The New York mayor, Eric Adams, is facing pushback for bizarrely conflating two issues: a shortage of lifeguards on city beaches as the summer approaches and a surge in the the city’s population of undocumented people.
In his weekly news conference, the mayor was asked what he planned to do about New York City’s lifeguard shortage and pivoted to the need for a plan to fill jobs that are in high demand with asylum seekers.
“How do we have a large body of people that are in our city and country that are excellent swimmers, and at the same time we need lifeguards?” he mused.
“We have all these eligible people waiting to work with the skills we need to fill the jobs but we are unable to allow them to work because bureaucracy is in the way,” he said. “The only obstacle is that we won’t give them the right to work to become a lifeguard. That just doesn’t make sense.”
But his remarks have drawn criticism from both sides of the political spectrum, with some progressive commentators saying the comments were racist and offensive. From the right the mayor’s detractors have said he is encouraging immigration without work authorization.
“The mayor’s statement that migrants are good swimmers is not only inaccurate and insensitive but also perpetuates harmful stereotypes,” says Andrea Gordillo, chair of community board 3 in Manhattan’s East Village and candidate for city council.
“We need leadership that takes the climate of xenophobia and racism that enables discrimination and hate crimes head on, and embraces the values of inclusivity and respect that our city should uphold,” Gordillo said.
Godillo said that the city “must strive for empathy and understanding towards migrants and their journeys, many of whom are here as a direct result of our nation’s federal foreign policy, rather than resorting to harmful generalizations”.
Murad Awawdeh, president and chief executive officer of the New York Immigration Coalition, said that Adams’s comments implied “that because some folks had to swim or wade through water on their dangerous journey seeking safety here in the United States”, they would be good lifeguards.
“Point blank, that comment is racist,” Awawdeh said. “The mayor should not be making fun or making light of the perilous and often life-threatening journeys people take and are forced to take to escape the violence and persecution that they’re facing. It’s demeaning and dehumanizing, and the mayor needs to stop using dangerous language like this.”
Adams’s administration has been pushing the federal government to speed up work authorization for asylum seekers, in part to lessen the economic cost of an additional 195,000 people in the city’s shelter system.
Simultaneously, the city is under pressure to find more lifeguards, in part because of a rise of shark “encounters” off city beaches over the past two summers.
Adams later said he had visited shelters in the city where he had asked people if they knew how to swim. He said he was “blown away” by the response.
“We have these capable people who know how to swim – from west Africa, from Ecuador, from South and Central America, from Mexico – and we have a shortage of lifeguards,” Adams said.
In an interview with PIX11 News on Wednesday, Adams defended his comments, saying: “There was nothing I said that was racist or offensive”. He added: “We’re not going to get into the point that every time a sentence is made, the ‘word police’ are going to try to make something offensive about it.”
Adams has had a series of run-ins with what he calls the “word police”. Early in he tenure, he said: “I would rather be authentic and make errors than be robotic and not be sincere.”
Included in his clashes, he has described service workers as “low-skilled” which brought a sharp rebuke from former restaurant host and Bronx congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who said the term “is a myth perpetuated by wealthy interests to justify inhumane working conditions, little/no healthcare, and low wages”.
He has also accused the “sentence police” of sitting in front of the TV waiting for him to slip up.
“Let’s wait to see Eric make one sentence that we can turn into a front page,” he remarked last year. “Listen, you’re going to find many of them, because I’m authentic and I’m going to talk the way New Yorkers talk.”
Adams returned to the subject earlier this month after the New York governor, Kathy Hochul, said at a technology conference in Los Angeles that African American children growing up in the Bronx “don’t even know what the word computer is”.
Adams defended the governor, who has since apologised. “Listen, I am not the word police. I know the governor’s heart. When you make thousands of speeches, when you’re in front of the cameras all the time, when you’re trying to be authentic and say the things that you’re really feeling, one can sit back and do a critical analysis of every sentence you say and say: ‘Oh, you didn’t say this way, that way.’”
