Denver discovers how expensive migrants can be

 National Review:

In February 2018, Denver city leaders sent a valentine to foreigners interested in relocating to the progressive mountain city and a message to any elected officials looking to stop them.

Draped on Denver’s City and County building was a large, blue banner: “Denver ❤️ Immigrants.”

If it wasn’t clear enough, then-mayor Michael Hancock posted on social media that it was a statement of “love” to let immigrants know that Denver is “an open and welcoming city.”

Denver leaders unfurled that welcome banner six months after they passed an ordinance curtailing the city’s ability to cooperate with federal immigration agents during a Trump-era crackdown on illegal immigration. Hancock also issued an executive order at the time directing city agencies to aid illegal immigrants in Denver and setting up a legal defense fund for them.

But six years later, amid a crisis that has seen more than 40,000 migrants arrive in the city since late 2022, Denver leaders appear to have a new message for some of their so-called “newcomers”: If you stay in Denver, you will suffer.

“The opportunities are over,” an official with new mayor Mike Johnston’s office told a gathering of migrants in Spanish inside a city shelter in late March, according to a video obtained by a local television station. “New York gives you more. Chicago gives you more.”

Denver has run out of resources, he told them, offering bus fare to somewhere, anywhere else.

“If you stay here,” he added, “you are going to suffer even more, and I don’t want to see this.”

While the immigration crisis has hit Chicago and New York City hard, in large part due to Texas governor Greg Abbott’s program of busing migrants to deep-blue sanctuary cities, it has absolutely hammered Denver, which is only a fraction of their size.

In January, the city was housing and feeding almost 5,000 migrants, mostly Venezuelans, in hotel shelters. Other migrants slept in tents on sidewalks and in parking lots, adding a new wrinkle to Denver’s ongoing struggles with panhandling and squalid homeless camps.

At intersections throughout Denver, migrants with water bottles and squeegees head into traffic to try to make a few bucks washing drivers’ windshields.

To address a migrant-driven financial crunch, the city is now cutting hours at local rec centers, slashing park programming, and freezing hiring in some departments. To save a little money, the city has decided against planting flowers in some of its parks and medians this spring.

The migrant crisis has cost the Denver region at least $170 million, according to a conservative estimate by Colorado’s Common Sense Institute, which looked at city spending as well as school and hospital costs, and is almost surely an undercount.
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Denver should be blaming Joe Biden and his open borders policies and not Texas Governor Greg Abbott.  American cities did not have this problem when Trump was president.