The Migrant Crisis Has Not Destroyed New York. But Challenges Remain.

To help migrants integrate into city life, officials should first treat their arrival as an opportunity rather than a catastrophe, advocates say.

It was a year ago this month that Mayor Eric Adams announced at a town-hall meeting that the migrant crisis would “destroy New York City.” Since they were first bused from Texas in the spring of 2022, more than 216,000 migrants have passed through New York, though their arrival may not turn out to be the most damning crisis of the Adams era.

The mayor outlined his doom scenario long before his administration began to unravel under the scrutiny of multiple federal investigations — before the police commissioner was forced to resign; before the mayor’s chief counsel quit, explaining that she could “no longer effectively serve”; before two former fire chiefs were arrested on bribery charges.

The influx of so many people fleeing various oppressions in Latin America and West Africa, all coming in such rapid sequence, has placed enormous burdens on the system, but it has not wrecked it. From the very beginning, the crisis revealed the willingness of ordinary New Yorkers to generously extend themselves, even as the rhetoric out of City Hall, steeped in resentment and a sense of futility, hardly encouraged it.

By December 2022, to cite one example, a woman named Ilze Thielmann had grown a network of volunteers from 10 to 800, most of whom were meeting the new arrivals at the Port Authority Bus Terminal every day and helping ensure they had hot meals, T-shirts, fresh underwear and transportation. Ms. Thielmann put $50,000 worth of pizza, doughnuts and bus tickets on her own credit card, she told me recently, before she had much sense that she would be reimbursed through grant money coming from organizations like United Way.

In a place the mayor frequently exalts as “the city of yes,” the political response lacked a comparably welcoming energy or enthusiasm. One year after his dispiriting comments, it is easier to see the dissonance in his administration’s handling of the situation, which City Hall has simultaneously treated as an emergency and as an intractable problem for which, Mr. Adams has said, he sees “no ending.”

In the administration’s defense, the mayor’s deputy press secretary, Liz Garcia, pointed out that thanks to its case management and “resettlement efforts,” more than 150,000 migrants have left New York’s shelter system since the beginning of the crisis “and taken their next steps toward self-sufficiency.”