Queen pols are fuming that the borough is being overloaded with rowdy migrants – and are calling for other Big Apple neighborhoods take their fair share of asylum seekers.
“It’s been a real challenge,” Queens Borough President Donovan Richards said Sunday. “Just because you have a loud voice and more wealth doesn’t mean you don’t do your fair share.
“What about Staten Island?”
The Post reported Sunday that the poorest neighborhoods in the five boroughs are taking a disproportionate number of the migrants flooding into the city – with Queens taking the brunt.
Queens is home to 70 of the 193 taxpayer-funded shelters – or 36% – being used to accommodate the more than 65,000 migrants still living in the city.
Long Island City alone has 23 government-run shelters, or 12% of the citywide total, with Jamaica and Briarwood housing 13 of the shelters in the borough.
More than 206,000 migrants have now passed through the city in all – with the number of arrivals now increasing back to about 1,000 per week, according to city data.
“We’re getting dumped on here,” said city Councilman Robert Holden. “How long can we sustain this? These shelters add nothing to the neighborhood.
“They only bring crime,” Holden added.
Councilwoman Vickie Paladino blamed progressive lawmakers who pushed “right to shelter” laws – “without limitations.
“You kind of get what you vote for,” she said. “Ask any Democrat if they support New York being a ‘sanctuary city.’ They all support it. This is what the progressives want.”
The migrant unrest that has rattled neighbors was in display at one shelter in Long Island City One on Sunday, where migrants have formed into hostile cliques – Latin American nationals on one side and African asylum seekers on the other – and have even allegedly started a “fight club.”
Haircuts and even tattoos are being sold right on the sidewalk on Austell Place.
“It’s slowly been sliding and now it’s like the third world, right here,” one 31-year-old local told The Post.
“That’s the best way to describe it,” said the woman, who asked that her name not be used. “You can’t walk down this street and say you don’t see it. The sidewalk is full of guys getting haircuts, tattoos. I swear to God, like a prison tattoo.
“Some nights turn into fight club, right here,” she added. “A couple of nights ago you could hear the noise half a block away.”
Many of the migrants refuse to eat the food handed out at the shelters and instead cook their own food on open flames outside, with the fires at times flickering dangerously between or even under parked cars, locals claim.
“They’re going to blow somebody’s f–king car up,” said Marin Hernandez, 19, who rides his bike past the shelter every day. “These guys are lighting fires in the street. They had a big fire going the other night with a bunch of post and lids and all sorts of s–t.
“I asked [one migrant], ‘Why the f–k are you doing this?’ A guy from Morocco explained to me that the West African guys can’t eat the food in the shelter,” Hernandez said. “They said they couldn’t eat the food at all. That it has nothing, no flavor or it is dead or something. He kept saying, to the West Africans, the food tastes dead.”
According to City Hall, Latin American migrants make up more than 70% of the population at the shelters, with 38% of all migrants from Ecuador and 19% from Columbia, the data show.
But natives of African nations now make up 13% of the asylum seekers at the shelters.
