After about a month of pointed hand-wringing, a pilot to provide asylum seeker families debit cards to the tune of about $350 a week for a family of four has begun. As the families go out and buy milk and eggs, hopefully the naysayers will see that the sky isn’t falling.
Let’s restate a basic and undisputed fact here: the Adams administration is already spending tons of money on the migrant response, with mixed results. The contractor DocGo, which as of late last year received up to $11 per meal, has thrown away likely hundreds of thousands of uneaten meals in the last year, wasting millions in taxpayer dollars.
As delineated by Comptroller Brad Lander, the city has generally been overspending on multiple services. Allowing migrants to directly purchase food and basic necessities themselves seems likely if anything to significantly reduce food costs and cut down on waste.
In any case, those are the types of questions a pilot is supposed to answer, and despite some of the overheated rhetoric, this is a very tiny pilot, lasting a mere six weeks and encompassing just 115 families. Once it’s complete, the city can and should evaluate the extent to which it can help reduce costs elsewhere, how much families ultimately need, and whether the current contractor, Mobility Capital Finance, is the right company to keep it going.
While some valid questions have been raised about the contracting process itself — an especially salient question given the issues with the city’s prior no-bid contracts — it’s not like MoCaFi seems out of its depth here. This type of low-income, municipal-focused finance is precisely in its wheelhouse, and Lander, who has been watching the city’s migrant contract spending like a hawk, signed off on it.
Much ado has been made about the fact that the contract in theory could extend to $53 million, but it’s worth noting that only about $2 million of this would end up going to MoCaFi itself, meaning some 96% of the spending would be expected to go directly to needy families — a pretty good overhead to services ratio.
The other retort here is that these migrants are getting something that needy locals aren’t, but that’s only true in the narrowest possible sense. While citizens and residents are eligible for programs like Medicaid and SNAP, asylum seekers are not, meaning that whatever safety net the city provides is the only thing they get to keep them from going hungry.
If the worry is that the cards will act as a draw, we’ll say it seems pretty unlikely that someone would sell all their worldly possessions and trudge a 1,000 miles across treacherous terrain for the promise of a few weeks of subsidized food and diapers. Plus, as we’ve already established, the city is providing this aid anyway, just less efficiently. At base, the teeth-gnashing seems like mainly an ideological discomfort with giving migrants money.
Of course, this is one more thing that the city shouldn’t have the primary responsibility of paying for. The federal government already provides some direct financial supports for refugees, and it’s more than capable of doing so for asylum seekers for at least some runway period. The backlash comes either way, at least the president could take some of the heat off localities.
