Asylum-seekers kick a soccer ball outside The Crossroads Hotel in Newburgh, N.Y., on June 22. | Karsten Moran for POLITICO
08/15/2023 04:13 PM EDT
NEWBURGH, N.Y. — When asylum-seekers cross the U.S. border with Mexico, many have a single priority — finding work. Or as one migrant put it: “Earning the green paper.”
But for the 100,000 migrants who have come to New York over the past year, they have been unable to be legally employed. The problem has created a standoff between the White House and New York leaders, leaving the migrants in the middle of a bureaucratic mess.
The fight has extended to the New York City suburbs where Mayor Eric Adams has bused about 1,600 migrants in recent months with the promise of work and a better life. But finding a job is not an easy task, and for those who do, the off-the-books labor can be rife with exploitation.
More than a dozen asylum-seekers who were moved from the city to Hudson Valley hotels said in interviews they have faced threats of deportation, wage theft and unsavory working conditions. The migrants — all of whom were granted anonymity because they fear retribution — said they get paid well below the minimum wage and sometimes don’t get paid at all.
“They don’t give you the opportunity for the permission to work, so you’re forced to take anything,” a 29-year-old Venezuelan man said in Spanish at the Ramada Hotel in Newburgh. The man said some jobs have paid him $100 for a 16-hour workday, roughly $6.25 an...
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