Easing work rules will only make New York’s migrant crisis worse

 One more time: Getting legal jobs for illegal migrants is not the answer to New York’s unprecedented migrant crisis.

Yet the state Civil Service Commission is looking to loosen rules to let migrants with federal work authorization take jobs in the state workforce — and skip over unimportant trifles like English proficiency or proof of previous employment.

Even more absurdly, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office is trying to sell this nonsense as part of a push to modernize the state workforce and eliminate red tape.  

Sorry, Gov: This is the opposite of forward-looking reform.

Civil Service Commissioner Timothy Hogues promises that the new rules, if adopted, would apply to all New Yorkers equally.

That is lower standards for all hires. Great.

New York’s overall unemployment rate, at 4.5%, lags the nation’s; the city’s is 5.4% — so it sure seems like these jobs (which Albany is quick to assure us are “hard-to-recruit, entry-level titles”) should be prioritized for legal residents of the state. 

Not a growing, gray-zone class of illegal migrants given ever-expanding privileges by progressive lawmakers and administrators. 

The number of state gigs that would fall under this new rubric is 4,000.  

So this is hardly, even on paper, a solution to the 170,000-plus migrant arrivals New York has seen. 

And there’s very little evidence these migrants want to work legally: Only 2% of NYC migrants have applied for work permits since the crisis began.  

But the real problem is that the move would add yet another incentive for migrants to come here — and stay.

Free food, shelter, and now the promise of easily obtainable civil service gigs. 

The past months with their record-smashing inflows — December saw more than 302,000 migrant Customs and Border Protection encounters alone — have shown that President Biden’s open-border policy is far more disastrous than even the most pessimistic imagined.

The literal last thing we need is for state executives, instead of solving the crisis, to try to make it permanent. 

https://nypost.com/2024/01/31/opinion/easing-work-rules-will-make-new-york-migrant-crisis-worse/