Posted on Friday, March 7, 2025
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by Andrew Shirley
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New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s recent announcement that the iconic Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan will no longer be used as a migrant shelter has provided renewed hope that America’s largest city might yet recover from the calamitous effects of mass illegal immigration.
Since 2023, the luxury Roosevelt Hotel, a stunning architectural masterpiece that opened in 1924, has been used to house the flood of migrants pouring into New York City. With its limestone exterior now covered in graffiti and its beautiful neoclassical lobby left rotting and decrepit, the hotel has become a symbol of the failure of open borders and sanctuary city policies.
In total, New York City has spent more than $7 billion on migrants since 2020 – including $220 million on a three-year contract to convert all of the Roosevelt’s 1,025 rooms for use as a migrant shelter, starting at a nightly rate of $202.
But it wasn’t just New York City taxpayers who were footing the bill. Earlier this year, the hotel received $59 million from FEMA to house migrants. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem is now attempting to claw back those funds, as she says an executive order from President Donald Trump expressly forbids taxpayer funding of hotel rooms for migrants.
More than 173,000 migrants have enjoyed lodging at the Roosevelt, including Jose Ibarra, the illegal alien who infamously killed Georgia nursing student Laken Riley last year. The Trump administration has also said that the hotel was a base of operations for Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
New York’s migrant shelter population reached a peak of 69,000 in January 2024 and now sits around 45,000. In 2024, the city averaged 4,000 migrant arrivals every week. That number is now down to around 350 per week thanks to Trump’s swift action to secure the border.
The Roosevelt Hotel itself is owned by Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) through a subsidiary known as PIA Investments Limited. The Pakistani government directly controls both entities. PIA purchased the building in 2000 for $36.5 million. But the COVID-19 pandemic forced the hotel to close its doors in December 2020, threatening hundreds of jobs.
In May 2023, Mayor Adams signed the lease with PIA to reopen the Roosevelt as a migrant shelter. At its peak, the hotel sheltered 2,852 migrants, at a cost of more than $575,000 per night to the city.
When the hotel ran out of rooms, many migrants sheltered in the lobby or on the street outside the hotel. Crime in and around the area increased precipitously. According to one report, felony assaults rose 6.3 percent and shoplifting jumped 23 percent in the neighborhood.
Adams now says he plans to have all migrants moved out of the hotel by June. PIA, meanwhile, has said it wants to sell the property for what some experts believe could be as much as $1 billion.
It’s unclear if a new owner would want to rehab and reopen the Roosevelt as a hotel or tear down the antiquated building, which is long overdue for a major facelift, and build something new in its place. As one anonymous source told The New York Post, “It was not in great shape before the migrants came, and God knows what it’s like now.”
The New York City government is required to cover all renovation costs of the building, estimated to be anywhere from $100 million to $200 million, as part of the arrangement it agreed to with PIA. Imran Igra, a New York property developer, noted, “These upgrades are expected to significantly increase the hotel’s value — potentially raising it to between $1 billion and $1.2 billion — while extending the building’s lifespan by 30 to 40 years.”
But as the Post also reported, a developer could “build a skyscraper of up to 1.8 million square feet on the roughly 42,000 square-foot parcel.”
Regardless of what the next chapter is for this prime piece of New York City real estate, it seems likely to bring plenty of jobs and opportunity. Flipping the building from a resource-draining hotbed of crime to a resilient, prosperous, taxpaying business would be a significant net positive for the struggling city.
Democrats and liberal activists consistently argue that the United States cannot survive without the cheap labor and population boost provided by illegal aliens. The American Immigration Council asserted last year that Trump’s promised deportations would lead to a “4.2 percent to 6.8 percent loss in GDP.” A Washington Post columnist also referred to illegal aliens as “America’s lifeblood.”
But the case of the Roosevelt Hotel contravenes this narrative. Turning a dangerous and dilapidated building filled with illegal aliens that taxpayers are forced to subsidize into a prosperous new center of commerce is a net benefit for the local economy and the Americans who live there.
Of course, neither Mayor Adams nor many New Yorkers are likely to thank President Trump for stemming the flood of migrants and providing this opportunity to revive the Big Apple in the first place. But New York City may nonetheless prove just how successful the president’s border agenda is.
Andrew Shirley is a veteran speechwriter and AMAC Newsline columnist. His commentary can be found on X at @AA_Shirley.
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