Media chooses to blame messaging rather than confront the truth of border crisis
The city’s migrant crisis has become “a specter that demagogues can use as the threat du jour,” says City Councilman Justin Brannan. “It used to be ‘defund the police’ or bail reform. Now this is the new thing they can divide and conquer on.”
Count this as yet another retread of the “Republicans pounce” gimmick: Shoot the messengers.
Brannan (D-B’klyn) offered up his “wisdom” in a Politico piece blaming Mayor Adams and The Post for “ceaseless, dire messaging” on the border, which is “threatening Democrats in a pivotal election year.”
Just as our reporting on crime, and Adams’ related rhetoric, supposedly confused voters and helped Republicans pick up several House seats in 2022.
The piece slammed the mayor for “rarely” letting “a week go by without issuing new pleas for Washington to help stem the flow of migrants into the nation’s biggest city.”
The bottom line: Stop talking about the border; you’re making Democrats look bad.
This much is true: A whopping 84% of New Yorkers consider the influx of migrants a serious problem.
But pretending the issue is messaging, not President Biden’s policies, is a delusional farce.
Democratic insiders like Brannan, and their media enablers, may buy it.
But the ones making Democrats look bad are Democrats (from Biden on down), who keep pretending everything is just fine (or, even more laughable, that the real problem is that Republicans won’t agree to just legalize everybody).
Adams doesn’t have the luxury of staying silent: The city has coughed up nearly $2 billion on migrants, with no end in sight as thousands more stream in every week.
Like many other big-city mayors, he has two choices: Send up a distress signal and hope for rescue or fall in line and watch your city buckle under the flood.
Yet New Yorkers don’t need Adams to flag the migrant crisis; they can see the effects in the overflowing hotels and shelters in every borough and the looming cuts to their city services.
If Republicans sweep in 2024, it will be because Democrats refused to stand up to Biden and demand change to unsustainable immigration policies.
Oh, and think twice before comparing the migrant crisis to crime: We were reporting the truth about that, too.
