By: Andrew Tao

Johnson Coronel is a 26-year-old immigrant from Venezuela. He immigrated with his brother a few months ago trying to escape government violence at home. When they got to the Texas border, they requested shelter.

In Texas, they lived in two shelters. First in Brownsville, then in San Antonio. In the end, they eventually ended up in a New York City shelter, where Coronel says that 12 people were housed in one room.

Coronel also says, “It’s a lot of instability…but the situation in Venezuela has gotten impossible. You can’t walk down the street without a government official shaking you down for money every couple of blocks. We just want to work and live in peace.”

NPR has called New York a “battle ground for immigration.” This is because neighboring towns have recently become more and more acrimonious.

The situation in New York is similar in the town of Colonie. Peter Crummey, a Republican and town supervisor of Colonie, says, “They’re all sanctuary cities until they must be sanctuary cities.” Crummey is suing New York because the city sent a bus with 24 migrants to his town.

Efren Rojas is a mechanic in Rockland County, N.Y., which is two hours south of Colonie. He says that he has always heard people talk negatively about Hispanics. “If your skin is a little dark, you will make people uncomfortable,” says Rojas.

Rojas says he’s not opposed to folks migrating because he did it from Mexico himself when he was a teenager. He now has his papers, but he was undocumented for years. But he thinks the federal government should not be offering immigrants assistance.

“I was always scared that if I asked for help, I could get deported. I’m not resentful about that. I came to work, not to ask for help,” says Rojas.

In a supermarket parking lot, Anthony Gerome says he’s concerned about the cost of taking this many people in. “We can’t afford it,” he says. “We have too many people in the US that are US citizens, veterans of war, and so on that need our help desperately.”

In summary, immigrants will be unwelcome by most people in the places that they are moving to. Most people are against Hispanic people coming to their towns, which means that immigrants will have a hard time adjusting to their new lives.