New York City has long been a magnet for new Americans. More than a third of its residents — over three million people — are immigrants. Before the pandemic interrupted migration patterns, the census tallied about 60,000 foreign-born people annually in the city who had been living abroad a year earlier.
What’s different about the 116,000 migrants who started arriving last year is how many came at once, and how many went straight into the city’s homeless shelter system, already near capacity.
In normal times, immigrants gravitate to neighborhoods where countrymen have set up social networks, and they are gradually absorbed into the city. The new group came in a rush, after the pandemic worsened violence and poverty in struggling countries. Many came with no communities to join. In the shelters, they are creating them from scratch.
Friday evening in Times Square: Two boys sat on the sidewalk. A ceaseless sea of legs flowed past — theatergoers and tourists, shouting street vendors, office workers. The boys, Ángel Martinez and Anthony Osuna, 8-year-old cousins, were oblivious. They had not seen each other in eight months.
Their families cried when they reunited near a grand 100-year-old hotel-turned-shelter. The boys got right down to business: drawing in a coloring book, like they would back in Puerto la Cruz, Venezuela. In their new home, the Row NYC, old friends and family renew their ties and strangers from different countries become neighbors.
Long Island City, QUEENS
Communities in Temporary Places
The Holiday Inn LaGuardia West in Long Island City, Queens, is a 15-story gray box in a mostly industrial neighborhood. Its 381 rooms constitute a small town of over 1,000 people. Some families have been there for months, though the city is considering a 60-day limit on stays at any one family shelter.
For all their numbers, the migrants, in most of the city, are invisible. The ones who sleep in shelters make up less than 1 percent of the city’s population. On the street, you may not recognize them as anything other than New Yorkers going about their lives.
Sergio Guzmán, 19, and Sara Farfán, 17, grew up a few hours away from each other in Colombia. They met at the Park West, a hotel near Central Park.
After Ms. Farfán was transferred to a shelter in Brooklyn, the couple bought a moped with money that Ms. Farfán’s mother, who lives with her, had made doing odd jobs around the city. Ms. Farfán said they wanted to “explore the city beyond the shelter,” adding, “You get tired of being locked up there.”
MIDTOWN MANHATTAN
A Summer in Crisis
New York’s migrant crisis is a slice of the global one, worsened by a combination of national immigration politics and local policies. The city was already seeing more newcomers last summer.
Later, it was reported that the city had hundreds of beds available in the city’s main shelter system, which has been kept separate from the shelter system created for the migrants.
Almost every plan by the city to open a major new shelter has been greeted with protests — in Staten Island, in Brooklyn, at the mayor’s Manhattan residence, Gracie Mansion.
FLORAL PARK, QUEENS
Tents and Tensions Rise
A tent complex for 1,000 men in the parking lot of Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Floral Park, Queens, drew opposition from residents who did not want the men staying near a school and a Y.M.C.A. Harjeet Singh Sandhu, a mural artist who has lived near Creedmoor for more than 25 years, led a protest of about 500 people
The city is constantly opening shelters. It has also closed them. Last fall it built a tent city on Randall’s Island, an expanse of playing fields and institutional buildings off Manhattan, only to take it down during a lull in border crossings. In August, new tents went up and 2,000 migrant men moved in.
Several recent protests focused on Floyd Bennett Field, a sprawling former airport in Brooklyn that is now part of the national park system. This month, a bipartisan group of lawmakers sued to block a migrant shelter there.
williamsbridge, the Bronx
A Business Card From the Border
About three-quarters of the migrants in the city’s care are from South America, but another growing group is from West Africa. Some Africans skip the city system and go first to community safe houses.
Imam Omar is often exhausted, but he never stops helping. It has been like this since 2020. “Anything people need, you don’t say you’re tired. Go ahead. Even if you’re sick, if a human being needs you, get up. Get up to go do what they need.”
Oumar Absatou Niass, a 24-year-old from Senegal and a distant relative of the imam, camped for more than two months outside his house. “We have no fear,” he said. “We’ve come a long way to get here. People died on the way.”
Elsewhere around the city, other New Yorkers have opened their homes to migrants and hosted a few at a time. Kimberly Acosta, 32, is one of several Venezuelans staying at the Harlem apartment of Hannah Wolfe, a psychologist who offered her home as a place to stay after reading about difficult conditions at some shelters.
Ms. Acosta tended pots of beef and chicken for arepas that she and her roommates sell in Corona, Queens, where they set up an impromptu food stall each night around midnight.
SUNSET PARK, BROOKLYN
Light in Sunset Park
The Sunset Park neighborhood in Brooklyn was already a haven for immigrants, mostly from China and Mexico. As darkness fell one recent evening, Elnazir Sidding, a new migrant from Sudan, sat on a bench in the park that gives the neighborhood its name.
A delivery of halal meals came, and the rug turned into a table where Mr. Haiballa ate a chicken dinner. (The shelter in the heavily used rec center has since closed.)
As summer turns to fall, migrants continue to stream into the city. If anything, the pace has quickened in recent weeks, as more people, including more families with children, have crossed the border. New York’s mayor and governor are pressing to put limits on the city’s court-ordered shelter guarantee.
“Never was it envisioned that this would be an unlimited, universal right or obligation on the city to have to house literally the entire world,” Gov. Kathy Hochul said this month.
ellis island
Seeking Asylum
Many political leaders and advocates have called the migrants asylum seekers. But that official designation can be hard to come by. Project Rousseau, a nonprofit that offers legal assistance to migrants, helps them complete the often daunting asylum application.
The city is putting increasing pressure on migrants, and providing more help for them to find housing, so that they can move out of shelters and make room for new arrivals. Almost half of the 116,000 who have entered the city’s care have left.
Aqdas Shahnoory, 17, and her family fled the Taliban in Afghanistan. On Ellis Island, she gave a speech in Dari, an Afghan variant of Persian: “We must remember that immigrants are not just numbers or statistics, but people with dreams.”