right? For those working in the global north particularly, planning and public administration are still technocratic fields that deal in long horizons, positive the possibility of a rational progression to a fully articulated goal or end state. But how do we plan when long-term resolutions and ideal end state seems so far out of reach? For these answers, I propose we turn to the rationalities of migration itself. While migration undertaken in pursuit of an ideal ends day-to-day, it's day-to-day, it's about keeping avenues open. Martina Tasioli in her writing about Europe, migration in Europe speaks of a governance approach that she calls choking without killing. And it's approach where state officials lean into the informal bureaucratic practices that produce cramping and disruption that slowly dismantle migrant infrastructures of survival. The goal is to extinguish the flickering flame of hope that drives so many migrants to cross jungles and deserts, travel along railroads and roadways, cross borders, climb fences, scale, both physical and metaphorical walls. And this quiet, unsaid policy of choking without killing is unfortunately an increasingly apt description of our current mayor's administration's approach in New York. We want them to go away to give up. But it doesn't have to be, and we don't have to sit by quietly. I'd argue that the role as planners and advocates and individuals within bureaucracy is to help maintain that flame of hope to work with migrants and support the ad hoc informal, the good enough for now methods that even if they don't solve the problem in a conclusive way, keep the possibility of a better tomorrow open and keep the flame burning. Thank you. That was amazing. And I am so honored to be here and be on this panel among all of these experts. So again, I'm Deb Berkman. I'll tell you a little bit about my experience and how I got to work with this group of new immigrants, but I wanna start by talking about framing in the language we use because everyone calls this group of new immigrants migrants, but I had always understood migrants to be people who were coming and then going. And from all of the clients that I've worked with, that's not the case. All of the clients that I've worked with have an immigration sort of experience that is identical to every other immigration experience. They left somewhere where they could not live to come here for a better life and to stay here permanently. So I really think when we're using the word migrants, it's really just sort of we're taking on the government's verbiage. And I think that was sort of an intentional naming in order to other this group. Like these are not different immigrants. These are the same immigrants that have always been coming and immigrants are what makes our city great. So this is not a new situation and I don't think it should be framed as such. So I work at the New York Legal Assistance Group and part of what I do in my job is that I work with people experiencing homelessness and particularly people experiencing street homelessness. And I run a project called the Shelter Advocacy Initiative and so I sit at different feeding sites that people go to and around April of 2022 last year, I almost overnight started getting all of these new clients coming to my legal table and they were asking me about public assistance for which they were eligible. They are eligible for benefits. So again, when we hear that our clients are undocumented, this is at least in my experience, very often not true. So they were eligible for public benefits. They were trying to enter the shelter system and they had come to New York, not on buses from Texas. Some had come on buses, but most of them had come on planes in the very beginning. And they were put on planes by social service organizations, like nonprofits in Texas because they wanted to be here. And almost overnight, and as soon as they got here, they started, as probably many, many people do when they get to the city in this country, they had great hurdles that they had to face. But almost overnight, more and more people started coming to my table and asking me, how can I apply for public benefits and how can I get out of shelter? And soon I heard Mayor Adams telling about the fact that Texas and the Texas government had sent buses of people to New York, but that was actually not my experience at the time. That did end up happening eventually. But it's hard to know when or how that happened, but that did end up happening. But in the beginning, in this city, we have a right to shelter in New York City, which means that everyone who needs shelter is supposed to get shelter. And so in the beginning, the families, and I was working with a lot of families in the very beginning, they came and they would apply for shelter, like anyone else who was experiencing homelessness would apply for shelter. So they would go to the office and they would fill out applications about where they had lived, and then they would be placed in sort of the current, like dominating New York City shelter system. But from the get go, they were facing opposition because they weren't being spoken to in the languages that they spoke, they didn't understand what was going on. Many people were having to wait in the shelter intake office for days. So there was a lot going on there, but in the beginning, New York was really trying to integrate this sort of newest wave of immigrants into our existing system. And that happened for a while and they weren't treated exactly equally, but in the very beginning, New York, it appeared more like New York was trying to integrate people. But more and more people kept coming. Now, it wouldn't really matter in New York if more people who came who were experiencing homelessness, if people who were in the shelter system already were able to transition out of the shelter system. Shelter's supposed to be a way stop on the way to a more permanent housing situation. But that wasn't happening and that hasn't been happening in the New York shelter system for a long time. A lot of people stayed in the shelter system for way too long instead of being able to transition to permanent housing. So the system got fuller and fuller. And so what happened is the mayor devised that instead of absorb, oh, I have two minutes left, instead of absorbing people into our current shelter system, he was gonna create this other shelter system that was only for new immigrants that had less services than our sort of general shelter system. And that was time limited, basically. And so we have the current situation of this other shelter system where adults are allowed to stay in their placement for 30 days and then they have to leave and potentially get another placement. And families are currently being told that they can stay there for 60 days and then they'll have to either leave or get another placement. Now, and a lot's going on with that and I can talk about it later, but what I really wanna highlight is the differences in treatment that this group of new immigrants is getting as opposed to immigrants who got here in January of 2020. It's really this new group of immigrants that's been sort of set apart. Wait a minute, I'll take it. Hello, everyone, my name is Mariah DeWoud again. I'm with the New York Immigration Coalition. I kind of wanna take a couple of steps back, right? I think it's, when we're looking at a prom, we tend to just look at what the issue is at the moment. How do we fix it as opposed to thinking about what the root cause is? And it's not gonna be a shocker to many people here, but white supremacy. That continues to be the root of all evils and everything that we're dealing with. And it shows up in every institution, every level of government. It happens on this campus often and we have to each challenge ourselves of how we're responding to that. And when we see a community of folks and folks being targeted for whatever their beliefs are, how are you responding, right? So it's easy sometimes to disassociate ourselves from the impact it has on us or what our impact can be and challenging some of the notions that we are witnessing, right? So this is your call to action. And when you see, I curse a lot and I don't know if I'm allowed to here. So I'll pause every time I'm about to. When you see crazy things happening and it just doesn't make very much sense, I think that we need to be really critical in the way in which we're absorbing information. So I ask you all to be critical. I ask you all to challenge your administration here. I ask you to challenge the people in power to make sure that justice isn't just for some of us but for all of us. So with that being said, I think that when we're talking about the recent increase in folks coming to the city, it's not really an increase. People have historically come to New York, right? New York has welcomed immigrants, refugees, migrants, asylum seekers for centuries. That is what has built the city. Regardless of what people wanna say, that is the truth. You can research it and figure it out yourself. Every single impact of the city has had an imprint by the immigrant, new wave of immigrant communities from our roads, our bridges, our skyscrapers to everything here. From the social and economic fabric of who we are as a city and the state has been impacted by immigrants. Unless you are indigenous to these lands, you are also an immigrant. I know that sometimes people have like a hard time comprehending that. But this nation was not a white nation and that also goes back to the first thing I said. So for us, we also have to look at the differences in what is leading people to leave. No one leaves their home because they feel safe. Would you leave your home if you felt safe? Looking around, I don't see anyone saying yes. So I think we have to really think about why are these conditions being created and then when you dig a little bit deeper, you end up seeing that the United States has a huge hand in that. So we are creating the conditions that are forcing people to leave and then we are conditionalizing humanity and who we see as someone who is deserving of being seen as a nation. So one thing that the U.S. quickly did which is the right thing to do after the conflict in Ukraine happened was they created the Ukrainian Response Initiative which we also created one for New York and supporting folks who want to come to the United States. We urged the federal government to create TPS, temporary protected status for those who are here, allow people to come into this country on humanitarian parole, they did that and they gave folks one to two years of humanitarian parole upon entry and it's because there was a conflict back home, right? So people fled for their lives. We quickly also urged the administration to do the same for the newcomers who were coming to New York and we sort of met with silence in the beginning. It was very odd in the way in which this administration responds to issues when they are impacting black and brown people but it seems like they just turn a blind eye to it. So months later, the administration launched a couple of different programs trying to get people to avoid going to the southern borders. One of those programs is the parole for Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans and Haitians but you have to actually have someone who is going to sponsor you to come in. It's not complicated but it is complicated because we're putting a financial check mark if you are not going, you need someone who's gonna sponsor you to come in kind of thing. And then they also created the CBP One app which is not very well known but that's how they're making people check in at the southern border now and that ports of entry is through that app. So if you don't have an appointment, in rare cases will they see you without an appointment but once, if you do get in with that you also get one to two years of parole. Why is parole important? Because it also gives people the opportunity to work upon, not upon immediately, they have to apply for it but it allows them to immediately apply for an EAD. So now we're going to, I got three minutes but if we look at like, let's just look at Venezuela, right? And we think, why did this happen to Venezuela? Like what happened that about 7 million Venezuelans left Venezuela? The vast majority have stayed in surrounding countries but some have migrated up north. And it's the Rubio sanctions that devastated the country. And this is why when we talk about sanctions, I think sometimes people are like, well we need to hurt countries that are doing bad things in our definition what we randomly think is bad. And I'm not defending any dictatorship or anyone but I'm saying what ended up happening in Venezuela was that the people who were impacted the most by the sanctions were the actual people of Venezuela. So there was no other option for many of these people but to leave. And if you look at other populations, right? A big population, I know my sister's gonna talk about it most definitely and deliver it with better justice than I can is our African and black migrants and immigrants who've been coming here, right? And we see how every level of government treats black immigrants in this country from the federal government down to the state, down to the city where it was okay for the city to be like, leave them in the street for three or four days. We're gonna like deal with it when we deal with it. And these are folks who literally have fled for their lives. Literal slavery is what they are escaping. Some coming from Mauritania who can show you their shackle marks on their wrists and their ankles. And these are the people that we are turning away. So we don't have a migrant crisis. We have a crisis of leadership. And it's a crisis of leadership at every single level of government in this country. And it continues to perpetuate itself unless it is a white immigrant. And that's where we have seen the US step up in amazing ways to do what we ask very quickly to ensure that they are delivering for this vulnerable population. I think I was supposed to talk about the work we do but I probably don't have enough time. We're an advocacy and policy organization that does coordinated services. We work with NILAG a lot in African communities together. They're both our members and they're amazing. But we bring together our membership of over 200 organizations across the state of New York to actually convene and talk about what are our top issues? What are we gonna fight for together? And immigration and legal services has been the top issue for, I've been here for a decade and not in this role but at the organization for a decade it's always been the number one issue. And we went from having almost no funding for immigration and legal services to having 100 million at the city level which has not been because this administration it's from previous administrations. And then we nearly quadrupled immigration and legal services this past budget in the state which was been incredibly helpful but it's still not enough. So when we're talking about the issues that we're also facing on the ground in addition to the shelter in addition to people having access to care and healthcare and everything you would need if you're setting up a new life in a new place those are incredibly important but another important piece is the immigration legal services piece which we have been trying to coordinate across the state and really working with all of our members to deliver in the best way we can as ethically and not as ethically ethically but also ensuring as creatively as possible because we know that we don't have enough immigration attorneys in the state or in this country we also don't have the infrastructure that we've been fighting for because it's not been funded and we're gonna continue to fight for it to be funded and this has been I think people see this moment as like it's been crazy for us right now it's been crazy for us for eight years and it was crazier even before the eight years but the eight years that I'm referring back to is when Trump ran for office right and him spewing the hate that he did against our communities him winning was a crisis of democracy to be honest with you him being in an office and the attacks our communities face that was another crisis and then COVID was a crisis and this moment again is not a migrant crisis it is a crisis of leadership so I'll stop there Thank you, thank you Moran It's an honor for me to be sitting close to Moran especially because like he said we are a member of his organization and we do our best to partner and also legal aid society and I call them all the time and it's really really they say it all so what I'm gonna say again so my name is Sophie Baku Yate and my work at African communities together it's working with African migrants I will say it socially but we have hospitality so we open our door to everybody no matter where you're from so yes we helping more our people because nobody is here in the city helping them they don't see us and I have to say us because I'm part of them and so I'm myself immigrants I'm from Guinea Conakry and the problem that we have here as African immigrants is when we talk about immigrants or migrants or who's coming to the US from the border they think about Latinos who came through the southern border they're surprised to see that yes African people come through the southern border and it's true that few years ago we were coming we were more or traveling by plane because Africa is very far from here I don't know if you see the it's pretty far so it's more easy to come from Latin countries than to come to Africa but you have a lot of people who do that now right but I will say that's what we try to do at African communities together and I think is we doing not too bad is to see our brother, sister, uncle whatever you want to say as a human because the thing is people forget that we're talking about human being they're talking about numbers they're more at numbers way more better than me when my supervisor, my director has me for my data I'm like okay so I put everything on my computer of course I'm a good student but I can't tell you how many people I see I cannot tell you I know that I can give you approximately a number of 50, 60 people per day which is a lot but I'm looking at my people as human being so when they talk about us I'm like can you stop being like oh we need the numbers we need this and we need that I say can you think about our feeling can you think about our mental health can you think about what we want can we listen to them when they're coming to us they're coming to a family they're coming to just of course to find resources you know we don't have a it's a lack of resources in the city so when they knock at our door sometimes we don't have even the resources that they need but what we have it's we have a here to listen and we have a harms to open and we have a heart when they leave the office they say oh my gosh that's a family we try to create a community inside a community and I think that people forget about that I was myself undocumented not too long ago for 15 years so what I tell them all the time is just looking at me I can give you hope you know and because here where I am today but what we want you to do is to fight for yourself too because you know in Africa we that's how we were raised it's don't say you know too much you know like we have to be very humble we cannot talk too much you know like you need to be respectful I say that to my dad all the time I say oh my gosh you know the way you raise me is tiring me because I have you know you can talk too much you can say this too much you can you have to be respectful and yes of course but at a point you have to say what you have to say you know because if you don't talk for you who's going to do it nobody so our organization are here for also educate our people because when you come into a foreign country you don't know how it works you don't know the system so we're here to explain the system but what we want to is New Yorkers to know us that's what we want too and that's why you know in my organization we talk a lot with press it's not because we like it I hate it first of all my accent you know my English I'm like oh my god but I have to do it because I'm the voice of you know Africa now here in New York so I have to do it and I have to go further and I have to don't think about me but think about my people you know and and again what I said all the time is hey we here yes we come from the southern border too but we are like you human being and we're here to work we're not here to we don't need no assistance that's true yesterday we did a protest for housing because we need to start somewhere right when you fed for another country and Murat said very clearly you don't live it's not because we don't like our countries we love our countries you know but it's because something happened like some of us were in danger and we have to come to the US and we want to go back home we want that I have three kids and I push them to go back home to make the difference because these things start over there you know and Murat say it it start there like why are we coming here so the new generation the new African can fight you know for these calls but for us who are here for decades two two decades for me and I'm I'm like I need to change something for my people why are we coming to they call that a crisis it's not a crisis but can you just understand us can you just listen to us why is it taking decision without having us on the table why you you know you choose something for us you decide something for us and you don't listen to us you know I think really what we need to do here is to come together because the solution is not one person who's going to find the solution and we we know that since long time ago since we work on policy and and you know all my time is up I'm sorry and I said I was a good student I'm sorry my time is up so just I'm just going to say that the solution is all of us it's just it's not one person is just one organization and why I see in you that you know we need to be like all together to do something but it's also you you know look at you know like right and left and talk to each other and you know learn about each other and that's what New York is made right immigrants so okay this is better I'm Natalie Rubio Torre I'm so sorry that I was late I guess I didn't estimate the traffic I'm I'm from bosses Latinas we are in Jackson Heights Queens often known as the epicenter for immigrant Latino settlement I myself came when I was three years old to Elmhurst Queens and but I am a I am a product of my father coming and experiencing very similar things that we are seeing now with our recent migrants and it's kind of full circle because I ended up working and building my career and building this agency in Jackson Heights I'm also a graduate of the Columbia School of Social Work and that's how I even started the agency through an internship at the school the social intervention group by the way but I just want to say I mean I don't I'm going to just hop in I'm you know we started as an HIV prevention and violence prevention agency because we saw and as a woman Latinas for Latinas agency because we saw that immigrant Latinas living with HIV were connected to care but they were living in their secret they were living alone with the secret and they weren't connected to cultural services and so although people offered the services in Spanish they still didn't get feel connected and that's all we did we just provided a space and that's it's unbelievable how when you provide a safe space and I agree I share a lot of what you just said it opens people up it opens so many other possibilities bosses is on the ground we are familiar with all the agencies here and we probably have some connection I just took this your training 40-hour training and uh and and so and we would and we refer a lot of people to your legal services African services so we are very much we've been doing this for 20 years so everything that was said that this is not new we've been doing this work for 20 years our people are coming every day to Corona Jackson Heights Elmers you could see in their faces who just arrived who needs to eat who's hungry and a little different from our agency is like boots on the ground we're trying to just get people where they're at and even if it's a gift card even if it's a meal even if it's a warm coat but just try to offer something to keep them make them a little bit more comfortable that day our people are walking around with a lot of trauma I don't know if we talked about mental health here yet but trauma is soaring and if you hear the stories and that's something that we don't hear about on the news we hear about the shelter we hear about housing in the mayor and all but we don't hear the realities of the day-to-day that our people are encountering on our living and these are the things that we're hearing so how many times a week do we run to target and buy a stroller just a stroller because women are carrying babies on the subway just trying to navigate the city how many times do we just feed people kids are coming in coughing up a storm tv is on the right tv has been identified as with our recent migrants so we're trying to connect to health care because they don't know that there's free health care here so we're just we're trying to keep up with the pace of what the people are coming in with those needs those immediate needs I could talk about all the legal and we are now offering legal services we're trying to get that program started but there's you know when somebody's in front of you and they're hungry or they're tired or they look sick you how you know we can't start thinking about the data and like the checking off and putting people into our our funding boxes we have to feed them and we have to clothe them and we have to say you know little kid could sleep here if he wants you know I have to call my contacts on the phone my pediatrician can you talk to this mom just to see what something's going on this is the way we're working now it's not like business as usual it's like now it's not making appointments at clinics and okay you can come in like a month from now no it's coming now and it requires walking hours too because people don't have our schedules people are in hotels and shelters they don't have a regular schedule so this is something that we're doing and as a as a as a COVID really changed the way we work because after COVID it's just been back-to-back situations and I know we weren't saying crisis but there are crises in our community and it affects the undocumented because the undocumented are not able to or they're more fearful to try to stay out of the radar and they don't apply and they don't know their rights and people take advantage of them and then the last thing I'll say is that our avenue is now the red light district have you heard this our avenue on Roosevelt Avenue is now considered the red light district because what's what Manhattan is that was cleaned up is now coming over to our right under my window we have migrants doing sex work we have migrants getting exploited we have migrants we've always been working with the women in the bars that do dancing and do waitressing and do sex favors just for to make more money but now it's at another level where it's in our faces I don't know who's been on Roosevelt Avenue lately you see it you don't even have to look for you see it massage parlors corners latinas asian women every one they're all migrants or immigrants and so why why are we letting this happen and our city council I'm not even going to get into that but check out your just do a little research on what our city council wants to do unbelievable what we have to accept and it's all survival survival but we could help and we could we could influence a little bit we could try to help and have them our people survive in other ways and then the last thing I want to say because I don't know how much but if you leave if anything you leave here is cultural humility because if you don't practice with cultural humility in which I think our city is failing is we're we're not getting anywhere if you're I don't know we're doing workshops and all and cultural look up cultural humility look up what that means being culturally humble at this time is vital because if you are encountering somebody that is needing so many services and they're not feeling safe opening up with you you're doing really nothing they're not going to come back they're going to keep going they're going to keep going on the subways they're going to be begging they're going to be continuing to sell candy putting their kids in danger all these things so we need to be culturally humble we need to learn we need to open up our hearts we need to be kinder we need to step in their shoes for a second and imagine what is it that they are going through what is it that they might need that is very simple but it's also very difficult because we you know we're lost too in what we for data driven we're constantly being pushed for data so that's that's a little bit about us I'm a social worker I like I said I'm a social worker I um this is what we do every day we are the five pillars that bosses latinas are our sexual health and wellness which is our hiv prevention our domestic violence and and intimate partner violence our promotora trainings which are community health care workers attached with the workforce development which we're doing a lot more right now with our migrants our mental health and we are now developing our legal services so that we are all across the board across all programs learning how to do work permits work permit applications that's everybody's job now at bosses latinas is learning how to do those permits because we need it so thank you very much I don't know well thank you so much for your amazing presentations following with that and trying to build upon what you already told us and thinking about some of the concepts that you already brought to the table for example the the character of the migration process the immigration process and as a process and not and not as a crisis we would like to ask you today from your experience in your practice what challenges do newly arrived immigrants facing accessing both formal and informal support and care systems in New York City could you tell us more about that I can I can start um I think the challenge is for African migrants of any immigrant it's the language access but especially for African migrants because they don't speak obviously English they try but they don't speak Spanish and you don't have I'm like sometimes very surprised to see that in the city where you have you know have so many migrants or immigrants that you can find someone who speak you know the African dialect that we have Mandingo of like a really like I just have one day we went to a shelter but of course they don't let you go inside you try to right but we stay outside you know and we wait for them and then when we incestulate David someone come up can I help you yes I would like to talk to a manager or someone who help with the languages and when I have do you have someone who speak Arabic now do you have someone who speak a wall of whatever different you know like languages that we have in Africa they don't for me it's a problem and you're not going to tell me that you cannot find in the city someone documented who can you know feel feel this job you're not going to make me believe that it's impossible and I don't even have the French not even the French is so I'm not going to be too long but that's the number one our and the lack of resources not enough again the number one thing that's and what builds our organization African communities together it's the legal assistance because when we come to this country the first thing we want to do is work right but how can we work if we don't apply for a working authorization so we need lawyers to apply because we don't understand the language and the forms are in English and Spanish right on USCIS only accepts forms in English but that our clients can't possibly understand right but at least you have the form in Spanish so you can understand and then you know you can at least you can understand the form but you don't have that in any other language so I will add also I think that for this most recent group of immigrants that's come since March of 2022 as as much as all of the usual barriers that new immigrants to the city face which is language access which is resources I think that you know and it's not that I think this there's been a real effort to dissuade people from coming before March of 2022 New York City was calling itself a sanctuary city and now our mayor is actively handing out flyers telling people not to come here so I think that in some ways the city is making it you know purposely more difficult to access the resources that actually are available to our clients like and I'm sorry I have to talk about public benefits but public assistance you know it when people are paroled into the country they're eligible for public assistance in New York State but so many people don't know that because government doesn't want us to know that and I think that you know part of trying to keep people out of New York part of the the plan has been to to limit access to to this type of information there's a lot to say on this but I do think that the there's this misconception that we didn't have the infrastructure to handle this and that's wrong I think we have the infrastructure we have been building in our communities for over then YC has been building for the past 37 years so we our organizations our community-based organizations our legal service organizations that are doing the work have been doing the work but the way in which the city and the state and the federal government operate is in like 12 month intervals as opposed to thinking about the long term and all city resources for the most part and state are not multi-year so when you're a legal services organization you're hiring someone to come on board rarely do you get a multi-year contract it's like hey there's this Ukrainian issue here's you know some money hire a lawyer for this Ukrainian community instead of thinking about the long term how are we setting up lasting infrastructure to actually meet every moment that we face and you know it's not as simple as just submitting someone's asylum application or their TPS application or if they're paroled in just their EAD application they're going to need legal services to continue on their immigration journey here right like specifically for folks who are being who are submitting for asylum must have like a lawyer throughout the process and I think that the city's perspective on this is like we just want to get everyone's application in we want to get everyone to submit so that their 180 150 day clock starts so that we're able to get them work authorization and I think that the city has miscalculated every single move that they've made and they've done it on uh real like horrible grounds right so even the way in which that they have been providing care for uh the folks seeking shelter right I think there's it's important to also share some data on like who's actually staying in the system and who's not because there's this perception that we had 140,000 people currently who have come to Newark or in the city shelter that's not true um we have about I think 65,000 people in the city shelter system right now and not that are newcomers um and about 20,000 families and the 20,000 families equate to the vast majority of the 65,000 people so these are families these are people with children these are people who actually have enrolled their kids in school and are looking for supports to get to their to get for their kids so they can actually have a thriving educational environment here and be able to survive in the city um the other pieces that adults are actually leaving rather quickly from the shelter system they're not staying similarly to historically unhoused um adults they're actually staying for 30 to 45 days and this is the city's data so this is not maraud making up this number the city has historically said this and has said this just as recent as this week that you know but that doesn't mean that just because people are leaving doesn't mean everyone's going to leave in 30 to 45 days people still need care so the hurdles and the bureaucracy that they're putting in place of like oh you got to re-intake yourself and then at the re-intake it's not a re-intake here's the tickets wherever you want to go get out of the city that is not how you operate in a in a city that has been built by this community um it also pushes people into the street and one of the first things the mayor did as mayor was create this I'm not gonna give my comments on it but he launched his program to get people off the streets and into shelter and he used the NYPD to do that right and was cleaning our subways of unhoused individuals it was like the most preposterous effing idea and now what he's doing is like we're going to offer people tents to sleep in the street that is his next solution by the way so the action we did yesterday in front of his home at Gracie Mansion with African communities together and other members of ours was we did a sleep in in front of Gracie Mansion with over 150 asylum seekers and migrants and immigrants and they were not very happy with us and I honestly don't give a about people's feelings in this moment when we continuously treat our newcomers and our historical communities like shit so the issue here is also the city did not invest real resources in the infrastructure so if we want to talk about infrastructure building or infrastructure nurturing the city has not done that what they've done is they farmed this out to private companies to deal with the tents to deal with the food to deal with all these different things which are incredibly costly and we have provided the city with solutions that are incredibly cheap like instead of paying 394 dollars per household a night they can give people 50 to 70 dollar housing vouchers and then everyone's gonna be like there's no housing there is housing it's being hoarded let's bring everyone to the table to actually get these solutions moving forward and that means working with people we don't like working with like the developers and everyone else is holding on to these apartments trying to you know wait for a day that they can unregulate their apartments but this is the thing these are some of the things that we're we're trying to illustrate here is that no one is really I think the shelter being able to have a bed is great but that is literally the floor it is literally be under the floor it's not even like even the herks and the respite centers have less safety standards and health standards we can we're gonna we can it's very enraging to think that this is the conversation that we're having these days to be honest with you and to see that this administration continues to go to court trying to undermine the right to shelter and gut it and actually they publicly say it's just for newcomers but if you read what they're submitting it's actually everyone just on the bed note um most of the adults that are in the herks and respite systems don't have beds as much as camping cots with no mattresses um I think I feel like I'm getting away from the original question now but I wanted to like build on what many of you were talking about just to point out that um I mean what this demonstrates is a simple lack of humanity right kind of what Sophie was speaking of is speaking of think if these immigrants migrants human beings have been treated as political pawns by multiple politicians um at multiple levels and it it requires a much more humane approach to to but it's hard to get I mean my my wager is that Adams I think Adams is going to try to get more money by making the crisis more visible kind of like what he did in the Roosevelt Hotel such that it puts pressure on Biden so that you coming up in next 2024 there's a the the liberal city of New York has people sleeping in tents on the street and that might get money flowing from Washington to solve a campaign problem that's my sort of strategy guess but again these folks are being used as pawns right the governor of Texas Mayor Adams Joe Biden they're not being treated as humans and I think that that keeping that humanity of the forefront is is critical but unfortunately our policy is not doing that because I I see that um the onus is kind of being put on the actual people in the hotels uh they when they arrive to our offices they're they don't know who their worker they don't even know that there's anyone assigned to them they don't they haven't talked to anyone in the hotel they don't know any it took them two hours throughout to find us because they heard about an organization that speaks Spanish you know in Queens they got like a loss of that it seems like if everything is kind of put on them and they're out seeking help they're just trying to figure it out I've been invited to so many meetings with the city to find out what our experience has been what we're doing what we feel is needed and but I still don't see anything different being done and I've suggested over and over again even directly to the mayor's uh deputy is why don't we look at some of these culturally specific centers community-based agencies and all the neighborhoods where the hotels are and kind and reach out to us reach out to us and invite us in invite us let us come in because I don't know what it is why they won't let us in it's it's it's what we could I've offered health care we've offered health screenings we've offered um our nyc care our insurance enrollments for them to get health care free health care and they just don't take us up on it so I think they've just limited kind of the resource page and I just don't know how they're working it just doesn't make sense to me I just want to add something that you said and is so true the city has a problem with community-based organization we tried to we tried many times to help to partner with the city for to serve better the community right but the problem is that they always they don't see the problem I think that the the the problem they don't see the problem when we come to them and we have them to the only um shelter you can go in but hotel we try what I said is something that's myself and my team we went inside hotel because shelter you cannot come in and we just ask you know can we you know how do you do to help you know the immigrants or what services do you have when you talk to them they have everything they have health insurance they say they have you know a list of legal resources whatever whatever so when we want to have access to this they say oh but the manager is not here okay uh oh but they always have a problem and and we're here to work together but obviously they don't want that I know we're going to probably move on but I just want to jump on this I I agree um that community-based organizations should be able to partner with shelters and providers but I also think that it's incredibly dangerous if we just allow anyone in just being it's a sensitive location so what we have offered the city is for them to actually do their own bedding to make sure that they're letting in people who you know they trust who have uh you know competent staff there have been instances where nefarious actors have targeted some of these shelters so I see the apprehension and don't think it's the worst thing like if I'm getting blocked but everyone else is getting blocked I'm okay with that but if I'm getting blocked and not everyone else then that's an issue right so I just want to point out like there's a way that we get that the city can engage with community-based partners to provide care and services um that they choose not to do which is the wrong thing but on the instance of not letting people in that's okay until they have a system that allows people who are you know competent in their in their roles to be there um is this working um thank you all for all of you know your responses the last question I think actually this ties in well with our next question more particularly um Murad you were saying about how we have a lot of houses but they're just being hoarded and then on the city's response not listening to community organizations and all that um so we wanted to ask in what ways does New York City socioeconomic and political infrastructures either facilitate or create obstacles for informal labor systems and care networks I can just very quickly with my work with street vendors you can't become a legal street vendor in the city um because the city you can't become a legal street vendor in the city because the city has a permit of 853 um limit that's been in place since 1979 to be a vendor of merchandise and uh they just lifted a cap which was good in 2021 that had been in place unchanged for food vending since 1983 um and that cap there's a long waiting list so it's very hard to get into the food vending business legally uh if you don't have a permit so um simply making it legal for people I mean that again we're talking about bare minimum stuff right we're not talking about giving people a yacht and you know sending them off in the Mediterranean we're talking about giving them a permit to sell things so that they can support themselves without the risk of harassment from police um so just from my own work I mean that's the first thing is more and more barriers put up to basic livelihood things yeah I would just jump in and say that the there's always this thing about cost that comes up and the funny part is that we this country has always money for war regardless like we will throw billions of dollars you know we were going to shut down the government recently because the supplemental hundred billion dollars for Ukraine and Israel supplemental war monies um to support more lives being lost and to support you know the atrocities that we're seeing every day very quickly we will do that we will send more money to ship out American made bombs to kill people but actually helping people we don't do um and that's a bigger problem here because when it comes down to the the response at every level it ends up being like well who's going to pay for it and it's like the spider-man meme where three spider-man's are pointing at each other um and it's like well this is a shared responsibility every level of government needs to step up um and we also need to think about solutions and the way in which our solutions are always cheaper than whatever government does by the way so like the immigrant and refugee community in the state of New York across the entire state contributes 60 billion dollars in tax revenue we do not receive 60 billion dollars in uh you know services or care or anything so when people are talking about well this is a this is a drain on our on our city or it's a drain it's not this community has and will continue to support and underwrite an enormous amount of services that they don't they they don't even access to and will not um so I think for this the specific things like even the housing voucher idea right that is like that it makes no sense why they are not doing it like every time we talked about it it's always there's a reason why and it's like you're looking for a no instead of looking for how we get there and that's across the board so the street vendor stuff even the people who have the 800 and whatever licenses they're not even in New York anymore these are people who live in Florida renting them out to people here in New York so the city is not even getting that income back right so even when the the way in which they think about things right instead of saying okay well this license shouldn't be held by someone who lives in Florida and is renting it out to New Yorkers it should be for a New Yorker who's living here and going to be contributing back into society even the way in which that they're spending when we we keep talking about like cost and like care and no care the city does not care about the city we could have invested four billion dollars that they've allegedly spent on reinvesting those resources in New York City and in New York state to actually hire people to do the work that needs to get done but that seems too much of a stretch for this administration to think tiny bit creatively. I also want to note that it is much cheaper for the city to provide and the state to provide rental subsidies which we call vouchers housing vouchers than it is to pay the cost to house people in shelter it's significantly more expensive to pay the cost to house people in shelter but for whatever reason the money the city seems to prefer to pay more money. Thank you so much and and thinking about that we wanted to ask you about the challenges that community organizations and newly arrived immigrants face when interacting with government and you have been talking a little bit about it so maybe you can explain more about that but before going into that we wanted to ask you how can communities academia and non-profit organizations collaborate to shift the current crisis-focused narrative into a debate on fortifying existing support networks for newly arrived immigrants. Okay I think the first thing they should do is bring organization to the table right should listen to us a little bit more you agree right okay and we definitely have to find and more at say it like long-term solution they love to call everything crisis so we have to find a solution right away for you know one situation but can they think about like long-term solution and not temporary you know solution I think is something they should think about and definitely you know I said that at the beginning and I'm agree with you know my colleague here and we need data yeah because we work on the ground so we don't we have to give you know we have to work on data because obviously if we want more funds we need to explain why and have those data so they need to allocate more funds for you know for for this situation that's you know how can we you know do if we don't have more our lawyer have how can we do if we don't have more social worker if we don't have you know enough organizer so we need they need to allocate more funds yeah I agree I think that a couple of things that so we on the ground need to partner with those bigger more you know influence or influential organizations like for example we're partners and members of Hispanic Federation and that's a huge national agency that's supporting is doing an amazing job of getting I think their goal was 3,000 applications for work that was completed and they asked volunteers they asked CBOs they asked just to just to get trained like I think it was like a two-hour training and then they had they not just for the applications but also people who could get coffee you could get copies who could like this was a massive effort and and we were part of that and I think that we have to be able to partner with those much bigger agencies or institutions that are doing the the bigger I guess the macro work and the might we're doing the the ground work so I think those are those are really important that led us to change our our day-to-day is making sure that everyone in our agency knows how to do and complete those applications that is what got us we're like this is this is not hard we could do this and that's making a difference so that's those are the I think we just need those critical partnerships the other thing I want to say is that I think our funders like we've had government multi-year funders that haven't changed anything on our budgets since this situation knowing that we're seeing this this this traffic of migrants coming in our door day-to-day knowing that we're in our hiv positive in our hiv contracts many are coming living with hiv but just not connected to treatment or medication so we're doing that I think 70 of our clients in our um undetectables program are the recent migrants but yet nothing's changed in our contract is in our conscious in terms of our budgeting and allocating funds so I think that funders also have to look at the it's New York City's different now like we're on the ground we need to have a little bit more flexibility or maybe a little bit added more funding because things are changed things are not the same I'll say too I mean you asked like what we can do is and I want to kind of speak to the the I know there's lots of master students in planning in the room here and thinking about the role that one can play as as a planner as a professional um whether in specifically inside city government because one thing that I found I mean I did a lot of work over the summer at corona plaza and understanding what was happening there in that space and which is a informal vendor market that grew up around a small plaza in in corona queens um and what was really fascinating in the story of how that space was built and ultimately it's been dismantled by the mayor and and moya the local council person is that it was really critical within there were moments within the bureaucracy where there were individuals who were willing to be flexible about how they managed that space about every person that I spoke to with the vendors and vendor advocates they would mention the same few names within the department of transportation or within small business services who were forces for the for the amplification of and of forces for justice willing to work at the edge of rules right work and be creative and I think a lot of what we've what we've heard here today from folks who are working outside of the city as advocates is how much of a bureaucratic brick wall it can feel like sometimes dealing with the city and that often is the case but what's inspiring to me is those moments where you find people and individuals who are willing to think creatively and flexibly about that about certain situations and that's a very micro level suggestion I mean we're really talking again not at the big level of more funding which is absolutely necessary but what can individuals do and I think there is a role as as planners as public administrators to have that ethic of being willing to work creatively and flexibly on the behalf of social justice aims for communities that have a hard time advocating themselves for themselves in a formal way yeah I would add that poverty is a policy choice and you heard that right so like people being in poverty and people continuing to be in poverty is a policy choice and in whatever role you end up taking because I know a lot of planners some who work at our organization who are not doing any planning but if you are going into planning or if you are going into any official role within government always thinking about how are you actually trying to address root cause issues and I think that's a piece that's missing in general in this moment and I think for students taking action whenever you can being able to not answer the course but actually be part of the solution like don't just make noise to make noise sometimes like what are the solutions you're pushing for how are you able to center those who are most impacted so that you're leading from a place that they are the ones who are giving you direction and what they need to survive and thrive and being able to think differently about the moments that we live in there's probably when I took this job as executive director it was about three years ago and for me it was more so like I came in with my own plan of like things I wanted to do to help change the organization and I got to work on it right and for a year I was on track and then things just went in a completely other direction and we're doing things that I thought we would never be doing in this moment and that's also okay because sometimes we have to be flexible enough and agile enough to shift as individuals but also as institutions and always try to find try to make sure you're always on the right side of history like you don't want to look back and be like damn I fucked up there but you know we're living through some really hard times right now and you know here abroad like there's just a lot of challenges and the way in which you raise your voice really matters in this moment so just make sure you're always on the side of those who are being oppressed and helping uplift their pain and their suffering because sometimes it's really horrible that we have to prove to people that other communities are human and that they deserve humanity and don't let your voices get shut down because you know it's not the cool thing to do in the moment because the way in which in US history student movements have really led the way for a lot of change that we've seen so I'll stop there. Okay well thank you so much for answering to those questions that we had prepared in the interest of time we would like to open now the floor for questions from the audience so my name is Jean thanks again for your time y'all are amazing so this seems like we're all kind of frustrated and we have this like cognitive dissonance with the people that should be representing us and we're advocating very clearly and vocally make these changes we need funding we need some action with these people need housing today and also some long-term solutions but these people that I don't know have power I guess to not fund you or to do certain things I guess what are the most for even people who are not academics or academics what are some actionable steps that we can take today for both short-term and long-term solutions is it is the best thing to participate in these student-led activist movements to make change and just having the conversation is there any other suggestions you may have for like being able to like push for positive change that's a great question and I'll try to take a stab at it and probably not do it the justice it deserves but there's a number of different ways that you all in your individual capacity in your student capacity in every capacity that you show up in the world to take action right while we were complaining most of the time we did win some shit last year and this year so I do think that even through the challenging times that we've been living through we've been able to secure over 800 million dollars from the federal level to support receiving communities we've been able to deliver a billion dollars from the state to support New York City and their mismanagement of money that was a joke but it's true we did deliver the billion dollars you know we did quadruple legal service funding we did fight back austerity measures at the city level and get an investment in undocumented child care so we are doing things we are winning so I wouldn't say don't this isn't doom and gloom um you just gotta be strategic right and know who your targets are um and in every fight that you're doing legislative policy organizing you always have to do a political analysis right and you have to know where can you where is the impact you can make be impactful and in the larger piece so you can organize among students you can organize with community organizations we're always looking for volunteers to support the work we're doing I think every organization up here is um there is ways that you can you know we also try to send volunteers to our members so like if you live in Washington Heights Washington Heights has a ton of amazing organizations that I would want to volunteer for if I live in Washington Heights we're doing amazing work on the ground and organizing um but it does it's frustrating and organizing has always been a long game not a short one um and number one rule in organizing is you have no permanent enemies or permanent allies um and that's an important thing to remember especially when you're doing work like this because someone who is championing our community win an election turned out to be a mini trump in office so I think you always have to keep that at the top of mind because elected officials people and fan allies them it's like weird um and it's like no they are there to serve our best interests um so you can organize at the community level the political level organize people out of office as well that's another option there's a bunch of political organizations that you can join that you feel most aligned with um but you have the power and at the end of the day I think that I don't know how old anyone is in here and I'm not trying to be ages but I think this is the generation that's going to be the generation that changes the course of this country's history so y'all have the power so start taking it up now to do it hi my name is Lili Mirsipasi um and I'm here from the school of international public affairs hoping to work in public policy for immigration specifically refugee and asylum seekers you mentioned earlier that um that poverty is a policy issue and I'm wondering as hopefully someone that works in policy what kind of policy reform do you think would best help those that need it most well I would just say no I mean she was asking you the question but I also want to say that the the amount of public assistance that's public assistance levels and the SSI the disability levels are so low that no one can ever get out of poverty there's no money to save and that is a conscious choice and that is on purpose and it is a punishment and if public assistance was not viewed as punishment but actually viewed as help or universal basic income then it doesn't need to be the case and that would be I think the first step but the other is making sure that there's no exclusions right so the reason why most community members don't have access to some of these benefits is because they're excluded and the exclusion can be uh they're not poor enough or they don't have status or you know they happen to live and not a zip code that should be getting it so I think when we're talking about benefits we're talking about like even to your example the city's not even processing applique I think it's 39 percent of cash assistance and 40 whatever percent on time that's insane right before this administration came in it was being processed not quick enough but quick in comparison at like a 90 rate so when we're talking about policy choices every single thing that every piece of legislation that gets passed has a financial or fiscal impact down the road so how is that actually impacting people who need to help most so if we take care of our most vulnerable and marginalized then everyone else lifts up with them so that is the the choices that we're making so instead of trying to figure out who's excluded and instead of throwing wrenches into systems that need more support to actually function better um making sure that if you're in those positions that you're actually pushing forward the most expansive as opposed to the most limited which is the preview government currently takes also the child tax credit is a good example of like reducing child poverty by 50 percent and then not having the courage to get it back is crazy apologize for if I missed this but um we're looking at a migrant crisis um all of us are thinking the recent arrivals but the migrant crisis started years ago and there's over five there's over 500 000 families who have citizen spouses or wives who still cannot get documents how are we dealing with that what is our what is our what are we doing you don't have time to answer real quick but I feel like really guilty of answering all these questions um and I'm taking up too much space so please ask questions of my amazing panelists here there's you know this Robbie better than anyone else we've been fighting for immigration reform for over 30 years and coming up short and again this goes back to one of the first things I said in this space the root cause of a lot of our issues is white supremacy and I'm going to keep saying that because I think people get uncomfortable when you say it but we have to sit in that uncomfortableness um the only reason why we've had different iterations of immigration into this country is because of workforce needs that is it in 1986 and 87 when amnesty happened under Reagan yes president Reagan where about two million people were able to legalize in this country um it was done out of a necessity for workforce it was not family values it was not to help people um we need an entire overhaul of our immigration system right now the closer the your closeness to whiteness actually gets you into this country quicker and that has historically been the case we have the Chinese Exclusionary Act right like this these are not far fetched things just a couple years ago the president of the United States Donald Trump was trying to ban Muslims from coming in and ended up being successful in that despite however many systems in place we haven't uh to block discriminatory policy um so what we need is a complete overhaul of the system actually making it a fair equitable and just system and not just for folks coming into the country but for the people who have been undocumented in this country for decades um and we've had over 11 million people who've been undocumented in the U.S. and that number is going to continue to increase if we don't have solution so the the issue you're talking about is actually fighting with the Biden administration right now on removing that that exclusion so that we can get that done um and allegedly there's a policy change rule that's going to be coming out soon so get ready to give a comment but hopefully that that's something that can get done uh because that will help I think three to four million people actually get status and in this country yeah um do we want to collect maybe like two or three questions at once and then maybe try to answer them at once amazing group of folks doing amazing work thank you so much um my question is around the uh community based for-profit immigration businesses that you see all over the Bronx Washington Heights Queens Brooklyn um they usually function as multi-services of all kinds offering for example like tax preparation services divorces but um a huge portion of these organizations income is actually uh you know like based on immigration services and I'm wondering how you all see um the role of these organizations um or businesses if we can if we can call them that are they and of course they largely deal with quote-unquote legal um immigration services where they're processing applications etc but I'm wondering um given that you guys work in providing infrastructure to organizations etc I'm just wondering if there's a way given like these folks coverage right like in the outer boroughs etc is there a role for these folks to play like are they playing a role um again I just want to emphasize the impact that these folks have in like their local organization in their their local um geographic areas okay I'm gonna try to answer this question because I work for many years as a tax preparer to uh in a business it's not an organization a small business a small business and they were helping african immigrants to fill out application um you know like for you know the immigration you know process we need to be very careful with that we need to be very very very careful with that even with the tax preparation and I'm talking again not about the about organization I'm talking about small businesses who try to play a role of um lawyer because they call themselves lawyer and they're not lawyer they're not even paralegal they just know and know how to read and write english and speak those different languages that we have in africa so they're taking advantage of our people so when they're coming to us we say to our people don't go there you have you know organization who know what they're doing you have lawyer you have paralegal and that's where you have to go because that's very dangerous and they can mess up all application they can even tax preparation you know why I came to tax preparation is because someone messed up my application my my taxes and I have to pay for many many years just because I didn't know what they're doing so they don't have no role to play just continue to make copies and to find maybe resources for the community or to have a certificate go back to school to be able to you know to help people so we need to be careful when we talk about small businesses and organization I do think I think in in the Latino culture el notario you know el notario like the notary it means something very different in in our countries and it does here I mean I was just in el notario in Iquitos Peru last week and I was like interviewing them because it's amazing how our different the role is but in our countries it's a it's it's legal representation they're lawyers you know and so when they come to Queens and or whatever the notary is here they think it's the same thing and people like prey on that and so sad and people have been charged thousands that they don't have for the just to get some legal services that they could get somewhere else from someone that is not even a legal representative so I we do the same thing we tell them very carefully and they have that's part of knowing their rights too and knowing where to go I think this just gets to the broader issue of again well just to speak of the fact that there are so many challenges that immigrants migrants face um and it it speaks to the role of organizations that are not businesses right to to to get more funding so that they can be those spaces where newcomers can feel that they are their needs are being met because of a of a goal of meeting those needs rather than profit and I mean I working with vendors you see a lot of same thing where there are there are I mean it's a it's a it's like a video game where there's different things you have to avoid you know on every step right there are people on every step and every every step of the way that from the from the people getting you across the border to um to folks in Queens who might um sell you a vending license or even the the people who are selling their their app um you know there's plenty of stories of people who have bought uh someone's like seamless app thing so they can be a delivery person and then all the money goes to the person who who who was renting this their profile to that person so you know having structures in place so that people don't have to rely on entities that are just there to take advantage of them is is important thank you so much for um sharing um some of your really amazing insights um I have noticed that the topic of like law enforcement as I come up um frequently like in this panel and I know that the um that the NYC like government invests a lot into NYPD and forms of surveillance um recently Mayor Adams um really like announced like publicly just like announced like his strong like alliance with like Zionism so I guess I'm wondering first of all what do your current experiences look like with law enforcement because they're it's a really strong presence within the city and then uh second of all I know there have been renewed surges of like divestment from like law enforcement led by like prison abolitionist movements throughout the city um and I feel like that's like surging up again recently as well so I was wondering what my divestment from that look like um for like all these organizations and communities you're working with um yeah I can speak to my client's experiences with law enforcement which are obviously not positive and I work with a lot of people who sleep outside recent immigrants who sleep outside and and they are very afraid of the police and they have every reason to be um as opposed and I think that you know we're talking about what is their money for there's plenty of money for the police to harass our clients but divestment when you see divestment do you mean like organizations monetarily I really don't want to talk but the one good thing about this budget modification that the city just issued is that they're cutting the NYPD budget um not very hugely but slightly um and I think that sometimes when every administration has had a chance of actually rejigger rejiggering our priorities and investing in our care as opposed to like carceral systems across the board that's not happened right so even if we talk about the city level the city just renegotiated uh the labor contract with the pba which represents all the uniform police officers well not all of them but the ones who are like the lowest rank ones and they got one of the largest labor contracts negotiated in support of them so they got like 35 40% raises over the next iteration of their but with the cuts that he just announced while we're fighting against them we're going to continue fighting against them I don't think anyone wants to fight for that one um to come back they're canceling NYPD classes this is the first time the NYPD's police force is going to be on the 30 000 uh individuals he's using it as another wedge to divide our communities and saying oh you're not safe because you know we have him in safe and because of this crisis you know we're cutting NYPD too so he's literally I'm not even gonna keep talking shit about him because he's just shit but um every level of government has its own responsibility even when we're talking about the state we've been fighting for the state to stop collaborating with ICE and border patrol because there's no need for that right like why is the state utilizing state resources and putting our communities lives on the line um to call ICE and CBP to be their translators in other parts of the city uh other parts of the state at the federal level we continue to see more militarization of our southern border and this is where like internationally like what word what we're experimenting with and what our foreign aid and military aid goes to is being experimented elsewhere to have down here right so all these fights for justice are all interlinked and when we talk about them it kind of seems like really insane that we were that this president and this congress and this senate were willing to gut asylum willing to gut asylum just two three days ago so that we can send 100 billion dollars for more war and the CR so like we're talking about I know it sounds like a stretch for people who are just hearing this and they're like well that doesn't make sense it doesn't make any sense a lot of stuff does not make sense and that's the point is that we if we're aware and if we stay ready we don't have to get ready when we have to fight back and there's every day there's moments where you guys can take action and simple as like calling your electives and letting them know like this is one moment where I don't think any elected has ever thought that they would get the amount of engagement from their constituents in history that they are shocked so keep it up and keep calling whoever you need to call to push back against these policies and the divestments you're looking for. Hi I have a question I'm sure this has been a great panel but I'm sure all of you are frustrated with the news coverage about the situation going on with migrants I find that a lot of the news has been about a community is pushing back to having migrant shelters in them you know like in the Hudson Valley or in Staten Island but I'm wondering if you could tell us about examples where longer-term New Yorkers are meeting new migrants and actually getting to know them because it seems like a lot of the coverage is about them there's not a lot of coverage about people actually getting to know their new neighbors and meeting them is a person-to-person way. I mean I one of the places that I intake clients is at a church that's a new immigrant welcome center and it's entirely a volunteer-run effort and you have people coming in every day who are working tirelessly cooking with people and helping them fill out applications for benefits and helping them appeal their denials and looking for immigration attorneys for them and I do think that the people who come in there and meet the clients and sort of like work with the impacted communities are really changed and you know when we're talking about how are we going to change the narrative it I think it's great a call to action is amazing and I think we should do that but I think working with the impacted communities like going there like not necessarily a political action but an action in making soup or making relationships is what we really need there are many many people that are providing aid to new immigrants and to people who need aid generally and that's not in the news but that is what's happening and I think that that is in some ways how people are able to get by because of the people helping them so and Jackson Heights has a lot of people welcoming people that are that are welcoming our migrants we have we've partnered with just residents that are retired lawyers immigration lawyers that are holding free legal clinics in like basements of houses and then we're going in and volunteering and learning from them and we're going in also providing our workforce development training so these are just people that are retired but want to help want to help their community so we do have like those pockets which is I think that's what also makes it helps me to just continue and continue to love what I do because we know I know we're not alone in this with so many other horrible things going on in the city but there are so many good people yeah definitely and we have also you know like people who help like they said just helping you know fill in them we have one example I don't know if you remember guys about the bushwick commercial centers commercial commercial building they call that a shelter but this was no bathroom no shower no nothing inside and you had the community you had a cooperative you know a farm just to cross the street and that starts you know getting together and they did the work that the city supposed to do you know help them you know at least to shower help them so they had a pool not too far and they negotiate with the with them to see if they can go and take shower you know over there they were cooking for them like it's incredible you have people who help them we have people every day who's coming with you know someone they just meet at the street because they were you know are looking inside the garbage and they say oh I tried to talk to him but we don't because we don't speak the same language and oh I just go girl and I see your name you know and how can I help how can we help you have volunteer who from Europe you know from different country who here and you know help you know the the the the uh immigrants so we have that but we don't talk about them on the news the news prefers to get people and it's very frustrating because there's so much good happening yeah and from the onset of this it's like ordinary New Yorkers who stepped up to support people from the busing situation it's helping people navigate to helping direct people to intake facilities to make sure that they're getting to where they need to go and historically New York state as a whole has been a welcoming state right there the refugee resettlement program that was launched back when actually is what brought back upstate cities and communities Buffalo Syracuse Rochester uh Ithaca the capital region Albany connected like these have become welcoming areas and if you look at this when Mayor Adams decided to be Governor Abbott and randomly bus people to other parts he kind of got the reaction I think he was looking for right and it's like I can't do this on my own I'm single handedly dealing with this I need to make it everyone else's problem um but what he was doing was actually incredibly horrible for the movement that was being built in upstate New York so welcoming communities are still welcoming folks it's still harder now in certain parts of the state there are over 30 executive orders or pieces of legislation that were put in place to ban emergency shelter for non residents of their counties those have since expired but I think there are a ton of stories of what you're asking about happening every single day and you know the media is just the media and they want what's sensational and they want what's hot and sexy for the second that they're dealing with things and if I can add if if we can stop bring problem all the time like talking about something it's always a problem you know we need to stop that can we if we think about like okay we're talking about human being you're talking about someone who's you like look like you you they have you know blood in the event they you then you're going to start helping people but the thing is we always think about a problem so we need to have to solve a problem at these moments but they don't think about you know the long-term solution and and it's not all the time a problem you know like we have neighbors I don't know I live in Harlem on 116 and in my building I have someone from Russia I have someone from Senegal I have someone from Italy I have like come on this is New York City right so it's not nothing new but it's just because they see us as a problem because they they make us a problem that we are unfortunately out of time so I would like a round of applause for a very informative hello everyone thank you for being here today this panel today is going to be on the housing question and the right to shelter we're going to have a very similar setup to the previous panels or we'll just start with introductions and then we'll allow our panelists to talk a little bit more about their work yeah so let's go ahead and get started hi everybody my name is Christian Siener I'm a term assistant professor of urban studies in the Barnard Columbia Urban Studies program I'm a geographer and my research is in political economy and the carceral state with a focus on the history and political geographies of New York City's homeless shelter system hi I'm Josh Goldfein I'm a staff attorney at the illegal aid society's homeless rights project I use he-him pronouns I am I've been in that office since 1998 now we are counsel to coalition for the homeless who are the plaintiffs in the right to shelter cases so when people talk about the right to shelter those that derives from lawsuits in which we are the lawyers good afternoon everybody how are you today my name is Amir Kafaji I'm a reporter with document in New York we focus on immigrant communities in New York City and we've been covering extensively the so-called migrant crisis her name is Sara she is Venezuelan she's 18 years old she's an immigrant and she currently lives in a shelter thank you thank you all so much I would like to start with the first question what is the landscape yeah so thank you for those introductions we're just going to get into it each of the panelists will have about 10 minutes to talk about their work then we'll follow up with Q&A good afternoon thank you to all the organizers Hiba Hugo all the student organizers for having us all the panelists for today especially those taking out time from their really busy schedules doing work on the ground to be here during a stressful time I've really enjoyed listening to all the panels thank you to my co-panelists I'm really looking forward to our discussion today given our theme the housing question and the right to shelter I wanted to give a few thoughts on this crucial moment the overlapping of the right to shelter with asylum seekers entering New York City and then relate these ideas back to the right to the city which is in the title of today's event these ideas build on a collaboration I'm doing with a colleague at Montclair State University sociologist Steven Roushik who specializes in immigration with a focus on undocumented youth in New York City and Paris each resident shall receive a bed of a minimum of 30 inches in width substantially constructed in good repair and equipped with clean springs each bed shall be equipped with a clean comfortable well constructed mattress standard in size for the bed and a clean comfortable pillow of average size in single occupancy sleeping rooms a minimum of 80 square feet per resident shall be provided in sleeping rooms for two or more residents a minimum of 60 square feet per resident shall be provided a minimum of three feet which is included in the per resident minima shall be maintained between beds and for aisles these are a few of the specifications that constitute the right in New York City's right to shelter they're inscribed in the Callaghan Consent Decree of 1981 an applicable quote to each homeless man who by reason to physical mental or social dysfunction is in need of temporary shelter end quote they reduce problems of human relationships to material conditions and they turn shelter into an instrument they hardly account for the home that should be the corrective to homeless over the past 40 years since the decree codified these stipulations the homeless shelter has become a pivotal tool in New York City's arsenal of urban governance managing the shortcomings of a private housing market by containing people in minimal shelter the homeless shelter has become a flexible institution that names and manages myriad overlapping social problems it does material work keeping people off the street as well as ideological work rescaling structural problems to the individual these aspects of sheltering demonstrate that the homeless shelter system is the local scale of the carceral state which geographer and abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines as quote an anti-state state built on prison foundations and i was very struck by Cynthia Santos Briones's presentation earlier today in which she showed children's art and and how much detention centers were a part of those youth experiences and i think it makes sense to think about the current moment in terms of as a part of that continuum with respect to housing this doesn't with respect to the anti-state state in terms of housing this doesn't mean that the state is absent from the structuring of housing markets but that is purported involvement is minimal in fact almost all housing in the united states receives some sort of public subsidy still at all scales the state has retracted from the provision of housing and relied solely on transitory supply side market incentives to instigate construction by underwriting a profit-making motive unfortunately most housing plans being discussed widely now fall into this logic and will reproduce the same unequal housing conditions intersecting layers of housing crisis are evident following decades of disinvestment and beyond the thousands of homeless individuals both in shelter and who reject shelter unaffordable rents across the board historic numbers of new york city public school students doubled up or in temporary housing gentrification caused displacement increasing numbers of evictions unstable housing for our elderly and most recently asylum seekers who are learning the limits of the right to shelter these crises become intractable in a political environment where any resources dedicated to long-term housing stability are necessarily seen as a draw on emergency resources put toward immediate needs indeed the right to shelter was supposed to support temporary accommodation it does the reverse it has become the permanent solution to ongoing displacement it illustrates that housing policy is separate from homeless policy under the presumption that the two issues housing and homelessness are unrelated this disconnect is what makes it so difficult for people to move out of temporary housing once they are in it moreover in the context of a right to shelter the responsive new york city officials to asylum seekers is contradictory if there was ever a justified time for emergency shelter wouldn't it be now why has this emergency called into question emergency shelter why hasn't prolonged gentrification and displacement done the same governor huckle and mayor adams attempt to weaken the right to shelter is only the latest by new york administrations to undo the stipulation that anyone who asks for it can get a cot with a roof over it the difference is that this time it's gaining traction they have represented the right to shelter as an obstacle that complicates both a reasonably functioning shelter system as well as their ability to help asylum seekers the mayor is continually marshaled opposition to asylum seekers through austerity and yesterday unveiled plans to cut all agency budgets to pay the cost of emergency shelter similarly news stories depict people living long-term in shelters as victims of the asylum seeker influx their narrative is that new york's homeless have been marginalized to make space for others who are groundlessly overtaxing a dedicated resource but we must not lose sight of the fact that the right to shelter is limiting and not what anyone would propose for fellow human beings in short the shelter system has run into its own contradictions as broken immigration policy and broken housing policy collide this is the context for asylum seeking asylum seekers entering new york city right now which is why it appears that the homeless shelter has finally met its match we believe that with the legitimacy of the homeless shelter in question we have an opportunity to think beyond it to imagine a more just and equitable housing system we join a growing consensus that declaring a right to housing is the most sensible step toward a more just housing system now is the time to push for a universal right to housing as upheld by organizers and activists in cities around the world and theorized by scholars such as peter marcus david madden chester hardman and many others as a guiding principle a right to housing nourishes multiple housing models and tenures enshrines democratic governance of housing and recognizes work that organizers and housing movements do on the ground a right to housing provides for developing concrete means to achieve the right to the city it is a foundation on which future housing policy finance and construction should be built these models should include decommodifying housing protecting public housing and rent control inventing new financing mechanisms promoting democratic control of policy and management and building solidarities across borders housing movements in new york have played a leading role in enacting tenant protections building public housing creating cooperatives and securing stabilized rents we can also play a key role in taking the next step implementing and supporting concrete plans that activate the right to housing clearly the right to shelter is not robust enough to address the entrenched shortcomings and inequalities of housing today it is an insufficient right because it seamlessly gels with profit making it supports housing as a mode of exchange and it has been manipulated toward containment a right to housing more effectively articulates a value of housing that prioritizes its use and works toward its socialization while not a silver bullet it attempts to substantiate universal access to one of our most central needs housing not just for material survival but as a means of collectively living together gathering our creative cooperative energy and providing for one another universal housing is not a resource issue but a political one it protects against the caprices of an unequal and unreliable real estate market and as Madden and Marquee's note quote necessarily implies fundamental challenges to the existing system we need to expand access and promote solidarities around housing rather than use housing policy to create divisions we have an opening to transform housing inequality in new york however we must prioritize people's freedom to make homes rather than housing's ability to make profits proposals for a path forward must center the practice of a right to housing thank you that's a that's a really excellent way to start this program because certainly the right to housing would solve so many of the problems that we're talking about i'm just a lawyer so i just have the tools available to me i will say that we almost had a right to housing effectively in the past ready to pass through congress and one person said no and that was joe mansion so that's um that's that is unfortunately how our government works so um but why do we have a right to shelter the reason that in new york city we have a right to shelter is because of a court case it's because in 1979 a young lawyer named bob haze brought a case on behalf of a group of men who lived on the streets around his apartment on the bowery and who he met at a local soup kitchen where he volunteered and he brought that case claiming that under the new york state constitution that the state was required to provide them with shelter and not leave them out in the streets exposed to the elements you know at risk of injury or death and the reason that the language that he cited in bringing that case was in in the was put in the new york state constitution in 1938 and it says that the state is required to provide aid and care to the needy and in 1938 that was a very specific reference to the fact that there were tens of thousands of people living on the streets because of the depression uh new york had just experienced that there were people living in central park um there were there was mass homelessness in a way that had not been seen in a long time and the legislators were very conscious of that and they had a constitutional convention and they included this language in the in the in the state constitution and so uh bob said you know that this is what it means it means that people should not be sleeping on the street and he brought that case and a judge um the city immediately and the state said you know this is ridiculous we shouldn't even have to to um to litigate this case and the court said you know no i'm not going to say that this case should just be dismissed outright we should actually have a trial on this case so facing the trial the city then agreed that there would be a right to shelter they would create they agreed that in perpetuity they were obligated to provide shelter to people and that was a not very long document that was negotiated between the parties it was signed by the city and the state and the plaintiffs including the coalition for the homeless uh is who is our client um and you heard some language from that uh decree which you know refers specifically to you know what the beds are supposed to look like and how far apart they are and that kind of thing but really the heart of the decree it says that people are entitled to shelter if they don't have a place to go that really to us is what the right to shelter means there's a lot of other um uh there are state regulations now there are local laws that were passed by the new york city council we have other settlements and other cases that that talk about what is required what is the city required to provide to people but most importantly is that in that Callahan consent decree it says uh that anyone who needs a bed is entitled to get a bed and that has endured since 1981 when that agreement was signed um it is what is the reason that new york does not look like other large cities um if you've been to other cities in the united states if you've been to portland if you've been to san francisco los angeles sacramento denver chicago uh other places even boston now um places that you go you will see lots of people sleeping outside in tents um and we don't have that in the same way in new york because we have the shelter system that shelters tens of thousands of people every night and we uh assumed always that the city would have to operate that in a way that provided people access to permanent housing because otherwise the shelter system would just continue to grow um if you can't move people out and if you don't invest also in keeping people in their homes so that they don't have to come into the shelter system in the first place and the city does make efforts to do that um we think they're inadequate um and uh at one point during the bloomberg administration they even experimented with well maybe people are coming to shelter in order to get access to those housing options so what if we stop giving people access to housing from shelter what would happen maybe will they stop coming and the answer of course was no and they doubled the size of the shelter system and since then uh the the two mayors since then have not been willing to try to reduce the size of the shelter system they've been trying to basically keep it even they about 50 000 people who are longer-term new yorkers who are in shelter um and not trying to bring it back down um and just to the to the point that you know there's a there's a uh distinction between um housing policy and homeless policy we have been advocating through the last three mayors that you know essentially one person should have responsibility for both of those questions that's the way that you would have accountability there and you would solve it but each of these mayors has insisted on having a separate deputy mayor to deal with housing and a different deputy mayor deal with homelessness as if they are two different problems and as a result the housing policy does not address homelessness and that is why we continue to have tens of thousands of longer-term new yorkers in shelter so we have these court orders and they require that anyone who needs a bed should get a bed and as part of our obligations to on behalf of the class to enforce this court order we meet with the city regularly and review what's their plan how many beds do they have how many people do they expect to come in over the next few months will they have enough space for them will that space be adequate to meet those people's needs based on their disabilities and other kinds of needs that they have and about 18 months ago we noticed that the shelter census the vacancy rate was approaching zero they did not have enough leeway in case lots more people came in and we met with them and said what is going on and they said well lots of people are coming from the southern border and this was the first we heard of this at the time they did not they weren't expecting this to happen and they had not planned for it and they were just having people go into the regular shelter system and treating them like everybody else but very quickly they decided they wanted to build a completely new shelter system just for this population which they define as it's very specific anyone who entered the united states after on or after march 15th of 2022 and says that they are afraid to return to their country that is they refer to that group as asylum seekers we prefer the term new arrival because we're trying to steer people away from thinking about this as people who are going to apply for asylum because most people are not going to be able to get adequate counsel to do that and their cave places are probably going to be denied so we think of them as new arrivals and they have built a completely separate shelter system to address the needs of this population and so since then for the last 18 months we have been negotiating with the city about what their obligations are and for the first year or so of this conversation we were talking about things like as in the Callahan Consent decree as you heard earlier they're very specific rules about like how many beds there are and how far apart they are how many bathrooms and they wanted some flexibility from that but now more recently as you may have heard they have gone to court and asked the judge to say let's just not have a right to shelter anymore we think people are coming you know just as they believed in the Bloomberg administration that people were coming into shelter to get housing subsidies now they say people are coming to New York because they know we have a right to shelter and that's why they're coming to New York and if we could do away with the right to shelter and make a big announcement there's no more right to shelter people would stop coming to New York now you've heard those of you who have been here for the prior panels have heard about the history of immigration in New York seems unlikely that global migration trends would turn because a judge said there's no more right to shelter but that is the city's current position that is what they are asking for in court we have a judge who is as many judges do trying to resolve the case so we are in what's called a mediation process now where we go we were just yesterday with the city and the state the lawyers for the you know the governor and the mayor trying to find a path out of this that does not involve them asking the court to be relieved of all their obligations to everyone what they're asking for is that they don't have to shelter anyone who doesn't meet a very specific definition of who can receive public assistance it would mean if they're successful that not just the new arrivals but everybody would be now potentially barred from shelter unless they receive cash public assistance benefits so that means people who do not have an immigration status people who are working even in low-wage jobs people who receive federal disability benefits all these people would be excluded from shelter whether they're new arrivals or not or longer-term new yorkers if the city were to prevail so that is what we are currently fighting against and my time is up so i'm going to pass it hello can you hear me the mic yeah good hi everybody um so we have the academic we have the lawyer now you have the reporter um i'm on the ground since the so-called crisis and i call it a so-called crisis because this is really a manufactured crisis right um since it started maybe like what 18 months ago you said um and one thing that's interesting is you know i i saw the city open up their arms for the new arrivals and i think that's a good term rather than asylum seekers um they would greet them a port authority bus terminal will open arms come welcome and then the mood soured over that 18 months to the point where the mayor of this city is going to columbia and tell him people don't come go somewhere else he's going on radio and Ecuador telling people not to come and the thing is a lot of them are being bused here from texas so it's not like they're made a conscious effort to come to new york city they're going to america and then getting a one-way ticket to new york um and chicago and some other cities so it's not like this conscious effort of people hearing about this and oh new york has a free-for-all um with their right to shelter that's not necessarily true um so what i noticed so there's a difference between my reporting and then my opinions and i form my opinions based on what i'm seeing on the ground um and what i'm seeing is this this real negative nasty xenophobic attitude in terms of pitting new yorkers against the new the new arrivals in this city and saying that they're draining resources from this city that they're taking away your tax dollars right and that's not necessarily true what what i've seen is it's really what it seems to me is that this idea of a right to shelter was this great progressive idea that formed in new york but it was really a band-aid to an overall problem with the lack of affordable housing in the city but it was a good band-aid right if you needed somewhere to stay you had it now we're seeing a complete attack on this idea of a right to shelter right but we don't have to we don't really ask yourself why is there a shortage of affordable housing in new york city why don't we have a right to housing in new york city so i'm noticing and every month the numbers go up there's like they've said that they spent almost five billion dollars on housing the new arrivals in new york and there's been maybe a hundred thousand new arrivals that enter new york give or take and they spent five billion dollars on that uh on those people and i just think to myself what could you do with five billion dollars there's some countries with the gdp where it's not even a five billion dollar gdp so how is it that we're spending five billion dollars on a hundred thousand people couldn't you just give the people the money and then they they could have got their own apartment it would have been much cheaper than five billion dollars it just doesn't make any sense to me well then i was looking back and the city and you probably know this better than me the city has spent before the whole asylum seeker uh new arrival issue was an issue this city was spending already billions of dollars on on the homeless issue right on the department of homeless got a budget of like 1.3 or 2 billion dollars and there was like 75 000 people in shelters at that time couldn't you just give the people the money and they could have got their own apartment like i don't understand this right so that so i start thinking i'm saying this is crazy what's going on here then i think i think brand lander maybe last year this year did a study where it showed that the idea of housing the housing first program i don't know if anybody's familiar familiar with housing first but the idea of just giving people homes and um and without any kind of strings attached and that would help you know that would eliminate homelessness and brand lander's study found that it was cheaper to give people permanent housing than to just warehouse them in shelters but the city doesn't have this attitude the city rather spent billions of dollars in homeless shelters where they charge the city 300 dollars for toilet paper 250 for toothpaste you know all these crazy amount uh these crazy charges and that they build the city the city for so it i think we have to start thinking about the idea of kind of combating um the what i call the shelter industrial complex there seems to be a lot of vested interest in keeping the shelter system alive and just maintaining a system that i'll buy it's okay right it's good to have a place to not a place but it doesn't solve the problem this city just throwing away billions of dollars rather than giving people housing but then it gets me thinking you know i think a lot it gets me thinking oh they don't want to give people housing because of course we live in a capitalist society and we live in new york city the mother of all capitalist cities in the world and the the idea so housing is commodified so if housing is commodified you can't give people housing because it'll devalue the idea of what housing is right well we can't charge if we're charging people three thousand dollars a month on rent we can't there's no way we can just give people housing because then the whole idea of housing is a as a as a value as a commodity completely collapses it's almost like having a reserve army of labor right having a reserve army of homeless people if you have a reserve army army of homeless people then you can charge whatever you want for housing because people are willing to pay if they can so these are just some thoughts and ideas i'm not going to give the whole 10 minutes we could talk a little more after this but it just these are some things that i'm seeing and as a reporter it's driving me nuts uh good afternoon everybody i'm going to speak to you about how i came here um and how i ended up in a shelter my story my my story begins at the age of 12 i'll try to make this brief in colombia for two months and in ecuador for and in ecuador for two months for two weeks and in peru for six years so my daughter was born in peru um and unfortunately my husband lost his job and from there we decided that things were too unstable so we quickly had to come up with a plan to transition uh to another place um thankfully we had the support of my husband's family um and uh that's when we decided to make the uh uh traverse through the dairien um gap across the seven countries bueno este cuando por fin logramos cruzar todos esos países que no es fácil uno tiene que venir de bus en bus a veces te toca caminar porque los buses no te quieren llevar porque eres inmigrante porque no tienes papeles la gente te humilla en todos esos países te trata mal este uno pasa hambre porque a veces uno no lleva dinero se le acaba el dinero o te roban entonces pues durmiendo de buses en buses todo eso es algo traumático tanto como para los niños como para uno el adulto uh so we primarily traveled from bus to bus experiencing all sorts of hardships including hunger uh and um theft and uh all sorts of other um traumas not just for myself but also for uh my daughter um we experienced a lot of um different uh transgressions uh based on like my migratory status from all of the distinct countries bueno ahí me agarraron los militares que son los que te reciben cuando tu cruzas ahí me de ahí hice un proceso me llevaron a migración este no me pudieron poner junto con el papa de mi hijo porque yo era menor de edad y él tenía cierta edad bueno y me llevaron a un centro de tensión de menores donde pase casi un mes um so once i arrived in mexico i was captured by the military and um from there i wasn't able to be put together with my husband because unfortunately like i was a minor and um he was not a minor um and uh from there i was housed with my uh with my daughter um uh and i spent a month in detention so from mexico i sorry from texas i was able to take a plane that was paid for by the government um and my mom received me here in new york uh while when we arrived in new york um i went to 151st street in the bronx where uh the migration processing um center uh bueno ahí estuve me fui como a la 7 de la mañana y estuve como hasta los 2 a m del día siguiente de ahí me llevaron a un hotel a pasar como el poco de horas para descansar a la 6 de la mañana me llevaron otra vez a la oficina y de ahí estuve como hasta las 10 de la So from the migration processing center I went, I was taken to a hotel at 2 a.m. of the next day and there I was able to get some rest and then from the hotel we were then processed into a shelter, which is where I've remained since. When I arrived at the hotel they gave me all the paperwork, they put me in a room and the room has a bed, they give you a cradle for the baby, it has a bathroom and it also depends on the number of people in the family because where I'm living is a family shelter. So there, that's where my papers were processed, there's a bed and I was also given a crib for my baby and because the way that the shelter is designed it depends on the size of your family so we were lucky to have a crib for the baby. So depending on the size of your family for example a mother and three children you would get two beds apart or if you're in a bigger family they'll give you two beds together, two rooms together, a suite. So it's not that the conditions in which I'm living in are the worst, I think New York is the best place for giving me a place so that I don't have to sleep on the street, however the employees that work there treat us as if we are less than. So the employees they treat us as if we're less than and they treat us however they want depend from time to time and it's not so much, it's unjust for them to treat us that way if they too come from immigrants. So another point is the point on nutrition and like nourishment, we don't get the best food and it's not enough food for the size of the, given that we're in a family shelter we don't get enough food for the family. So right now the way that we're fed is we get a piece of bread at 11 a.m. and then we get dinner at 6 a.m. So there's no there's no snacks for the kids even though you're supposed to get three meals plus snacks since it is a family shelter. So a lot of times the food is rotten and a lot of times when people arrive they just remain hungry because the food just decays. So the type of activism that I do is based out of what's up. Essentially I work with an organization that distributes clothing and I do the work of categorizing it between gender and age. So once the clothing is classified, what I do is I reach out to everybody else and I do the work of categorizing it between gender and age. So once the clothing is classified, what I do is I reach out to everybody else and we also do like a collective job of integrating other people into the what's up group. And then I essentially notify everybody in the what's up group that there are clothing available for recent arrivals and they come to my room and they pick up whatever they need. And that essentially composes most of the work that I've been doing. So another thing that I wanted to bring up is the question of these hotels supposedly being four stars. Our food is rotten, we don't have enough to eat, so I would like to know where are the supposed four stars. And she also mentioned the manner in which the people that are there are treating her and other migrants. Well, when I arrived there at the hotel, the hotel didn't have a microwave. The food was cold, there was no kitchen, so they only gave you breakfast and dinner. So there's only one microwave for 1,331 rooms in the hotel. And there's one microwave for everybody there. And again you have to, you're only fed twice a day once in the morning with the bread and then at 6 p.m. at night with dinner. And there are no kitchens in the rooms. There are no kitchens. The kitchens they have in some rooms where they store things are used by hotel workers. They don't let us use those kitchens. So we're not allowed to use refrigerators and we don't have, the refrigerators that are there, the workers actually use them for themselves and they don't allow us to access the refrigerators. Well, one of the organizations that supported me the most and apart from the hotel, the people that have been there, is called La Morada. It's a restaurant that stays at the Bronx. Well, we've received a lot of help from them. Sometimes when I tell them that they can cook and bring us food, they do it. Every time they can do an event, I invite all the people from many hotels that I know. And from them I've received more help than from other organizations. The organization that's provided the most support for me has been a restaurant based out of the Bronx called La Morada. So if I call them and reach out and tell them that I need food to eat, they'll cook and bring us food whenever they host events. I go and I bring as many other people as I can to participate. Well, my opinion on the limit of 60 days is something traumatic, I would say, for children. The question of the 60-day limit on shelters is quite traumatic. The question of the 60-day limit on shelters is quite traumatic. Your papers don't arrive in 60 days, you also don't receive your papers in 60 days. Kids don't go to school for 60 days, so I think it's really traumatic. Well, my opinion and my experience, thank you very much to New York for opening the door to the president who also made us come to this country. With the housing thing, if it's a bit hard to get a job here in New York, it's very difficult. I mean, if you get a job, it's not a fixed job. If you don't get a job, well, my opinion on myself is that I and my family actually want to work, to get out of the shelter, to get a job for the government. Well, I came here to study, to finish my studies, to work, to be able to get my daughter out of the shelter. And to keep a home, I mean, a rent that is worth 800 or 900 a week, one has to have a fixed job. So I thank the president, again, for making it easy for us to come here. Again, I want to thank New York for opening its arms and allowing us to be here. Personally for me and my family, I came to finish my studies and to provide my child with an education. What I would like to do is to find a permanent job and eventually transition out of the shelter system. And also that it's really hard to access housing since, for example, the rentals are 800 a week. So how can you even pay those prices when you don't have a stable job? Well, it would be that we get a stable job, with a paid salary, and that it helps us with living in a stable home, so as not to depend on the government, but something that we can already pay. We can already have a job and be able to pay the rent and be fine, because that's what we came to this country. What I would like to ask the mayor and the president would be to provide the ability for us to live in permanent housing and work permanently, so that we're able to be independent and not be awaited to the state. Eso es todo. Muchas gracias. Thank you so much to all of our panelists. Yeah, another round of applause for everybody. That was really great. I really appreciate you guys being here and sharing your insights and your knowledge and sharing your stories and building on just important conversations that have been taking place today across panels. So at this time we're going to transition into some prepared questions, and then we're going to open the floor for engagement with the audience. Good afternoon. Good evening, everyone. The first question is, what does the landscape of housing for migrants and asylum seekers look like in New York City? How many people are in city-provided shelters versus private housing? And how many people are in hotels versus congregate settings? And adding on to that, in a much broader context, based on all of your experiences and work, I was reminded about something that the late George Collins said, where he always spoke about the idea of homelessness in the US as something that is happening because there is not a way for someone to make profit out of it. And the moment that someone can do that, suddenly the problem will start going away in a much faster manner. In speaking to that, I was wondering what are the political and economic systems around this idea of the homeless shelter in the city? Because from what Amir also has spoken about, it's a lot of money that is being invested in these systems, and it's important to understand how these systems operate and what they are. Just to directly address the number question first, there are, as I said before, there were about 50,000 people in the New York City shelter system a year and a half ago. Now there are, let's say, 120,000. And the number of longer-term New Yorkers has stayed about the same. So we've added, let's say, 70,000 new arrivals to the system. Most of those people are families with children. And up until last week, all of those families with children were basically in hotels or places that are like hotels. Within the last week, the city has started to use a new kind of shelter that we haven't seen in decades in New York for families with children. They call it semi-congregate. There's a huge tent out at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn where they created, you know, the state regulation says that a family with children has to have a room with a locking door. So they said, okay, we'll give them a locking door to a cubicle. So it doesn't have a ceiling. Inside this tent, they have set up these giant cubicles with about 10-foot walls and a locking door. And now, of course, someone could jump over the wall into your room. So I think that people are not sleeping very well in this place because they are, well, for a number of reasons. But one reason is because they're worried about the safety of their children. But that is a new model that they are testing, I guess. They are going to have a couple, maybe 2,000 people there. And I think it's pretty clear that the purpose of this is to discourage people from coming to New York. Already, we've gotten emails, for instance, from people who were in Nassau County who saw this and said, if I come to New York, is this what will greet me? So to the extent that they're trying to get the message out there that this is bad and this is what you will get, I think that is successful. As to the deeper question of why is all of this happening, I think some of the previous panels, people had much more eloquent answers than I would have. I will just say for my part very quickly that we have, this is a question of investing in resources and who is worth spending money on. I mentioned before that we were this close to having in Congress Section 8 for everybody, which would have amounted to affordable housing for everybody. And one person said no, and that was it. You know, every budget is a choice and all of these problems are resolvable. The federal government could solve this problem by letting people work. The city and the state could solve this problem as could the federal government by investing in affordable permanent housing for people. And then they wouldn't have this problem and they have chosen not to do that. And I think we've had much better explanations of why that is today than I could give you know. Maybe another aspect of the kind of, you asked about the kind of political aspects of it. And another thing that I might mention is like some, I've seen some folks talk about housing in like a punitive sense where there are like strings attached to it, right? So like, well, if housing is just simply accessible to all, right, they're not going to want to work. Or right, it's going to be, or they're not going to take care of the housing, right? So there's certain kind of condescensions around that type of perspective on housing. Coming from, right, like officials and former officials that I've read in the newspaper. So I think it's that type of kind of perspective around housing that limits the vision of resources that could be dedicated or what could be achieved around housing. Because of this kind of limited narrow perspective on like what housing means and how we can build it and how people, what people's kind of claim to it is. Has anybody ever been to Floyd Benefield? It might as well be in Siberia, you know, it's like collective punishment sending everybody over there. It just doesn't make any sense. Some thought that came to my mind was, does the city own Floyd Benefield? From my understanding, it's a national park. Is there some legal maneuvering that we can look into? Maybe that's illegal? Is that supposed to go in there? I wonder, I'm just curious. We are involved in a lawsuit about this very question. Really? Okay, you see, great minds think alike. So, yeah, like these, back to what you were saying earlier about like profit, who makes money and how it kind of works. You know, there's all these nonprofits that have city contracts to shelter people. And a lot of their CEOs or the people who are the executive directors of these nonprofits, like former city council person Christina Quinn, they make hundreds of thousands of dollars as spokespeople for the homeless and advocating on behalf of shelters. But it's this complete industrial complex in which there's no movement. They work within a logic that housing is not a human right, that housing is not a right that everyone deserves, that the most you can do is hope to shelter them. And they'll make a lot of money sheltering. I know these hotels, a lot of these hotels are making huge amounts of money just sheltering the homeless. So it's we're working within a logic that is focused on the idea that housing is not a right. Like you said, there's all these strings attached. You have to be deserving of housing. We can't just give you a home. That doesn't make any sense. One reality we should be shifting our idea, you know, if there's 100,000 people are in shelters, you know, it's too many. If one person is in a shelter, it's too many. But 100,000 people is a manageable amount of people and families that we can really get into affordable housing. But we're moving in a direction in which we're even privatizing public housing. So it's really we have to make a paradigm shift. And this so-called crisis could actually be an opportunity to address the realities of the housing situation in New York and trying to change the conversation and change the way New York runs in which people could live in the city, but yet our mayor and the powers that be are, you know, against that. And, you know, we're with a mayor that believes God made him the mayor. So I don't know what we're doing here. That's great. I'll build on that a little bit too. I think that right now kind of the what I was trying to get at in some of my comments is that housing is developed only through kind of like these kind of private markets, right? And over the past 50 years or so kind of public public options have been disparaged and disinvested. And so there's various plans out there, right? There's people doing work around this to have kind of concrete achievable plans for developing more public options. Homeless shelters are a sort of degraded form of public housing, right? If we think about it in that way, it opens up our eyes, I think as Amir is saying, to other options, devoting other resources towards this issue. Community kind of financing programs, community banks, things like that, instead of privatizing something like public housing. Similarly, right? What I was hearing from a lot of the other panelists earlier in the day was not just right? City scale investment, but kind of there's other resources available at kind of the national national scale, right? So many of these think of how much human energy and creativity is tied up in all of those detention centers along the way, right? Think of how much kind of not just like capital, like investment capital, but like think about the human relationships that are formed through those interactions. All of that energy, right, could be turned toward collectively investing in these kind of creative ideas about housing, not just to have one primary way of developing housing, right? A monopoly through private markets at this point, but letting all different alternatives informed by the creative energies of housing movement, drawing on all that creativity and energy and activating, right, this right to housing as a practice, right? Not something that we can kind of pull out of a hat that's magical, but letting them develop and take shape informed by the good work that many people are already doing right now. Thank you for those responses. The next question in a manner ties to this only. Given the given New York City's right to shelter mandate, how is the current infrastructure responding to the needs of the migrants and where is it falling short? What steps can the city take to ensure that it can sustainably fund the right shelter program? And adding on to this, what do you think is the fundamental difference between how the city is responding now versus how it responded in the 30s after the depression? When the law was actually written about this. Actually, on the first part about how is it, what are the problems in the shelter system now, I want to turn back to Sara if that's okay to ask you to say some more about what's wrong with the system or how it could be better. They could give us more stable housing, given that not everybody is destructive and that we won't be destroying the housing that is being provided for us. Oh well, in the shelter where I am, and I imagine that the others also happen, that there is not so much security. It's very uncertain. Already twice, two armed people have entered and they are not policemen. I want to show you the food that they give us, like give us the children and the adults in the shelter for dinner. I'm sorry about the folks in the back that won't be able to see. So what you see is rice. It's rice and peas and a gray piece of meat. I think that's chicken. It's a pollo. It's chicken. So this is what they give us at 6pm after having only given us a piece of bread at 11. Did you come here because you knew that there was a right to the shelter? Well, yes. And also because of my mom who lives in a shelter. She lives here, her mom lives here but not in a shelter. So my aunt who was pregnant lived in a single woman's shelter and that's how I found out. So when I was making the plans to come here, she asked me to go to the office in 151st Street. So our next question is when we talk about housing and the right to shelter, inclusivity and integration come up quite often. And we've heard that in the previous panels today where Sophie talked about how we're seeing migrants helping people and even what the work this era is doing and finding community. And so from a community organizing perspective, what strategies have proven effective in integrating new arrivals into neighborhoods and the housing systems? And how can these strategies be scaled and improved upon? There are a lot of mutual aid groups on the ground like a group called South Bronx. What was it called? South Bronx United, I believe. And they've been working real hard in really helping the new arrivals in New York. That restaurant she had mentioned has also been a real kind of a safe space and place for a lot of the asylum seekers coming in. And they were, what was the name of the restaurant? Yeah, they've been doing amazing work and words have been spread all the way to Texas. This restaurant is there and it's helping people. So there's a lot of grassroots efforts on the ground of people organizing and really working with the new asylum seekers, the new arrivals. And what's also very fascinating to me is how the new arrivals themselves are actually giving back and organizing and getting involved. So I think that's not getting as reported as much, right? But what I also feel like the city can do is integrate them into the planning and conversation, but the city has this attitude where they don't want them to hear. So they treat them in a way that tries to discourage them from even staying here. When you give people food like that, what message are you sending? You're not welcome that we don't want you because people are not going to stay and live in these conditions and live in Floyd Benefield and eat this peas, rice, and gray meat. It doesn't make any sense. So what the city, well, it makes sense because the city don't want them. But what the city should really be doing is creating some sort of panel or try to find a way to integrate the new arrivals into the planning of finding solutions to how we can integrate them in the city long term and really welcome them rather than discouraging them. Yeah, that's a great answer. There was a kind of informal service center that came together at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in the early stages of this because that's where people were arriving. A lot of people were arriving. Most people actually are arriving by air at this point. The mutual aid volunteers, activists who were kind of coordinating all of this welcoming were found that they were spending most of their time at the Port Authority and so people would come to see them there. And so organizations like ours would go there because we knew there were a lot of people that we could meet and assist. And the city had, you know, this is all volunteer driven. The city doesn't want any part of it. And then eventually they kicked us out of the Port Authority. So now we, the people who were working out of that site have now identified two other sites and someone asked an earlier panel about are there places to connect to volunteer or to assist? And I can tell you that there are two locations. I'm happy to talk to anybody afterwards who wants to hear more about it. But, you know, one is in a church on 40th Street, one is in an office on 145th and Lenox and there are people coming every day and asking for assistance, whether it's just to get clothing, whether they're looking for an immigration lawyer, they want help with benefits, they get their mail. You know, there's just, there's a lot going on and a lot of people coming. And so organizations like ours and NILAC who was here earlier on the previous panel go to these places and meet with, we know, because we know there's going to be people there we can meet with and assist. There's obviously many, many people that we could assist, many more people than we have resources to assist. So this is a way to address the need. And it is, as I said, like entirely volunteer driven kind of ad hoc. The city wants no, wanted no part of it, including in resellment efforts. But just this week on Monday, the mayor called a bunch of these folks into City Hall, including Marat who was here earlier, and they all gave him a really hard time about this, you know, not taking the assistance and advice of the people who actually know what they're doing and have the trust of the community. And he seemed to understand that maybe they should change their approach to incorporate more of the organizations that have been and always have been and will continue to do this work rather than relying on city officials who have taken a, you know, a very scorched earth kind of approach to how to do this work. And, you know, I'll say at some point I have to always make this pitch. So I'll shoehorn it into this answer, which is that one of the big things that people need help with with their finding is that they're being, everybody's working, right? Whether or not they have work authorization, people are working. And so people who do not have work authorization are being exploited in their work because the people they are working for know that they or believe that they will not complain. One of the big ways that people are working is delivery apps. And initially when people arrive, they could just sign up for an account in their own name. The delivery apps came under a lot of pressure for this. They require people to prove that they have work authorization, which means that what's happening is that people are renting an account. So someone who is able to set up an account will do it, and then they will rent that account to people who have just arrived here. They'll rent the account and they'll rent the bike because those bikes cost like $3,000. And they will then, they're totally reliant on the person who has that account. So they, if the person then just ghost them basically, like if they have a good week and the person who owns the account sees a whole bunch of money came in, they can just disappear and keep all the money. And the person, the actual delivery worker then is totally out all their wages, but of course they still owe for the bike rental. So, you know, we have, our employment lawyers are now starting to get involved in these kinds of issues. And the reason I like to shoehorn the story into these appearances is to tell everyone, because I know everybody uses these hafs now, please tip in cash. About integrating immigrants into neighborhood and housing systems. I feel like giving us a secure housing, and since we're occupying the space that we're in, in the shelter or in the hotel where we are, well, for the people who are just arriving, I think that a way to improve the integration in neighborhoods and also the housing system is to have a safe, access to safe houses, because we're going to give that space that we're occupying in shelters to other people that are coming in, and that wants a space and probably need more space. So, we are allowing, providing them shelter and to, so they avoid sleeping on the streets right now with kids, which is a problem. So, they avoid sleeping on the streets right now with kids, which is a problem. Talking about the issue with delivery apps, I think I asked the mayor that we have to provide those workers with work authorizations, because they're already using their savings to buy bikes or motorbikes or anything, so they're already investing in that, and since they are already sacrificing themselves, at least the government can do is giving them work authorization. Also, that they should give work authorizations to street vendors instead of giving them fines, especially because if you get a fine, that's going to be on your record and probably, like, jeopardize your, if you are applying for any type of paperwork or become a regular. We would be like in a chaos, and also that, I say that, in all the immigrants that we are here in the country, I don't feel that they are actually spending $5 billion on us. In reality, I don't know why they say that if you don't see the results of those $5 billion. Thank you, everyone. We're going to open the floor for questions now, so just raise your hand and we'll have someone bring the mic over. Hi, I'm Meghna, I'm at the Columbia Journalism School, and I'm working on an investigative report regarding DOCCO, one of the for-profit contractors. I just want to ask you, what is your understanding of why the city administration provided a contract, a no-bit contract, running into hundreds of millions of dollars to a medical services provider to run a migrant housing, sort of like a series of migrant housing programs? What's the logic in your work? Have you come across one? And second, if you're awarding these contracts to for-profit contractors, aren't they naturally incentivized to give you the cheapest food, the worst facilities, so that they can make the biggest margins, because they're operating for-profit? Can I just say, for anybody who wants it, I filed a foil with the city of New York at the end of May to get the full contract between the department of... I've already got it for you, I'll send it to you. So if anybody wants the full contract, I have it. I just got it yesterday from the city. So it works to file the foils, people. I'll just say also that you heard that again at the beginning, some of the rules that exist about beds and how far apart they are, and they wanted to get away from all that, so they created a separate structure, and their theory was, well, now it won't be governed by any rules and we can do whatever we want. Yeah, thank you again for all this is great. I have a question that's probably very directed at Amir, and this is around, I guess, new journalism and kind of the way that journalism is moving, and it has to do with just thinking through all of the panels today about what's happening here, but also what's happening in a lot of the West Coast cities that's almost identical, especially around, you know, Eric Adams, and people voted for Eric Adams, and in Vancouver where I'm from, they voted for someone who's almost identical to him, and putting out similar policies that are quite awful for people who are unhoused, and a lot of it is because they run on platforms that sensationalize crime, and thinking about the way that the cycles of elections, especially municipal elections, happen. There's a compassion fatigue, I think that happens throughout that cycle where people have an understanding that people need housing, and then as the years pass by, they lose interest, and it's a lot easier for people to have fear of crime in their neighborhoods than to be welcoming of people who need housing. Is there, what are your thoughts on how we could combat that, just in populations that will end up voting for people in office who then put a lot of this in motion? Is there a way to keep people interested in a lot of the matters that they should be? Oh, both, or whatever you'd like, yeah. So, there has to be a movement in this city where we push constantly progressive policies and constantly push, and not just worry about these election cycles, right? So when you have someone like the Basio came and he was supposed to be this, he was gonna be a progressive mayor, and then he had a lack of interest or he didn't have any strong ideas, and then he was so absent from being the mayor and he didn't inspire people, didn't give a damn really, was constantly looking for the next opportunity to highlight his career. People kind of, there was that backlash, and I think that's where Adams came in through that vacuum, right? Of him, of the Basio weakening a progressive movement in the city and allowing this snake named Adams to come in and who believes God put him here, and he said this in multiple times, to become mayor and look what he's doing now in the city. So I think we have to keep pushing a progressive agenda and we have to have a strong progressive movement in the city that constantly says we're not gonna... that constantly put... that fights against this constant right-wing trend here. We get someone who's progressive, they're kind of weak, they don't do much, and then you get this right-wing turn. We had that with Dinkins and then Giuliani. We had this with the Basio Adams. It has to stop somewhere, and I think it just constantly... and I think we're seeing it now. People are kind of... the vultures are circling around Adams with his ties to Turkey and all these kind of corruption things that he's working on and we've been investigating. So yeah, I don't want to ramble on. I just don't like Adams, and I think we have to... we have to move into a more progressive direction. Hi, I'm gonna ask a question on behalf of someone who's actually not here, who's writing their question in earlier. And that is, as you all know, many people who are in the shelters right now are receiving notifications that are misleading or perhaps incomplete or even false, telling them they have 60 days and then they need to leave and there's a lot of panic happening and lots of people who are packing their bags and wondering where to go. And I'm wondering what advice you... I mean, actually not even just advice, but information you could share with those folks and whether it would be possible to offer Know Your Rights workshops to people about whether they can in fact be kicked out after 60 days, what their rights are in the shelter, et cetera, or maybe it's not workshops, it's materials that are distributed, I don't know. Thank you for that question. We have those materials on our website, so I can provide a link to that. If you go to the Legal Aid Society's website, there is a section that says Get Help and you can find my team, the Homeless Rights Project there and we have materials there for people that explain exactly how this is supposed to work and what their rights are. We still have a right to shelter, the city has gone to court to ask that there not be a right to shelter, but there still is a right to shelter and that means that they, you know, if a person does not have a place to go, they have to be offered a bed. And so we have seen with the single adults, they've started giving out these notices to families with children that say you have 60 days. The first of those notices were served in October, so December 29th is the first day that someone will have reached the 60th day and then we will see, they still haven't quite worked out exactly what's going to happen when those notices come due. I think it's pretty clear at this point that we will still have a right to shelter in New York City on December 29th and for the foreseeable future, so they're going to have to offer people something if they don't have any place to go at the end of that time. They very much want to encourage people to move on, so they are telling them, you only have 60 days to stay here and what they're not saying is, but if you don't have anywhere to go at the end of that time, we will still give you another placement and so that this is why people are panicking and they believe, you know, because it doesn't say in the notice that you get, that you can get another placement, they're kind of counting on people to be terrified by that. I think we have seen that people are pretty networked on WhatsApp and through other social media, they form other communities, even if they didn't know anybody here before they arrived, they're meeting those people. For the single adults, when they come in to reapply now, they send them to, you know, if you get to the end of your time and you say, I still don't, you know, have anywhere to go, they send you to a place they call and say, where would you like to go? We'll buy you a ticket, anywhere. Tell us where you want to go and then the person says, I don't have anywhere else to go and they say, okay, fine, now we'll give you a shelter placement. But, you know, they carry it as far as to, in order to get that placement, you have to go to a place that's called the Reticketing Center. They're trying to reinforce as frequently as possible that their goal, city's goal is for you to leave New York so I think they built this system with the aspiration that they, the court would relieve them of the obligation to offer somebody a new placement, but they have not yet won that. They still have to offer people a new placement at the end of that time. And so they are trying to push the envelope as far as they possibly can without affirmatively saying to people, we don't offer you shelter anymore. They did actually try that and they were forced to stop. But, you know, they are not willing to go so far as to say, NPS, at the end of your time, you can get a new placement. For the single adults, you know, it's a hardship. They have to pack everything up at this arbitrary date when who knows where they are in the process of trying to find another place to go. This may actually slow people down. They may have gotten connected to resources in the community or they may have had a deadline. What we have said is it would work much better if they had a real case management model where somebody met with the person and said to them, what do you need to move on? What do you need to be independent? A lot of people just want an ID, a New York City ID. Some people just want a driver's license. Some people are in OSHA training class and they think from that they are going to get real work. If they can have those kinds of conversations, that would be a much better way to do this. But instead, they are saying, 30 days, 60 days, whatever it is, come in here and talk to us and tell us what your plan is. But also pack up all your stuff, you are leaving wherever you have been and at the end of that conversation if you don't have another place to go we will give you another place to go. That last part they are not saying but they still have to do it. That is the current state of things. I am also a student from Columbia Jordan School. I am a reporting fellow at the NYC Housing Lab now focusing on the immigrant housing. So my question is what impacts are those new migrants bringing to the old immigrant communities of the city now? And if there are some bad effects that the city should do to minimize those kind of things? A lot of voice anyway. I am not aware personally of any situations in which there is any conflict between old immigrant communities in New York or established immigrant communities in New York and the new arrivals coming in. If anything, a lot of the immigrant communities in New York have risen to the challenge and really have come out and helped and supported the new arrivals especially places like Jackson Heights and in the Bronx. They have welcomed them with open arms and some of them even welcomed them into their homes. So there seems to be a nice relationship with a lot of these new arrivals coming into the city and that is not really getting reported as much of how the new immigrant communities, the old immigrant communities or established immigrant communities are really coming together and welcoming them and I think that is something that should be discussed. I want to say before I finish that if you want to donate clothes for the new arrivals what you need most now is a shelter shoes because when you are released from immigration they take everything from you they dance with you like a chanclet that you are practically walking on the floor. And gloves and hats I want to invite everyone to donate because that is one of the things that we most need at the moment we actually need like coats clothes especially for the winter and because basically when we leave the detention center we leave the detention center without anything just with a pair of sleepers almost like walking barefoot so if you have any kind of shoes or any type of outward for winter it is very welcome and well actually yes, I feel that they have been more more attentive to everything that we need the immigrants because they are not only that they know me and they only give me for my shelter they go they just find out that they open a shelter or a tent they go there they fight with the police they argue but they go and help all the people of all the shelters be it your family I feel like yes the community in the Bronx especially La Murada has helped us a lot and it's not only helping me or my shelter but it's also helping any other shelter in the city or even camps even if they get in trouble with police they go and try to make connections with the new immigrants they are always trying to help I just wanted to circle back to the question about the two centers that you mentioned are you able to share the names just so everyone knows I'll just say that there's a Metro Baptist church on 40th street there are people there in most days and then there's another program called Africana which is at 145th and Lenox that is open every day I would just maybe in making the connection it's helpful to know if you speak any other languages they're serving slightly different clientele at each place and I'm happy to make the connection these are all volunteer efforts so it's not like there's a volunteer coordinator I can direct you to but I'm happy to stay for a few minutes after if people want to connect that way and I can help you reach out to them I know that they're particularly at the Africana 145th street there are a lot of Columbia students who are coming there every day whether that's been organized by anyone or it's just kind of spontaneously happening through word of mouth I don't know but I'm happy to facilitate that if anyone wants to get involved thank you everyone amazing I have a question maybe to Christian and to others so we established that there's a lot of money exactly that happens now we're going to build shelters and then now we're going to rent hotels and put people in hotels now we're going to put tents with open cubicles how does these policies get designed who decides on what's happening there's money to be made but how is it suddenly that hotels are single SROs and how is it now that they're building tents the other question that is related to that is that what is the future when they're talking the right to shelter they're imagining that people will stop coming but we know and they know that the people are still going to come so what is the future post right I mean it's already there's a lot of unhoused people on the streets so what is that future of the post policy of the right to shelter that is imagined like more people on the streets or what is it one of the panelists is so insightful about kind of complicating this notion of crisis and right this crisis mentality of right okay well now it's it's like all in the moment of like now it's tents now it's right hotels whatever is available so I guess right it seems very maybe you can confirm ad hoc right and so long I don't know if there's a long term like post right to shelter vision right like there I don't know there probably is not but if we kind of think about right this in kind of about right like providing ways for folks to move into more stable housing conditions than I think right I mean that's clearly I think what we're all in agreement on on this panel right that that from our angle is the most sensible thing to do without that I don't see kind of right yeah like like the like the COVID plan too right like the hotels are being used like put people in hotels right I feel like it's very like in the moment ad hoc is that you're kind of feeling of things too everything we've been negotiating this for a year and a half now and they just keep making it up as they go along I think they the story that they're telling is that they're using whatever space they can find and they're constantly scrambling to find new space and they take what they can get but what we've said to the city over and over again is suppose you win it doesn't solve your problem now you have lots of people living on the street that's not doesn't mean the problem is solved that means the situation is worse so why would you be asking to undo the right to shelter guarantees you at least a system to place people somewhere other than the street and you know if you prevail then you're going to have the same number of people but now they're going to be in the parks and on the trains and in terrible situations and being injured or dying because of the weather just because it's related right just wanted to know if you guys believe that there's a relationship between the current state of hotels and shelters now in New York City with SROs like if you believe they played some type of precedent into how hotels are being transformed now even though they're somewhat of a failed system in New York City it's a unique feature I think of the city I'll say just historically that the reason that there are so many people in hotels is that we do have a right to shelter and the city could not did not create enough just built places that were going to serve people in better ways and one reason for that is just a political will and a lack of interest in doing it but also every time they try to open a shelter now there is a nimby response in whatever community they try to do that and a group forms and files a bogus lawsuit and in the end the city wins all those cases but it definitely takes a toll it slows them down it takes them years to build a new site from the ground up that is a purpose built shelter I mean obviously it would be better if they were building housing in that way and putting people in permanent housing but they also have to have some safety net and the nimby efforts are not limited to litigation they will go and intimidate whoever it was that was going to provide that space to the city and get them to back out of the deal or they will call the mayor and the mayor has they had a couple of sites that were ready to go officials in those communities called the mayor and he said okay we won't open that shelter so certainly a number of factors have put them in this place where at the end of the day when they have to have beds and they are running out of space there is only one real solution for them which is to rent more hotel rooms that is the only way they can immediately get enough units to actually physically house people as they are coming in they would have enough resources to moving people out this is part of the problem if they would move people out of the shelter system and into permanent housing then they would have a lot more units they would have all the spaces that continue to warehouse people because they don't successfully move people out of shelter into permanent housing if we didn't have 50,000 people who were already in shelter when this started those people could all be in permanent housing you would have 50,000 new shelter units and you would have zero homelessness among people who were already here before the new arrivals start to come I have a question about I guess the 50,000 people who are in some other form of housing I think you introduced 70,000 people in shelter right but 120,000 migrants so could anyone sort of speak to what is the housing situation of those other 50,000 no doubt precarious also are people moving out of shelters into equally precarious maybe even worse situations in the private market or better situations what's that other 50,000 look like let me just clarify the numbers because it sounds like I said something wrong so there are the shelter system before new arrivals started to come a year and a half ago had about 50,000 people in it those people were all in New York City shelters and that's roughly where we are today with people who did not do not meet this definition of came here on or after March 15, 2022 people who may have lived here their whole life and got evicted or whatever those 50,000 people are in New York City Department of homeless services shelters there are a couple other agencies that operate shelter systems but let's say it's about 50,000 people those people could all move tomorrow into permanent housing if we were running the system properly creating enough supply of affordable permanent housing and providing them with the tools to move in now they do move a lot of people out of shelter and into permanent housing every year so it's not like we are past the point where the number is sort of flat it remains flat we would have preferred that they drove the number down but what happened was as I mentioned before in the Bloomberg administration they cut off access to permanent housing the number of people grew to 50,000 and De Blasio restored those tools and so it stayed at 50,000 but they didn't want to invest extra and drive it back down so we stay at around 50,000 then there are 70,000 new arrival individuals who are currently being sheltered by the city of New York in this wide range of different settings that range from bad to horrible for the most part and but in terms of people moving out we continue to push for better programs both to keep people in their home so they don't have to come into the shelter system in the first place or if they have ended up in the shelter system let's move them out and they there is a wide range of programs that is available that the city has they have a lot of tools for this they could be using those tools better they could be improving them we've provided very detailed recommendations on how they might do that but the goal is to get people into permanent housing now to answer the question of what is the housing supply in New York I mean that's a bigger question and maybe I'm not the best person to answer that but if the tools were there to move people out more people would be moving out the number of the shelter senses of people who we need a new term for this people who are not new arrivals right longer term New Yorkers could be driven down significantly if those programs work better and we think there are a lot of ways to make them work better was there a shortage of shelters prior to the recent arrivals coming in because when I was doing I was doing a lot of reporting on people who are losing their homes to fires and flooding they were already being housed in hotels and it seemed like that was kind of like the beginning of how the city was going to end up depending on the hotels there's two ways to address that again they could prevent people from having to come into shelter in the first place and move people out who are in shelter or they could keep adding space so that's the equation they have to manage it seems to us the best solution is to invest in getting people into real permanent housing and need fewer shelter units but at the end of the day it's their obligation to provide the shelter so if they don't do that then they just have to keep expanding the system and being stuck with these hotels thank you to all our panelists for spending their time here and having such a wonderful conversation about this topic I would like to pass over to HIPAA to give closing comments thank you thank you everyone panelists thank you