Liberal pop star Lady Gaga’s father is thoroughly disgusted by the City of New York’s response to the growing illegal immigrant crisis, especially since it is his part of the city that is suffering under the policies as migrants flood his once-quiet neighborhood.
Joe Germanotta is a restaurant owner since 2012 in the Big Apple’s Upper West Side, and the “Born This Way” singer’s father. But now, he is also a community leader attempting to get city hall to do something about the dangerous conditions that have cropped up in his neighborhood after the city decided to house hundreds of illegal aliens inside a former residence hall for music, art and drama students.
His community was once a safe, quiet and upscale area where businesses and families thrived. But now that the city has moved hundreds of illegals into the Stratford Arms Hotel, that has changed, the New York Post reported.
Germanotta said that now the neighborhood is more dangerous as young illegals carouse through the night, drinking, doing drugs and dangerously riding unregistered motor scooters and e-bikes through the streets at all hours.
Then there is the littering, and loitering, not to mention the huge upswing in open prostitution and used hypodermic needles suddenly showing up all over.
Months ago, the city contracted with the American Musical and Dramatic Academy to remove all the students of the arts from its Stratford Arms Hotel and instead move in some 500 illegals. The hotel gave the school kids two weeks to vacate the premises, but neither AMDA nor the city informed the neighborhood that the plan was to fill the hotel with illegals.
The whole takeover of the New York hotel was fostered with subterfuge.
“It was a stealth operation. They were bused in the middle of the night, like when they flew them into Westchester, they didn’t want anybody to know what was going on,” Germanotta said. “It was all pretty rapid.”
“There’s now 500 migrants living in that dormitory. That’s when all the mayhem began,” Germanotta told the Post.
“Since the arrival of the migrants, the restaurateur said the quality of life in the area has taken a hit, with impromptu block parties outside the hotel that last into the early morning, prostitution, kids getting catcalled, and reckless e-bikes and motor-scooter drivers wreaking havoc on one-way streets,” the Post reported.
“[New York City’s Heath and Hospitals Corporation’s] answer was, ‘We’ll build a bike corral,’” Germanotta scoffed. “You’re just enabling ’em,” he told the Post.
Now Germanotta has joined with a group of fellow business and building owners in a group that they are calling the West 70th Street Association with which they are taking their concerns about these migrants to New York’s City Hall.
Germanotta also says that he worries about the safety of girls and women in the area because sexist, unruly and unemployed young men are gathering in gangs and harassing women — and girls as young as 14 — in the streets.
Many residents are even afraid to walk their dogs for fear of being attacked by these gangs of illegals, who have no jobs and nothing else to do.
Still, Germanotta insisted that he is not against having migrants in his neighborhood.
“I don’t mind having them there. They’re gonna be there for three years. That was the contract, I understand. But at least manage it. Put the proper security in place, have a police presence and a code of conduct,” he said.
But he added, “They’re guests in our neighborhood, and they have basically taken over.”
Even as Germanotta and his association members told authorities of the problems the illegals were causing, the city didn’t seem to have any real answers.
Germanotta also blasted AMDA, the company that owns the building the city is renting out to house the illegals.
“AMDA is getting very, very rich off this, and they screwed the neighborhood,” Germanotta grumbled.
“In my opinion, you should have just suspended “sanctuary city” status until we had enough housing,” the pop star’s father said. Then, once more housing was obtained, he said more could come. But instead, the city allowed hundreds to flood the city before the housing was arranged.
“The really sad part is that in the neighborhood, we still have our share of veterans and homeless — but we’re not taking care of our own. They don’t get food every day. It’s really sad. I feel for them,” Germanotta concluded.
It is interesting that Germanotta thought of “suspending” the city’s “sanctuary” status. But, in truth, the whole mess seems to prove that those same “sanctuary” policies don’t work in the first place. Because, as soon as a large number of illegals showed up, they couldn’t be accommodated.
It was very easy for these Democrat-led states to be all in for illegals when none were showing up at their doorstep. But now that the illegals have come, suddenly many New Yorkers are questioning their beloved sanctuary policies.
Of course, it isn’t just New York that is facing this dangerous wave. The same wave of illegals is bringing disease, sexual abuse and crime all across the nation and forcing states to spend millions of tax dollars that would not otherwise be spent. And this is all thanks to Joe Biden, who sent the signal that the U.S. had an open-door policy that would allow anyone to simply walk right across the border.
If we have no borders, then we have no country.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
