Nothing's as expensive as cheap imported labor, and New Yorkers are about to find that out the hard way.

According to the New York Post:

The NYPD’s force will be reduced to just 29,000 cops by the end of fiscal year 2025 — the lowest level since the mid-90s — amid a slew of city-wide budget cuts revealed by Mayor Eric Adams Thursday as the Big Apple grapples with its multi-billion-dollar migrant crisis.

Under City Hall’s newly unveiled updated 2024 financial plan, the next five police academy classes will be axed — essentially decimating an already strained department as roughly 4,500 officers are expected to leave their ranks within the next 18 months.

Firefighters are also in the firing line with FDNY members who are on “long-term light duties” — meaning they’ve been injured on the job or are out sick — being forced into early retirement or fired under the plan.

“The defund the police crowd’s woke dream has come true. We were fed a line of BS that the wave of migrants would be a benefit to the city. Now we are defunding the police to pay for their beds,” Council Republican Minority Leader, Joe Borelli, raged.  

The astonishing thing is that none of them, other than Mayor Eric Adams, seem to recognize that migrants are why they can't have nice things. They can pay for the migrants or they can have a cop come to the phone when they get robbed but they can't have both. While migrant service cuts are on the table, what should be happening is the elimination of the entire free ride package -- instead of 20% cuts to migrant freebies, why not 100% cuts, getting rid of them altogether? Of course, the bureaucrats and NGOs would have to go, too, but that's probably where the problem is.

That's too complex for these people. So now in exchange for hundreds of thousands of migrants from the third world on their streets, commiting crimes, draining public resources, and demanding more, New Yorkers will have to deal with unpicked up garbage, fewer teachers in schools, no cops on call, and better hope your home doesn't catch fire. New York's world-class museums, such as the Met and the Natural History Museum will see cuts, too.

The move to cut does come from Mayor Adams, though, who has warned about these migrant costs for weeks now.

All the same, he may be appealing to the taxpayers by inflicting this pain, as he's doing this in the classic city-government way of avoiding any cuts at all: By cutting only the visible services. such as cops and teachers, he's avoiding cutting the real fat in government, such as bureaucrats, diversity administrators, arts commissioners, non-essential welfare programs, youth leadership building teams, travel and field trips, DEI administration and other dispensible agencies. He couldn't cut from that kind of waste? He had to start with the cops and firefighters?

New York City is brimming with bureaucratic fat to be cut but it's pretty suspect that he starts his cuts with the most visible parts of government services, except, of course, tax collectors.

All the same, the Post reports that much of the New York City Council thinks migrants have nothing to do with New York's budget woes. 

All of it points to a call for a federal bailout, with no reform of its lavish migrant packages in return. Joe Biden, of course, would happily give it to them except that it's an election year, and New Yorkers are therefore stiff out of luck.

Migrants come with costs and New York is about to learn just how costly they can get.

Image: Twitter video screen shot