Both Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul have described the influx of migrants and asylum seekers into New York City as unprecedented.
“We are facing an unprecedented state of emergency. The immigration system in this nation is broken. It has been broken for decades. Today, New York City has been left to pick up the pieces,” Adams said last month.
Hochul, also speaking in August, said the “unprecedented migrant crisis” required a “historic humanitarian response.”
But is the more than 100,000 migrants who have entered the city’s care since last year actually unprecedented?
Interviews with scholars and a Gothamist review of immigration data dating from the 19th century to the present shows that the number of migrants entering the city is not unusual.
Ellis Island processed 100,000 immigrants in just a single month in April 1907, when much of the legal framework around modern immigration did not exist.
Ellis Island
Just a year before – in April 1906 – nearly 45,000 migrants passed through Ellis Island in one week.
Back then, neighborhoods like the Lower East Side were overburdened by an influx of migrants due to a lack of space, with more than 700 people per acre, according to the Library of Congress. Today, census data shows the neighborhood has about 136 people per acre.
Between 1996 and 2001, an average of 111,828 immigrants settled in New York per year, according to Department of Homeland Security statistics.
In 2011, around 95,000 migrants entered New York City, according to a report by the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs.
Alan Kraut, a historian with the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, said the political fight surrounding the current influx of migrants is different from generations past. Some of the migrants have arrived at the Port Authority aboard buses from the southern border sent by Republican governors – pawns in a larger debate about immigration policies.
He said the number of migrants arriving, however, is unremarkable.
“Certainly the idea of immigrants arriving in large numbers to New York, that’s a story as old as the city in the context of the country’s history,” Kraut said.
Representatives from City hall and the governor’s office emphasized that today’s migrants benefit from a legal right to shelter, unlike previous surges of immigrants. There are currently more than 58,000 migrants in the city’s care, according to the Adams administration.
Mayor Adams has sued to weaken the legal protections surrounding the right to shelter, saying the city can’t meet the law’s obligations.
Recent angry protests against the new arrivals – as have happened in Staten Island, Queens and outside Gracie Mansion – are also nothing new.
A ship pulls into New York Harbor in 1900.
In 1849, nativists fought with immigrants in the Astor Place Riots that left roughly two-dozen people dead. Nativists – who sought to place their “native-born” interests above those of new arrivals – frequently targeted Irish Catholic churches, according to Jay P. Dolan’s “The Immigrant Church: New York’s Irish and German Catholics 1815-1865.” There were repeated efforts, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, to limit who was allowed in.
“A city that attracts so many immigrants will generate opposition to immigrants,” said Kevin Kenney, a professor of U.S. immigration history at NYU.
At Ellis Island, tourists acknowledged immigrants built New York City, but were divided on whether the newest arrivals should be welcomed into the Big Apple. Many were aware of Adams’ recent comments that the migrant crisis could “destroy” New York City.
Mark Cunningham, 60, who was visiting New York City from the United Kingdom, said that Adams’ remarks were disheartening to him as a Black man.
“What they’re saying is that, we came here, our parents came here, now it’s time to drop the drawbridge and everybody else can swim,” Cunningham said.
Tourist Seana Broom, who was visiting from Scotland, wondered if New York City had changed from the days when Ellis Island processed tens of thousands of immigrants each year.
“Perhaps looking at Manhattan and looking at how sophisticated and economically sound it appears to be, it may be a case of if people feel politically, we don’t want anymore, we’ve got enough,” said Broom. “We’re not in the position we were all those years ago. People like to protect what they’ve got.”
