U.S. residents must list past addresses and help the government investigate whether those homes are still available. If they aren’t, officials ask if they know anywhere else they can stay. But for asylum‐seekers, the government only asks about past addresses or alternative contacts inside the U.S. and only if they’ve been here for more than 30 days.
Asylum‐seekers are not denied government‐provided places to live even if they abandoned multiple homes or shelters elsewhere in the world. They are not denied if they have friends or relatives who could house them abroad. They are not denied if they left homes or shelters in other states unless they were also in the U.S. for more than a month.
Predictably, immigrants are overwhelmingly approved for shelter. The government does not separately report denial rates for immigrant families, but you can clearly see the effect of the lax policy toward immigrants in the overall denial rate.
In July 2022, New York City denied 82% of all families requesting shelter. At that point, New Yorkers were the overwhelming majority of applicants. But the next month, Texas began to bus immigrants to New York. Mayor Eric Adams very publicly welcomed them into New York shelters. Immediately, the overall shelter denial rate started to fall.
Policies didn’t get easier for homeless New Yorkers. The drop in the denial rate was caused by lenient policies for immigrants. Total applications for family shelters are way up, approvals are way up, but denials have barely increased. Since May 2023, about half of all families, immigrants and New Yorkers, applying for shelter have been approved. For the denial rate to fall from 82% to 54%, over 80% of the increase in new applicants, including immigrants, must be getting approved.
This indulgent policy is a major reason why the population of asylum‐seeking families in New York shelters has exploded from hundreds to nearly 53,000. In 2021, there were just 13,000 families in the system overall, and it wasn’t because few American families wanted free hotel rooms in New York. It was because the government had standards for shelter that it enforced.
The city is compounding its refusal to screen immigrants by putting them up in rooms in hotels that are usually charging the city over $200 per night — far more than rent for many apartments in the city. Much cheaper options are available, including upstate, and anyone who refuses cheap alternatives can be legally denied shelter as well.
The city claims that investigating foreign places to live jeopardizes asylum‐seekers’ safety. But it provides no evidence for this claim. Are the Maduro or Castro regimes going to murder Venezuelan or Cuban dissidents on the streets of New York City? If the asylum‐seekers will return home if they don’t get government‐provided shelter, are they really asylum‐seekers?
There is nothing wrong with deciding to move to the U.S. or New York City, but there should be no expectation of a free hotel when you get here. If you truly have nowhere else to live and want the taxpayers to pay for you to live here, you must be at least willing to prove it.
If New York changes its policies, immigrant families without places lined up will disperse across the country rather than load up in the city. They generally won’t come to New York unless they have a place to stay. It is now known around the world that New York has this policy, and it will end in disaster.
It won’t be good for the immigrants in the long run, either. Government shelter limits immigrants’ mobility to go to where the jobs are, slowing their paths to self‐sufficiency.
Congress should not bail out New York. A better plan would involve ensuring that immigrants can work legally, and a comprehensive reform of the legal immigration system should focus on initiatives where Americans sign up to sponsor immigrants, assuring that they will help them if they need a place to stay.
New York can’t wait for a comprehensive solution. It must start with its own rules and fix this situation before it’s too late.
