After a tumultuous year at the center of the so-called migrant crisis, the tent shelter on Randalls Island is now slated to close come February. The 3,000-person facility was both symbol and response of this era, and its winding down represents a new chapter in the story of NYC’s tense relationship with recent asylum seekers. This closing is an acknowledgement that it’s a logical step for an emergency stopgap that was never meant to be permanent at a time when the population of migrants in the city’s care has stabilized around 60,000. That follows a number of developments that we’ve advocated for or criticized. As we’ve been saying from the beginning, some portion of migrants would eventually achieve work authorization and be able to leave shelters of their own volition to do exactly what they had come to do the first place: find work, find their own places and begin the arduous process of a full re-establishment here. Others have left the city entirely, headed to greener pastures in other cities and states where they have friends or family or found ready work; some have undoubtedly left the country, bouncing on to a next destination or returning to their countries of origin. These are, to some extent, good outcomes; migrants have made their own decisions and reclaimed some initiative, with our shelter system ideally acting as the sort of way-station we’d hoped it would be on this path. Then there are those have left not of their own devices, many as a result of the Adams administration’s necessary changes to the city’s shelter mandate, which generally limited single adults to 30 days (60 days for those under 23 years of age) in the shelter system before they were shown the door barring certain extenuating circumstances. We said then and we believe now that the government had some interest in clarifying and limiting traditional homeless shelter rules that were never designed to contend with the situation of a large flow of newcomers. However, the shift and the limited outside supports have left us with the predictable other problem of migrants being left on the streets, which isn’t really better. This is all about the migrants who actually have arrived here. Due to some Biden administration restrictions, put in place after a compromise bipartisan Senate plan was killed by Donald Trump, many other migrants have been blocked at the border by rules that effectively shut down access to asylum once a certain threshold of crossings had been reached. While this was certainly relief for a New York City straining under the weight of new arrivals, it is not the ideal solution. Hundreds of thousands of people who could have valid humanitarian claims may now be being turned away from their legally protected right to seek them. The way to make facilities like the makeshift tents on Randalls Island obsolete isn’t to close our doors to so many legitimate refugees, but have the federal government and other municipalities shoulder their own share of the responsibility. The need for something like that tent city is the result of bad policy, to be sure, but let’s not try to fix it with bad policy.