ALBANY — Gov. Kathy Hochul said Thursday she has written to the Biden administration, demanding the president expedite work authorization for asylum seekers in New York.
She also called on him to provide federal housing vouchers, case management and other support for migrants, as well as support for local schools; provide more federal facilities for new shelters; and reimburse the state for National Guard troops that have been helping manage the influx of people coming to New York.
“Let them work,” the governor repeated in her livestreamed address.
Read Hochul’s letter to Biden:Take executive actions to aid asylum seekers, New York state
The governor said that more than 100,000 asylum seekers have come to New York in the last year. Some 26,000 families have applied for asylum in the last six to seven weeks in New York City, state Homeland Security and Emergency Services Commissioner Jackie Bray said in a briefing.
Hochul said as migrants want to get jobs and become self-sufficient, employers across the state tell her they are desperate for workers, including at farms, restaurants and hospitals. “We have countless unfilled jobs that are just begging for someone to take them.”
The state Department of Labor, in anticipation of migrants getting work authorization, will be developing a jobs program that connects asylum seekers with employers even before people are authorized to work.
Hochul said that decisions about who can work are “solely determined by the federal government.” So New York needs a federal designation that gives asylum seekers already in New York “the ability to work, support themselves and their families. What we’ve said all along is just let them work.”
NY ‘shouldering this burden for far too long’
Hochul, a Democrat, took a swipe at Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, for making “despicable decisions” to bus migrants to NYC to score “cheap political points, treating people as pawns.”
She pointed out that asylum seekers are fleeing dire and dangerous…
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