NYC’s ‘Right to Shelter’ Cannot Survive with the State’s Already Strained Resources

Standing in front of the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City last week, I found myself immersed in a world that felt both foreign and tragically familiar. I’m a Venezuelan immigrant, but I never imagined encountering fellow countrymen who had fled our homeland’s desperate situation to live in shelters in the Big Apple, thousands of miles away.

Standing by the hotel entrance was Milagros, a name that means “miracles” in English — appropriately enough, given her story. She is a 21-year-old mother of two children, the oldest of whom turned six the day I met her. She described her heartbreaking life story and how she and her children made it to the US southern border. She was orphaned at age 10 after her mother’s death and cared for by her grandmother, but her grandmother died during the COVID-19 pandemic.

With no support system in place, Milagros left behind a country ravaged by Nicolas Maduro’s socialist regime, which has presided over an 80 percent decline in GDP and the world’s largest refugee crisis. On her trip north, Milagros was lucky not to be a victim of crime herself; she witnessed a family being kidnapped by a Mexican cartel in Ciudad Juárez, where she spent months while waiting to enter America. She also saw “traumatic things” while crossing the dangerous Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama, a roadless jungle that divides the Americas.

Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post

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Daniel Di Martino is a grduate fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a Ph.D. student in economics at Columbia University, and the founder of the Dissident Project, a speakers’ bureau for young immigrants from socialist countries. Adapted from City Journal.

Photo by Fatih Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images