05/24/2024
[Adapted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusivelyon VDARE.com]
Here’s the late Judy Garland with “Give my regards to Broadway …”
Ah yes, Broadway; the Great White Way, the Street of Dreams. Does any other thoroughfare in the United States have such a romantic, evocative name?
And on West 50th Street, halfway between Broadway and 8th Avenue, stands the Square Hotel. It is officially named the Square Hotel at Times Square, but that’s a stretch: Times Square is actually five blocks south; but I’ll just put that down to promotional license.
This is the very heart of New York City. Living there must be real expensive, right?
Right: figure six thousand a month for a one-bedroom apartment.
The Square Hotel is appropriately well-appointed. There’s a Japanese restaurant and bar in the lobby and the rooms are Art Nouveau style with sophisticated furniture, plush beds with down comforters and deluxe linens, flat-screen TVs with cable. and toiletries from C.O. Bigelow downtown, “the oldest apothecary in America.”
Great! Let’s book a room!
However, if you go to the hotel website at squarehotelnyc.com, all you get is a plain notice saying “THE SQUARE HOTEL HAS TEMPORARILY CLOSED. Please pardon our appearance as we slip into something new.”
Strange! Can a nice establishment like that, so centrally located, have gone out of business?
No: the Square Hotel is very much in business — just not with American citizens or legal residents. It’s in business with the City of New York. The Mayor of that city, Eric Adams, has filled up its 141 rooms with illegal aliens.
For the hotel and the city, it’s win-win. The hotel is getting easy money from the city and guaranteed full occupancy without having to provide traditional hotel services. And Mayor Adams gets to pretend he has the influx of illegals into his sanctuary city under control.
And upper-middle-class New York theatergoers get to feel good about themselves. Retiree Judie Rudman, 57, who came to see Arthur Miller’s “Enemy of The People” with her husband and three kids, told the New York Post that
I’m more concerned about the migrants than the theater goers. If they have a place to stay it makes the city safer.
[Chic hotel in heart of Broadway converted to migrant shelter in latest sign of growing NYC migrant crisis, by Carl Campanile and Marie Pohl, May 5, 2024]
There are of course also some losers.
There are potential tourists with one less place to stay in midtown Manhattan.
There are local merchants with correspondingly fewer customers.
There are hotel employees whose services are not required under the minimal new regime.
And there are the occasional victims of a mugging or a knifing by Venezuelan hoodlums resident at the hotel.
What do you get when you mix Close Rikers, Decriminalize everything, defund police, the Raise The Age act, ban the gang database and facial recognition technology, throw in unlimited migrants ? A teen getting stabbed by a gang of 18 migrants last night.https://t.co/mGNkSFNhRZ
— RealNewYorker212 (@RealNewYorker2) February 23, 2024
❗🇻🇪⚔️🇺🇸 — This is how 15-year-old Jesús Alejandro Rivas-Figueroa was arrested.
The Venezuelan migrant delinquent who shot a Brazilian tourist and a New York police officer after they confronted him about a shoplifting on Thursday night. pic.twitter.com/TmZhH5f3A4
— 🔥🗞The Informant (@theinformant_x) February 10, 2024
And, of course, there are (or will be) American voters.
Finding suitable high-class accommodation for foreign scofflaws is now big business all over. Associated Press told us last month about the city of Denver, which is rolling out a new, ambitious migrant support program, including six-month apartment stays and intensive job preparation for those who can’t yet legally work [Denver makes major shift in migrant response by extending support to six months but limiting spaces, by Jesse Bedayn, April 10, 2024].
As well as six months’ rent there also comes free food and utility assistance, a free computer, a prepaid cell phone and metro bus passes, training courses on English language, computers, financial literacy, and workers’ rights, and help with the paperwork for the scofflaws’ bogus asylum applications.
Meanwhile, up there in the State of Maine, the town of Westbrook wants to use private homes and churches as shelters for illegal aliens [Westbrook Wants to Turn Private Homes and Churches Into Homeless Shelters — 90 percent of welfare recipients in Westbrook are “New Mainers,” according to a city official, by Seamus Othot, MaineWire, May 20, 2024].
Our enemy is targeting the Whitest states to replace us. pic.twitter.com/QJv3spLHBj
— RAMZPAUL (@ramzpaul) May 22, 2024
Wait a minute: Is Westbrook, population 20,400, a sanctuary, er, town?
Is Maine a sanctuary state?
If neither, why don’t the town fathers just call in ICE to arrest and deport the scofflaws?
Does any government in our country — the Biden Regime or state, municipal, or local levels — give a flying fandangle about American citizens?
Or about fair but rigorous enforcement of the nation’s laws, duly passed by our elected representatives?
To ask the questions is to answer them.
John Derbyshire writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.
For years he’s been podcasting at Radio Derb, now available at VDARE.com for no charge. His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.
Readers who wish to donate (tax deductible) funds specifically earmarked for John Derbyshire’s writings at VDARE.com can do so here.
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