BY: Keith S. Shikowitz, Investigative Reporter
He also said that he introduced legislation along with Ken Zebrowski in the Assembly that was going to give them some relief and allow the state to renegotiate that so that we were not putting businesses on the hook due to the fact that inflation has occurred, and things have gone up and unfortunately after we passed that through the legislature, the Senate and the Assembly, and the governor vetoed that.
Our governmental system is based on two things, a separation of powers amongst the branches and a checks and balances that ensures that no one branch becomes more powerful than the others. Melnick pointed this out.
“That’s just one example. You can do a lot in the legislature, but it’s important to make sure that the governor comes on board. We had a governor when I started who found his way out of power because he couldn’t stop groping women and all those other things that he shouldn’t have been doing. We had a new governor who came in and certainly she didn’t have any of those proclivities, but honestly, she had a big learning curve, and I wasn’t happy that she vetoed some of the bills we had passed.”
A major problem in the state is that the governor and other politicians on that side of the aisle, have made
New York a sanctuary state and a lot of illegal immigrants have come into the state, and they are giving money to these illegals. New York City is giving them debit cards and stuff. In the state they are wanting to do things with the same kind of stuff. How do you feel about that because it affects everything. I mean, it’s our tax dollars going to people who come into this country illegally breaking our laws and then they’re getting free stuff and American citizens can’t get stuff that we pay taxes for.
So, we clearly have a broken immigration system. There’s no question, everybody that looks at this and I’ve been watching Congress and hoping that they can get their act together to fix it because what we have now is millions of people that are crossing the border, turning themselves into border patrol officers claiming asylum.
They may be qualified. They may not be qualified. Nobody will know for years because the amount of judges that are out there to actually look at those asylum cases and see, are you actually a valid person to get asylum?
Because you’re fearing you, you’re going to be killed if you go back to your country or do you just want to live here? And if you just want to live here, that’s not what the law says. If you really were fleeing religious persecution or political persecution or anything like that, you can claim the asylum, but Congress has not done what they need to do.
They’re deadlocked now. I’ve watched there’s been negotiations in the Senate and the House and so what we’re left as New York State is we’re holding the bag. So, New York City, you mentioned they have what’s called this right to shelter law, which was put in place years ago for just folks that are homeless. That says that basically, if you’re homeless, the city has to provide you shelter. Nobody thought when they put that in there are going to be hundreds of thousands of people coming over all of a sudden to need that. And so we are being left to pick up the pieces from what you asked me, Washington has done nothing to address this crisis for years.
It goes after Biden under Trump under Bush, Obama, you name it. It’s not a recent crisis. It’s just seeming to get worse and worse as we go along.
If you look at the numbers under the Trump administration, there was very little illegal crossing. Compare that to the numbers under Biden and there is a stark difference and increase in those numbers.
You got 20,000 troops in Mexico, there was even stay in Mexico, and they were building the wall, people were coming in but they were being vetted and they were being…
Melnick responded, “So there was, I think it’s the case that there were actually quite a lot. There were not during COVID because for many reasons, everything shut down and we were able to use aspects of the law during COVID to keep it even more shut down. The problem now is that these are not mostly people that are coming here that are sneaking in and evading detection, they’re crossing the border and, in some cases, turning themselves in directly to a border patrol agent. They want to get found and they want to get found because they know that the current American law says that if you cross the border and you say I’m claiming asylum, you can.”