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🌊 How Hotels Profit off Migrants
Part one of our series on the business of mass migration
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The newsletter has two purposes: To cut through the noise surrounding major current events and to provide original reporting on topics that Big News fails to cover well (or at all).
Mass migration fits into the latter camp: Left-wing media focuses on sob stories of migrants being deported away from their families; right-wing media focuses on egregious crimes committed in sanctuary cities. Lost between them is an honest study of what’s happening with migrants and why.
Over the past couple of years, we’ve reported on mass migration at each leg of the journey: We’ve reported from the Colombia-Venezuela border, the US-Mexico border, and migrant centers across the country. Now, we investigate the business of migrants: Namely, who is profiting off them and how.
To learn the truth, we’ve spent weeks exploring New York City’s migrant ecosystem, interviewing locals, migrants, and officials. In doing so, we uncovered a massive migrant-dependent financial ecosystem, which we cover this week in a three-part series.
–Max Frost, Roca editor
By Max Towey, Roca co-founder
When the Roosevelt Hotel opened its doors in Midtown Manhattan in 1924, it symbolized New York City’s rise as one of the world’s most important cities.
For decades, the hotel was a premier destination for both locals and visitors – so much so that the tradition of singing “Auld Lang Syne” on New Year’s Eve was born at the hotel’s Roosevelt Grill.
A century later, the Roosevelt Hotel has a drastically different role: As a modern-day Ellis Island, having processed over 150,000 migrant arrivals since 2022 and provided housing to thousands of migrants from around the world.
When we visited the Roosevelt Hotel last month, migrants – mostly families – queued on a red carpet at its main entrance, shivering in 15º heat. The migrants were from all over: The first person we talked to was from Ecuador; the next from Guatemala.
Only one man in line wasn’t shivering.
We asked where he was from. “Russia,” he answered. With the help of Google Translate, he introduced himself as Timur and explained how he was once a successful entrepreneur with three thriving businesses. Then he protested the war in Ukraine alongside the late Alexei Navalny – he had the photos to prove it – and lost everything.
“We had a great life. They took it all away,” he told us, his daughter clinging to his side.
Like the other migrants living at the hotel, he wore a lanyard, which could get him inside. When we tried to enter, security chased us off. But inside was where the real story was, and that story is this: The Roosevelt Hotel – like many others in the city – is making a fortune off people like Timur. In this story, we explain how.
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Reader Replies
Record amounts of feedback to yesterday’s DOGE story. We’ll have a lot more coming on that agency (or whatever it is) soon. In the meantime, here’s a selection of your replies:
Andrew from Florida wrote:
Youth vs. Experience
Energy vs. Patience
Tale as old as time…
When it comes to the government, no one deeply embedded is able to make the tough decision to cut waste and spending as it would directed affect them and those around them. As a result, having young and enthusiastic people, outsiders really, willing to look at the numbers unbiasedly is exactly what we need. Our government has been wasting and abusing our tax dollars for longer than kids have been alive, and like the technology they use, it’s been heartless and brutal. But unlike the government, they’re actually efficient.
Good on them, I sincerely hope they keep going and rooting out the waste and corruption.
J. wrote
Suggestion: let a recent grad do your complex brain surgery. Is that maybe kind of stupid?
Watch for decades long fallout. From ideological purges that leave massive blind spots in capacity, ability to react and foresee, to wide scale injustices that will be in time consuming expensive litigation for years, to broken functionality that will caused the loss of data and protective systems that will take decades to correct, if ever.
The cutters are on a frat boy cutting orgy and are indiscriminately applying ultimately straightforward tech tools to complex circumstances they have no understanding of.
Any frat boy can do that. There is no “wow” here.
And more importantly, trust is broken so the real best and the brightest will not want to work for the government. Not talking here about kids that know how to use a tech tool, whatever that is.
And even more important than that, the US is abandoning its place in the world, as a leader in government capacity and as an actual aid provider and leader. This leaves a massive vacuum for China to move into and build a sphere of influence, corralling American interests even more. This is yet another downward step in American influence and hastens the end of the era of peace and prosperity that was led by America.
Almost half the American population and the whole rest of the world is looking on in horror. With two exceptions: the leadership in the Kremlin and in Beijing that want to see America and the West weakened. They of course are thrilled.
Karl wrote:
Put me down for Team Fearful. I don't have an iota of trust in President Trump, unelected, erratic billionaire nogoodnik Elon Musk, or their armies of lackeys to do things for the better of the American people. They are out to enrich & empower themselves and their ultra-wealthy supporters and to terrorize their enemies/people who try to resist their agenda, with no concern for working people.
And a private replier wrote:
We are both fearful and excited. Fearful because we are federal government workers in agencies that are being downsized, and excited for this new, bright future ahead for the United States of America.
Thank you all for writing in. We love to see the diversity of opinion in our audience. We’ve got a lot of DOGE haters and a lot of DOGE supporters.
We’re very curious to see your replies to today’s story, too. Send them in here to let us know!
See you tomorrow.
–Max and Max
RocaNews co-founders