What the New York City Migrant Crisis Is and Isn’t

It doesn’t take more than a couple of strolls around the block on East 45th Street in Midtown Manhattan for the faces of New York City’s most recent arrivals to reveal themselves. On a relatively quiet Thursday afternoon in late September, the migrants calmly came and went through the front and side doors of the Roosevelt Hotel, the city’s main asylum intake center, which the New York Times recently described as the “new Ellis Island.” Some had been staying at the location, not far from Grand Central station, for a few...