Imagine you’re a healthy young man who made your living with a knife and a gun in Venezuela, Honduras or Haiti.
You get to the American border with Mexico, cross over with no papers and, coached by leftist lawyers, tell a harried border patrol agent you demand asylum.
You don’t have a legitimate reason, but the agent is too busy filling out forms for the hundreds of people behind you to care.
The Catholic Charities welcome wagon showers you with goodies and treats you like the persecuted migrant you claim to be.
You accept a bus ticket to New York and marvel at how easy it all is, just like your cousins, who came in January, said it would be.
The ride is long but comfortable and you’re greeted like a long-lost relative when the bus stops in Manhattan at the Midtown bus terminal.
More smiling greeters shake your hand and give you another bag of freebies, including a phone.
They direct you to another bus, which takes you to the Roosevelt Hotel on Madison Avenue.
It’s overflowing with young men.
Women are selling chicken and rice out of coolers.
One man is getting a haircut on the street.
Welcome to New York.
The chaos feels like home, only with bigger buildings.
You see a guy you knew there and he offers you a “job.”
Fill a garbage bag with anything you can grab at a pharmacy and you’ll get paid, he says.
Why not?
You paid a cartel $10,000 to get here, and you’re broke.
Soon you’re “shopping” in a nearby CVS.
Again, you marvel at how easy it is.
Employees say hello when you arrive, and don’t try to stop you as you fill your large bag and leave.
What a country!
Deadly consequences
This is not the story of an actual migrant, but neither is it a work of pure fiction.
It’s the profile of many young migrants, so much so that Bloomberg News recently carried this headline: “Venezuela’s Violent Deaths Fall to 22-Year Low on Migration.”
It appeared soon before Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student in Georgia, was murdered.
Her case was a flashpoint at the State of the Union address because the suspect, Jose Antonio Ibarra, is a Venezuelan who entered the United States illegally in 2022.
The Daily Signal, citing his long rap sheet, dubbed him a “menace to society.”
We could say the same about the so-called migrant influencer Leonel Moreno, who mugged for the camera while waving a stack of $100 bills.
“I didn’t cross the Rio Grande to work like a slave,” he said on Instagram.
“I came to the US to mark my territory.”
He touted a law that he claimed allows squatters to take over houses that have been abandoned for as little as 30 days.
“Friends . . . invade abandoned houses,” he ordered.
He’s in jail on federal charges, thankfully, but he wasn’t the only one who saw an opportunity in empty houses.
Armed and squatting
A Sunday Post report told the harrowing story of eight migrants, at least one of them an armed Venezuelan, who were squatting in a Bronx house.
After a police raid because the armed man flashed his gun to a neighbor, several of the eight were immediately released by a judge whose first instinct is to turn ’em loose.
The judge, Eugene Bowen, also released two men last November who were caught on video beating a cop who asked them not to smoke on a subway platform.
Day in, day out, it’s a perfect storm of man-made decisions that are having hurricane-like effects on New Yorkers’ safety and quality of life.
President Biden’s open-border policy compounds the damage done by the open-the-jails movement in Albany and City Hall that are turning the criminal-justice system into a sieve.
Recidivists are often back on the streets while the cops who arrested them are still filling out paperwork.
The pattern is not incidental to the case of the six people who went on a destructive shoplifting spree at an Upper East Side Target last week.
Cops who tried to stop them were attacked by two of the shoplifters, injuring one of the cops.
Both men charged with assault have long rap sheets.
Of the six, all of whom are Venezuelan, one escaped and five were arrested.
But four of the five were soon released without bail and only one is being held at Rikers.
Stories like these are routine these days, but they were unheard of just a few years ago.
Gotham is in the midst of an epidemic of crime without punishment, and it’s not sustainable.
Neither is the flood of unvetted migrants who continue to cross the border.
As many as 10 million have come across since Biden threw open the gates and pledged to be kind.
And still they come by the thousands.
While not all have a criminal mindset, enough do that New York and other cities are crying uncle.
Retail outlets are closing because of the cost of the thefts and the danger to workers, who often lose their jobs.
Stores that stay open often put most goods behind locked panels, a move that affects honest shoppers.
Where are the politicians and prosecutors?
Why do they stand mostly mute as the city is being destroyed, one ransacked business at a time?
We know where the state attorney general and the Manhattan district attorney are.
They abdicated their jobs to protect the public and instead are engaged in obsessive partisan hunts for their white whale.
Even if they bankrupt and imprison Donald Trump, it won’t stop a single one of the many perps carrying out the widespread shoplifting, physical assaults, robberies and car thefts driving New Yorkers to safer climes.
Mayor in the muddle
Then there’s Mayor Adams, who has been on both sides of the issue for two years.
Last September, speaking about the flood of migrants, he said at a Manhattan town hall meeting: “Never in my life have I had a problem that I did not see an ending to — I don’t see an ending to this. This issue will destroy New York City.”
He got that right.
At the time, there were an estimated 110,000 migrants in the city, but his anger was not so much about the number or backgrounds of the new arrivals.
Nor did he fault Biden.
It was all about the money — the mayor wanted more of it from Albany and Washington to help fund his embrace of the sanctuary city status.
Now the number of migrants in the city is well over 200,000, with many living in city shelters and leased hotels.
Yet the mayor doesn’t complain much these days.
The state and the feds have both chipped in more cash, though city taxpayers are still footing the bulk of the billions in costs.
Gov. Hochul also has never complained about the open border.
She did try to get the Legislature to agree to a retail-theft strategy, but Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie doesn’t believe penalties actually deter lawbreakers.
Yes, he really said that, so if Hochul gets anything passed, it will be watered down to the point of being useless.
And so it goes in the daily march to the bottom.
The politicians’ callous indifference serves as a reminder of one of the great lies: The government is here
to help.
