Borelli Says S.I. Is "Guilty As Charged" For Not Taking More Migrants

Queens Borough President Donovan Richards is carping on Staten Island for not taking in more migrants. A recent story in the New York Post broke down the numbers on how many migrant shelters are in the city by zip code. Long Island City, for instance, has 23 alone- more than four times the number in the entirety of Staten Island.

Richards has complained that Staten Island should take in more migrants, but officials in the forgotten borough say he has only brought the mess on himself. One of those officials is New York City Councilmember Joe Borelli (R-NY 51). Speaking on 710 WOR’s Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning program, Borelli readily admits there is only one response to Richards’ claim that Staten Island isn’t doing its fair share.

“Guilty as charged,” Borelli told Berman and Riedel. “We don’t want to take in migrants, but at least with us, we have had the honesty and the decency of being open about this fact since October of 2022, when we said we don’t want to be a sanctuary city… You know, it’s rich that the Queens borough president wants to open shelters on Staten Island, but I feel like we should just go back and take a time machine just a few months ago, when he was, you know, parading down the street talking about how virtuous he is for wanting sanctuary cities in the first place.”

Borelli says the issue is not even distribution of migrant shelters throughout the city, but rather ending a gravy train that the city can’t afford in the first place. “I’m not being facetious; I don’t care. Most of us around the city now have realized this is a real problem, and instead of adding shelters to under-, you know, homeless-sheltered communities, we should be ending contracts on the ones we have. We’ve given people, in some cases, two years of free housing, free food, free clothing, free everything. That’s enough. If you haven’t figured out your life in two years, or you haven’t come to the realization that maybe this isn’t gonna work out here, then that’s not our problem anymore.”

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