NY To Migrants: "Free Stuff!"

In an article entitled "Inside Mayor Adams' migrant debit card boondoggle — no-bid bank gets $50 million, border crossers up to $10,000 each," the New York Post reports on Mayor Eric Adam's administration giving away pre-paid cash cards to illegal aliens. As the article relates:

    Unusually for the mayor, Adams didn’t publicize this story himself, and his administration for nearly a month has failed to correct several public misperceptions about it.

    One misperception is that the program allows the city to give out just $50 million to migrants.

    No wonder the mayor has been reticent.

    This debit card program — if you read the actual contract — has the potential to become an open-ended, multibillion-dollar Bermuda Triangle of disappearing, untraceable cash, used for any purpose.

    It will give migrants up to $10,000 each in taxpayer money with no ID check, no restrictions and no fraud control.

 The program, the article continues, was originally sold as a way to save money ("save" in the government sense of "save" and not in the sense any normal person uses the term). That is, since the illegals were too good for the free food that the city was providing and most of the food was going to waste, the city could save money by giving them money to buy their own food. Except that there are no restrictions on how the money on the cards is spent--they can even be used at ATMs.

    Rather than bid the contract, however, the city’s Housing Preservation & Development department (HPD) only considered one business per the order of Mayor Adams: Newark-based Mobility Capital Finance (MoCaFi), an inexperienced company whose appears to have been picked because of its minority ownership. But it is a good gig for MoCaFi because, under the contract with the city, MoCaFi will be paid $53 million in order to manage a pilot program distributing $1,000 per month (although up to $10,000 can be loaded onto each card) to 500 families in the Roosevelt Hotel. That is only $6 million.

    And, according to the article, that $53 million is just MoCaFi's fees--it doesn't include the $6 million to the illegals which still has to come from the city.

    In other words: For a maximum of $53 million, MoCaFi issues blank Mastercards, in bulk.

    That’s it.

    And for the “service” provided, MoCaFi not only makes money from each card distributed, but gets a 3% fee on the first $50 million the city puts on the cards — that is, $1.5 million. That fee drops, but only slightly, after that first $50 million.

    It’s easy to work out how MoCaFi would get a $50 million or so fee, the maximum allowed under the contract. After stripping out various fees the company gets for printing up the blank cards and such, the city has purposely given itself the flexibility to disburse at least $2.5 billion on these pre-paid debit cards over a year.

* * *

    So, to sum up so far, the Adams administration, with no oversight, no consultation with the city council, and no public discussion, has given itself the flexibility to launch a massive parallel benefits program, alongside — not replacing — traditional welfare cash assistance and (for New Yorkers legally in the country long-term) federal food stamp benefits.

And from where is Adams going to get the money to pay for these programs? For one, it appears that New York City is raising property taxes. And, for another, Adams is planning on cutting the NYPD by 6,000 officers, making cuts to education as well as other cuts to city services to help pay for the illegals.

     But, to paraphrase Dr. Suisse, that is not all ... no, that is not all. Breitbart reports that the State of New York has changed its welfare rules to allow illegals to receive cash payments. From that article:

    Gov. Kathy Hochul’s Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance (OTDA) modified its Safety Net Assistance (SNA) program’s parameters in 2023, making migrants who have filled out asylum application forms eligible to receive even more taxpayer dollars. 

    A memo quietly sent out to New York welfare office workers from the Hochul administration on May 12, 2023, carefully revised the standards needed to qualify for SNA, expanding them to include “non-citizens who are considered permanently residing under color of law (PRUCOL).”

    “PRUCOL is not an immigration status, but a public benefit category used by OTDA for the purposes of Safety Net Assistance (SNA) eligibility,” the memo reads, before listing the several different kinds of immigration documentation SNA providers should accept from migrants. 

    SNA is a program that provides cash assistance to eligible needy individuals and families who do not typically qualify for other forms of welfare, including single adults, childless couples, children who do not live with adult relatives, and families of drug or alcohol abusers. 

    “Generally, you can receive cash SNA for a maximum of two years in a lifetime,” OTDA said. “After that, if you are eligible for SNA, it is provided in non-cash form, such as a payment made directly to your landlord or voucher sent directly to your utility company.”

    It is believed that about ten percent of New York’s migrants will receive (or are already receiving) the additional cash benefits from SNA; however, the OTDA did not release actual numbers of migrants affected by the rule change, the New York Post reported.

    Over 173,000 migrants have poured into New York City alone since the spring of 2022, so it is possible that more than 17,000 could be receiving SNA benefits just in the city.

Sounds like NYC and the State of New York have not yet learned their lesson. Time to send more illegals from Red states to NYC.