Mayor Johnston Leads Coalition Seeking Support for Migrant Crisis
- forshman
- Nov 2, 2023
- 2 min read
Published in: Denver News
Denver Mayor Mike Johnston today is leading a coalition of Mayors from Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, and New York City to Washington, D.C. to urge the Biden Administration to offer more support to cities supporting migrant refugees from the Southern border.
The coalition of Mayors sent a letter to President Biden and congressional leadership urging them to offer more financial support, increase work authorization for migrants, and prioritize a coordinated entry response to ensure new arrivals make it to their final destination. Read the full letter here.
Read more from the AP’s Colleen Long:
The mayors of Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles and New York are pressing to meet with President Joe Biden about getting federal help in managing the surge of migrants they say are arriving in their cities with little to no coordination, support or resources from his administration.
The Democratic leaders say in a letter obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday that while they appreciate Biden’s efforts so far, much more needs to be done to ease the burden on their cities.
In Denver, the number of migrants arriving has increased tenfold and available space to shelter them has withered. With fewer available work authorizations, these migrants cannot find work that would allow them to get into proper housing.
Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, who is leading the coalition, said nearly every conversation he has had with arriving migrants is the same: Can he help them find a job, they ask.
“The crisis is we have folks here who desperately want to work. And we have employers here who desperately want to hire them. And we have a federal government that’s standing in the way of employers who want to hire employees who want to work,” Johnston said.
Also signing on were the mayors of the country’s four largest cities: Eric Adams of New York, Karen Bass of Los Angeles, Brandon Johnson of Chicago and Sylvester Turner of Houston.
In years past, when migrants arrived, they would be released and picked up by nonprofit groups before usually going to stay with a relative already in the U.S. But the nationalities of the people arriving have changed, and many no longer have any place to go.
Biden has requested $1.4 billion from Congress to help state and local governments provide shelter and services for migrants, after earlier pleas from Democratic mayors and governors. Johnston and the other mayors say in their letter that more is needed, and they are asking for $5 billion.
The mayors also want an accelerated work authorization approval process so migrants can find work.
The cities are full of people who have applied, but there are delays of six months or more. The mayors also are pushing to expand authorizations so anyone released into the U.S. would become eligible to find work while they wait for their immigration cases to play out.
Lastly, they are asking for the administration to create a regional migrate coordinator who would work with the federal government, nonprofits and state and local officials. The aim is to better coordinate and place migrants in areas where there is capacity for them.
“We think there is a real commonsense path here that and that’s why we thought it was important,” Johnston said.
News via denvergov.org
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