Brian Laird on WNYC, now as usual on Wednesdays, our lead Eric Adams reporter, Elizabeth Kim,

with excerpts from, analysis of, and to take your calls about Mayor Adams' Weekly Tuesday News Conference.

Among other things, the mayor was noncommittal yesterday when asked if he supports President

elect Trump's plan to begin a mass deportation program. We'll play that clip. But by way of historical

contrast and historical context, first, here's a clip of Mayor Rudy Giuliani

in a speech in 1997, when Giuliani was in office, talking about the effects as he saw them

of large-scale immigration to the city. He cites the number 100,000 immigrants a year.

Let me see if I can give you just a few facts about the city of New York.

Immigrants who come to the city of New York, all the new people that you're talking about,

work about 10% more often than people who are citizens of the United States and citizens of the city.

They start businesses 2 to 3% more often.

They are net contributors in fairly significant amounts to the economy of the city. When I see immigrants coming in,

it used to be Ellis Island and now it's Kennedy Airport, but when I see them coming in,

of course I see some that are problems, create difficulties, some that commit crimes,

but by and large what I see are people who are going to work, people who are going to establish jobs

for other people, people who are going to increase our tax revenues, and people who are going to

rejuvenate neighborhoods that maybe previously were falling apart. And if you think about it, they come in

with an emotion that unifies them with my grandparents. It's really the same emotion, the

same feeling. The feeling is to create a better life for themselves and their families. Most

of the people that come to the United States come here

to work and to work in order to produce more opportunity, a better situation for themselves

and for their families. And when you multiply that by 100 people, 1,000 people, 100,000 people per year, you get a city that is one of the

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