By random chance, I discovered a 32-minute YouTube video by a videographer named Nick Shirley titled, "I Lived with Migrants in NYC for 24hrs."

It was two weeks old, but what an amazing revelation it was, a very fine example of what good long-form journalism used to be.

Shirley, who speaks Spanish (and captions his videos in English well), has a talent for connecting to the illegal migrants and those in contact with them, and they open up and explain what they're doing, where they're going, and why. Sure, it's a lot of information we already knew, but seeing it through the eyes of particular people helps one to grasp the big picture better than individual data points.

Shirley begins with an immigrant from Ecuador named Fabian who lived in a shelter in New York City, explaining what he was getting from the state, what he does all day, how he makes money, why he came here illegally, and what motivates him.

It turns out he's getting a lot from the state -- free hotel, free room service, free food, free legal help, free transport out and many more services.

But it's an uncertain life. A single, military-aged young man, Fabian gets bounced from shelter to shelter, as do others, with migrants dreading some of them as disease-ridden hellholes. Most of the New York staff running these shelters are nasty -- and many migrants noted this. Some reported bad food, others said it was pretty good. It's no fun however, because the migrants have nothing to do all day but stand around and do nothing.

Fabian has a family back in Ecuador and said he didn't bring them along because he couldn't afford it. He said it was the story of many migrants, suggesting that if they are allowed to remain here, they will waste no time doubling or tripling the migrant population in the states as they bring in their families. Each migrant pictured in the border pictures on Fox News actually represents several people.

Fabian wasn't poor, however, He said he was a businessman and had a house and car and all the modern amenities back in Ecuador, but he was constantly being extorted by gangs, who once he makes money, shake him down for it. We also know that that's the story across Ecuador and why Ecuador's voters elected Daniel Noboa, but the interview did not reach that scope of questioning. It would have been good if it did.

Fabian, and virtually everyone interviewed were universal in their desire to be allowed to work. The migrant crisis is not about asylum, as the NGOs claim, it's about economic migration.

Fabian and others wanted work permits from the U.S., which is basically what legal immigration is for. It would give them the independence they sought, the higher standard of living they were looking for, and the capacity to bring in their families. It was viewed as downright an entitlement from the illegals, which shed some light on where the problem was. Fabian said he made $200 a day in Ecuador, and could make $200 a day in New York, with the only difference the lack of extortion from the New York side.

While that told us that Fabian was not a poor, starving, shantytown dweller fleeing unbearable poverty of leftist NGO narratives, it did tell us that he had some middle class values, some get-up-and-go, and in the video adventure, we learned that it was true. Fabian and Nick decided to go together to find a way to earn $10 so they could buy some lunch. Fabian offered to sweep floors, and do other menial work with various establishments, but drew no takers.

A street merchant Fabian asked for work from gave him $10 as a gift, even against his protestations, saying he too had once been a penniless immigrant. Fabian and Nick, being enterprising, decided to convert their $10 to $20 by buying some oranges from a market and trying to sell them first on the subway, and then in Times Square. They got robbed of two of their ten oranges on the subway, but managed to draw great sales in Times Square, selling all of their oranges for twice what they paid for them. With the $20, they got a nice meal together. It was an impressive example of a hardworking, worthy, immigrant despite his being in the U.S. illegally. All the same, that desire to work was clearly hitting the reality that there wasn't enough work for all the migrants coming in. Some expressed regret at even being here.

Nick also noted that he didn't see anyone trying to learn English with all his idle time waiting. They wanted the jobs, but had little interest in assimilation, which tells us that this migrant wave wasn't like other migrant waves where people apply, give up their culture, say goodbye to their homeland, do all the things historic immigrants have done. It was about instant gratification.

Nick then moved on to ordinary New Yorkers who generally had compassionate but commonsensical views on why migrants were coming -- because Joe Biden left the door open as one basically said. If someone offers you a gift, you take it, to paraphrase Milton Friedman. Yet they were bankrupting the city and schools and rec centers were closing. Obviously, there wasn't enough economy for them to take a place in. There was no housing, and no jobs.

Nick explored the issue of crime, too, with the criminal element coming alongside the better class of migrants. One cop-like figure he rode along with said that migrants weren't saying it it openly, but often the migrants rented rooms from the same criminals they supposedly fled. It made sense, as immigrants historically have always moved in networks and family and community support groups. Many cited a dread of the major Venezuelan gangs getting a foothold in the U.S. And Fabian earlier said that the shelters were often full of thieves who robbed the others daily.

Other migrants interviewed said they were headed out to Houston, and Arizona on free bus tickets provided by the City of New York in search of that work. They were fleeing the blue city same as other Americans do. That was telling, too. It was about far less than asylum than it was about finding work, jobs, yet there weren't enough jobs.

That called to mind that there weren't enough jobs because there wasn't enough 'economy.' Red states would have more than blue ones, but with at least ten million migrants allowed in and most of them coming to seek jobs, there aren't going to be enough jobs, nor housing for them because the U.S. is just too overregulated and overtaxed, particularly under Democrat rule.

While Nick didn't get into this, I think what it tells us is that only freeing our economy would make it possible to absorb all of these migrants if that would be what the public wants to do, and in practical terms, may be what happens anyway. Freeing our economy is never going to happen under Democrats, who have planted their boot firmly onto the economy and seek to make government wards of the citizenry and diminish the value of citizenship itself.

That means one of two things will happen in coming years: Either President Trump will get elected and the economy will be freed, meaning, the U.S. may be able to absorb the migrants here even as he severely disincentivizes illegal immigration and gets deportations going, though there is still the risk that some judge will stop him. (He couldn't even get rid of DACA, which was an Obama executive order that should have been wiped out easily). Those who want to work and assimilate will be able to do those things and the growing economy will be able to accomodate both them and the native-born Americans because the economic pie will expand.

On the other hand, if Democrats maintain both open borders and an overregulated economy, with central planning, high taxes, government dependency as a model, and other economy killing measures, the migrants could morph into a discontented helot class prone to rioting, or more likely, advance the spread of the informal economy, making the U.S. just like the shack cities of the countries these migrants left. Migrants will operate illegal businesses, squat illegally on public or private land, pay extortion cash to gangs, and live outside the rule of law and the authorities will just look the other way as the lawbreaking becomes so widespread. That's what goes on with shantytowns surrounding most Latin American capitals, and it would necessarily come here, except that one hopes that it doesn't.

What a future that portends with Joe Biden's disastrous open borders policies. The U.S. doesn't have that much room for this many people and as time goes on, this will become more and more obvious. That's the takeaway from Nick's video and I hope to hear more from him.

Image: Screen shot from Nick Shirley video, via YouTube