Wall Street and other top business leaders joined in the debate over the growing number of asylum-seekers in the city, calling on the Biden administration to provide New York City with much-needed assistance and arguing that migrants could help solve a labor shortage.
The request came in a letter signed by 114 business leaders, among them the heads of JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Ernst and Young, Blackstone and Citi, released Monday by the pro-business coalition Partnership for New York City.
It’s causing a fiscal challenge for the city, but it’s really a humanitarian crisis.
It was addressed to the president and congressional leaders and comes as the migrants face themselves at the center of a widening community debate over their presence in New York.
The urged the federal officials urged to “take immediate action to better control the border,” and requested federal relief “for educational, housing, security, and health care services to offset the costs that local and state governments are incurring with limited federal aid.”
The scene earlier in July under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway where migrants established a tent encampment in Brooklyn.
Arun Venugopal / Gothamist
Kathryn S. Wylde, the Partnership’s CEO and president and a signatory of the letter, said the letter was meant to amplify similar requests made last week by Gov. Kathy Hochul in response to the presence of more than 100,000 asylum seekers in the city.
“It’s causing a fiscal challenge for the city, but it’s really a humanitarian crisis,” said Wylde in an interview with Gothamist. “These are people, families for the most part, 20% of them kids who have at enormous sacrifice made their way to the United States and then mostly [been] bussed to New York City.”
Wylde said some of the signatories had personally petitioned the Biden administration for relief. She said that while immigration reform fell on Congress, the president could help…
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