Earlier today, Karen wrote about some suburban New York counties near the Big Apple declaring a state of emergency involving the border crisis. They are hoping to prevent New York City Mayor Eric Adams from shipping hundreds of illegal aliens to their smaller communities to be put up in hotel rooms at the taxpayers’ expense. I’m generally opposed to government officials declaring states of emergency because of things that are outside of severe weather events and acts of God. As we saw during the pandemic, it is far too easy for officials to use that tactic to grab unwarranted amounts of executive power. In this case, however, the county executives don’t seem to be using this as a ploy to impose restrictions on their own residents. They’re trying to stop another executive (Adams) from inflicting pain on their residents. Or at least so far.

But this issue runs much deeper than the amount of money it would cost to house that many migrants in these suburbs or questions regarding where all the food and other resources they will require will come from. The Biden Border Crisis brought with it far more than overcrowded shelters and food shortages. It brought a crime wave that we still haven’t been able to fully grasp. That’s what one of the executives tried to point out while issuing the emergency declaration. (ABC News, emphasis added)

“We are now declaring a state of emergency because we just don’t know what the vetting process is. Who are they?” said Neuhaus.

Neuhaus and Day, both Republicans, are against Democrat Mayor Eric Adams’ plan to bus in around 300 single men to live in hotels in the suburbs.

Neuhaus was being a bit more polite than he needed to. Nobody knows what “the vetting process” is because, in the vast majority of cases, there has been no vetting. How could anyone believe that more than 6 million people plus an unknown number of “gotaways” could possibly have been vetted in 27 months? We still haven’t been able to vet all of the helpers trying to flee Afghanistan even though they thankfully “only” number in the hundreds of thousands, not the millions.

New York City and its suburbs are garnering all of the media attention this week. But speaking as a resident of the upstate portion of New York, I can confirm that the problems started well before this and they have been spreading. In January, a large group of illegal migrants were seen boarding a bus in Utica, New York. (That’s squarely in the middle of the state.) Rumors spread that they had been bussed in from New York City, but it was later revealed that they had been brought in from elsewhere by an employer who hired them to work illegally. They were leaving after the job was complete, but the impact had been felt in the community nonetheless.

Over the past six months, out in the westernmost part of the state, the very small city of Jamestown (population 28,000) has been hit with a flood of migrants. One family there had offered to house a couple of relatives who were stuck in a border camp in Texas. Rumors of the offer quickly spread among the migrants, claiming that Jamestown was “the place to go” for work and shelter. The city’s few shelters and food banks were quickly overwhelmed. Crime rates rose and police reported a serious spike in drug sales on the streets. They’re still struggling with the crisis today.

The rumors and subsequent flood of people in Jamestown is a microcosm of the larger federal border crisis. When Joe Biden was elected and was heard promising to end deportations and stop construction on the wall, the word quickly spread among aspiring migrant communities. The door would be open to one and all, so the migrants took Uncle Joe up on his offer by the millions. Smelling an opportunity, drug smugglers and human traffickers blended in with the army of migrants, bringing us to the uncontrollable crisis we’re facing today.

But the problem didn’t stay on the border or even just in the big cities. It’s impacting everyone. Perhaps this rough medicine is what it will take for moderate, suburban voters to wake up to the true scale of the crisis that Joe Biden’s policies have caused. Only then will we perhaps see them voting for a change in leadership from the top down.