Queens flooded with more migrants than any other borough, data shows
Queens is bearing the brunt of the Big Apple’s migrant crisis, with more settling in the borough than anywhere else in the city, immigration court data shows.
At least 39,131 migrants listed a Queens address on their initial paperwork upon entering the country this fiscal year through through the end of August, edging out Brooklyn, where at least 36,579 migrants planned to settle, according to stats tracked by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a nonprofit at Syracuse University.
At least 18,910 and 16,151 migrants indicated they would be staying in the Bronx and Manhattan respectively, and 2,462 said they were headed to Staten Island, the data shows.
Meanwhile, the number of incoming migrants coming to Queens and Brooklyn are surging, with nearly 10,000 declaring their intention to move to Queens, and just under 9,000 heading to Brooklyn, in July and August alone.
“I don’t see it slowing down as much as people think it will,” Queens Borough President Donovan Richards Jr. said. “This problem is not going to go away anytime soon.”
“Before we saw this we were dealing with a housing crisis, so we had 40,000 New Yorkers in shelters, and of course with this crisis it just exacerbates that issue,” he said.
Richards added that many of the migrants he has met are mothers and their children, who put pressure on an already overwhelmed school system.
“We have some of the most crowded schools already.” Richardson said.
Earlier this month, a Long Island City high school hit capacity and students, some of whom were wearing migrant shelter IDs, were photographed waiting in a line that stretched around the block just to get in.
The ballooning migrant population in the borough has also led to depleted food pantries that were already stretched thin, Richardson said.
Approximately one in five children in Queens do not have reliable access to nutritious food, double the nationwide rate of food insecurity of 10%, according to a report by the Zara Charitable Foundation released in June.
A plan that could bring relief to the borough has been met with contention.
Dozens of lawmakers – led by Democratic state Assemblywoman Jaime Williams and Republican city Councilwoman Joann Ariola — filed a lawsuit Tuesday to block a plan that would house more than 2,000 immigrants at Floyd Bennet Field days after the city finalized a deal to use the federal property in South Brooklyn that sits on the borough’s border with Queens.
If the courts rule that the city and state can use the more than 1,000-acre field to house migrants, Richardson said it would reduce pressure on the borough already housing approximately 1,000 migrant men at Creedmor Psychiatric Center in Queens Village.
“For the neighborhood, for Eastern Queens, they have never seen 1,000 homeless individuals in their neighborhood,” he said.
