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Gov. Maura Healey took a big step this week by declaring a state of emergency over the state’s stretched emergency shelter system. It already has more than 20,000 individuals and is currently seeing 100 or more migrant families apply each day.
“The increased level of demand is not slowing down,” Healey said in her announcement Tuesday. “And due to both a long-standing shortage of affordable housing, as well as delays and barriers to federal work authorizations, we find ourselves in this situation.”
Healey’s decree opens the door to move more quickly, with speedier state hiring of contractors and faster activation of the National Guard. It could also lead to expanded federal aid. At the same time, it adds Healey to a growing list of governors, including many Republicans, who’ve essentially said the Biden administration needs to do much more to respond to a crisis that long predates it. Among other things, Healey wants the federal government to take an axe to its work authorization backlog and expedite approvals. This would let those now living in shelters legally get work, and be able to afford housing and their new lives.
The governor’s move was lauded by advocates and state contractors, who hope it could lead to things like more living space and mental health services for migrants. But it also raises a question: why now? After all, migrants have been coming to Massachusetts in increasing numbers over the past year and a half, overwhelming groups like the Immigrant Family Services Institute in Mattapan, which saw 4,000 Haitian immigrants in May alone.
Last year, GBH News asked the Baker administration several times if there was a plan to address the growing numbers of new arrivals. The response, in essence, was that they could apply to the shelter system. That more restrained approach carried over into the start of the Healey administration. For example, while refugee advocacy organizations had been privately urging the state to open one-stop-shop Welcome Centers since last fall, that didn’t actually happen until June.
The sudden cohesion in the response from the state may be linked to the June hiring of immigrant-rights firebrands Susan Church, Ronnie Millar and Cristina Aguilera Sandoval to head up the state’s Office of Refugees and Immigrants. While the Healey administration had been grasping for a solution to a crisis Baker left behind for months, those hirings, and the connections those new employees brought with them, likely helped ramp up the state’s response.
So: what happens next? And how will we know if Healey’s announcement yields results?
Back when Massachusetts announced the COVID-19 state of emergency, success was easier to track. That involved clear data points like hospital capacity, shots in arms and numbers of deaths.
A humanitarian crisis is different. On its own, Healey’s declaration won’t change the turmoil and violence in certain countries that make people unsafe and decide to seek asylum here. Whether the federal government will grant migrants expedited work authorization is an open question. And it could be months, even years, before new arrivals are able to find homes in Massachusetts’ notoriously tight housing market.
Increased federal funding could be delivered relatively soon, and would offer tangible evidence that Healey’s gambit worked, at least on a political level. Still, it might not be enough to meet existing state needs, which may well grow even more acute in the months to come.
And yet Healey’s announcement has already made one thing clear: Massachusetts is unlikely to follow the lead of New York City when it comes to trying to push prospective arrivals away. In July, Mayor Eric Adams’ administration moved to distribute fliers on the southern border urging migrants to “Please consider another city,” citing New York’s high cost of living and the large numbers of migrants who’d already arrived and were waiting for shelter. (Some of them were bused north by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who began sending migrants to so-called sanctuary cities around the country last year.)
The overriding message on Tuesday, though, was that more needs to be done to welcome migrants, not less. That message was delivered by Healey but also by Monique Tú Nguyen, director of Boston’s Office of Immigrant Advancement, who said the city has helped 2,000 to 3,000 families in the past two years.
“I just want to uplift that after meeting so many families, that we’re really grateful for them to choose Massachusetts to settle in,” she told GBH News.
