State of emergency: Massachusetts and migration – The Boston Globe

Migration into — and out of — Massachusetts

The Globe’s Sept. 9 front-page story “Healey: Speed up migrants’ work forms” documents what is indeed a “desperate need” for concerted federal assistance to address the continuing influx of migrants to cities like Boston, New York, and Chicago. Expedited, if not immediate, grants of work authorization — as urged by the governor and many others — are a key element of that assistance.

It’s humanitarian and civically responsible because it will enable migrants to support themselves legally with less support from the city and state, and not in the undocumented shadows, where they’re subject to workplace abuse by unscrupulous employers. It’s economically responsible because, as Healey points out, tens of thousands of available jobs in the Commonwealth are sorely in need of filling.

For the Biden administration, it’s also a political imperative. Those inclined to discredit the White House as ineffectual or worse can gleefully point to Democratic mayors of some of our largest cities who have called out the Biden team for its failure to act more decisively, and swing voters are no doubt taking notice. Biden’s taking every possible step to provide this new and needed workforce with the necessary papers might not be a silver bullet, but it will go far to address this multiple-front crisis.

Michael Felsen

Jamaica Plain

The writer is a senior adviser and Access to Justice fellow at Justice at Work and the strategic enforcement adviser at Workplace Justice Lab@Rutgers University.

Re “Healey: Speed up migrants’ work forms”: We already have a housing crisis and too much traffic — not surprising since we’re the third most densely populated state, after New Jersey and Rhode Island. Faster work authorizations will probably attract more migrants to Massachusetts and encourage more illegal immigration to the United States.

Our country cannot support unbridled immigration. The United States is running out of water. Among much else, an aquifer that waters half the nation’s rice production is losing water twice as fast as nature replenishes its supply.

Climate change will reduce carrying capacity still further. Within several decades, “millions” of Americans will become climate refugees, according to ProPublica.

If anything, we need to stabilize, or even reduce, our population. But the Census Bureau projects that our population will grow by 79 million over the next 40 years, 68 million of that — equivalent to 3.4 New York states — from mass immigration.

If we’re going to save our country for our progeny, we need to face the fact that we can’t save the world.

David C. Holzman

Lexington

The shelter crisis is only the tip of the iceberg

Re “Cities, towns call for help as migrants pour in” (Page A1, Sept. 8): The recent influx of migrants has pushed Massachusetts’ shelter capacity to the brink, raised serious concerns among local leaders, and led Governor Maura Healey to declare a state of emergency. Yet the shelter crisis is merely the tip of the iceberg. The deeper crisis is the severe statewide housing shortage that has been growing for decades, primarily due to municipal border controls, enforced through restrictive zoning regulations, which impede the construction of new housing.

High rents and home prices have already forced thousands of Massachusetts families out of their homes and communities. Massachusetts families, not just newly arrived migrants, have been forced to move into emergency shelters, double-up in crowded living conditions, or move to distant communities or other states where housing is more abundant and affordable. The Massachusetts rental vacancy rate of 2.8 percent, the lowest in the United States, is less than half the national rate of 6.3 percent. We also have, not coincidentally, the third highest rents.

If you can’t build more housing, then one solution is to reduce the population; in fact, Massachusetts has the fifth highest rate of domestic net migration in the country. In 2022 alone, more than 50,000 people left Massachusetts for other states, including many young adults who grew up here but could not afford to remain. This is our migration crisis; it is entirely of our own making and we can choose to solve it by removing the power of cities and towns to police their borders through restrictive zoning. If there was ever a need for declaring a state of emergency, this is it.

Bruce Ehrlich

Jamaica Plain