Mayor Adams unveils NYC migrant crisis blueprint that includes upstate job training program, national resettlement efforts

Mayor Adams’ administration is launching a job training program for migrants at an upstate New York college and undertaking efforts to resettle asylum seekers to other parts of the country as the city continues to house tens of thousands of them.

The new initiatives are part of a migrant crisis response blueprint Adams rolled out at a City Hall press conference Tuesday. Also part of “The Road Forward” blueprint is the launch of a new 24/7 arrival center for asylum seekers and an Office of Asylum Seeker Operations that will centralize the administration’s response to the migrant crisis, Adams said.

“Our goal is to help them become self-sufficient as soon as possible,” Adams said of the more than 30,000 mostly Latin American migrants who are currently in the city’s care.

The job training program will be based at SUNY Sullivan about 40 miles west of New Paltz, according to Adams’ office.

Coordinated with The Center for Discovery, the program will initially offer 100 migrants the chance to live on the SUNY Sullivan campus and receive employment training while they wait for their federal work authorization papers. It was not immediately clear what fields the job training program will focus on.

Adams said the administration will also engage with a variety of nonprofits and houses of worship to offer newly-arrived migrants the chance to relocate to other, “pre-vetted” cities and municipalities instead of staying in New York.

“There are many cities and states across the country that say they want to help,” the mayor said.

However, Adams said he won’t name the cities he’s looking to relocate migrants to because he claimed reporters like to “pit cities” against each other.

“We are not telling you. We’ll tell you when they get there,” he told reporters at the press conference.

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