Editorial: Migrants overwhelm NYC – is Massachusetts next?

When will Gov. Maura Healey have her Eric Adams moment?

Healey has been adding help and housing options across the state as an influx of migrants continues unabated. But like New York City Mayor Eric Adams can attest, the need for housing and help extends beyond the immigrant community.

The Healey administration announced Monday that a dorm at Eastern Nazarene College will serve as  emergency shelter for up to 58 families experiencing homelessness, including newly-arrived migrants. This is the second “welcome center” in Massachusetts, following the June opening of a center in Allston. There are also housing options at Joint Base Cape Cod.

The Brazilian Worker Center, which runs the operation in Allston, has recruited locals to serve as hosts for newly-arrived families who do not have housing.

As of July 21, there were 15 to 20 host families in Massachusetts, mostly active in hosting newly arrived families on the weekends, a spokesperson for the Executive Office of Health and Human Services said.

“Our administration continues to explore all options for expanding shelter capacity, including evaluating whether the host family program could be expanded,” the spokesperson said in a statement to the Herald earlier this month.

College campus, host families, welcome centers – Healey is stepping up to help those in need of housing and services.

“Our administration has been working hard to meet this unprecedented need and use every resource at our disposal to help families,” she said in a June statement after the Cape Cod base plan was unveiled.

But as Texas and other border states have demonstrated, the need will continue as more migrants cross the southern border. These states sounded the alarm and were largely ignored until they started sending migrants up north, to the places which talked a good compassion game, but hadn’t yet had to deal with border crisis firsthand.

And now we are.

Mayor Adams hit the wall first. As Politico reported, photos, videos and interviews from the street outside the midtown Manhattan hotel doubling as an intake center circulating online and in the national media are hammering home the point Adams has been making to President Biden.

“We need help,” Adams said Monday. “And it’s not going to get any better. From this moment on, it’s downhill.”

Groups of newly arrived men resigned to sleeping on cardboard boxes have found that, as Adams has repeatedly warned the White House, there is no room for them.

Adams has blamed the White House for not sending enough financial aid or acting on requests like expedited work authorization. More than 93,000 migrants have come to the city since last spring. More than half remain in its care.

As much as Biden tries to lay the blame for the border crisis at the feet of former President Donald Trump, this is happening under his watch. Northern states like Massachusetts are new hotspots for migrants, while we have our own homelessness crisis spurred in part by rising housing costs.

The well is not bottomless, and Massachusetts is in line to become another New York in terms of need outpacing supply.

Enough with touting Bidenomics – the president needs to pull out the stops to help states dealing with the border crisis fallout.