Former Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo lambasted the state of immigration in his "Real Time" appearance on Friday, saying Biden-era border policy has not only hurt the country but the people flooding into it.
"His immigration policy was a mistake, right?" Cuomo argued on comedian Bill Maher's HBO show. "I get the theory of the extreme Left: We’re a land of immigrants, let everyone come in, we all came as immigrants. I get it. But how you do it makes all the difference in the world, right?"
He continued to lament how the migrant crisis has overwhelmed American cities in the past few years.
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"To just open the borders with no plan, you don’t know where they go, you don’t know who’s going to pay for them, they wind up in cities all across the country. New York has a couple of hundred thousand in hotels, costing New York City a fortune, no jobs, no training, no help assimilating into society," he said. "So who did you even help? Right? It was a great theory."
Maher noted the shift in messaging from New York's current governor, Kathy Hochul, and New York City’s current mayor, Eric Adams, and how they have called to stem the tide of mass migration.
"I mean, if I didn’t know who was talking, I would have thought they’d be Republicans," Maher quipped.
"Yeah. But they didn’t stop them, Bill. They could have stopped them," Cuomo said. Maher agreed.
"The governor was saying she didn’t want them outside of New York City, but the mayor could have said no, the governor could have said no," Cuomo continued. "Many mayors and governors said no. But New York was more of the ideological left, ‘All are welcome.’ And now we’re finding out, 200,000 people later, you needed a plan. You needed to know what to do with these people. And that’s where you failed."
Hochul replaced Cuomo as governor after he resigned in 2021 amid a slew of sexual harassment allegations. She was re-elected in 2022 in a closer-than-expected race against Republican Lee Zeldin.
Hochul's office and Adams' office didn't immediately reply to requests for comment.
