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The mayor held a press conference Wednesday to describe the migrant strain on the city’s budget, and ask Washington for more money. New York spent $1.45 billion on shelter services for migrants in fiscal 2023, and in June it approved $2.9 billion to fund new arrivals in 2024. But two months later it already knows that won’t be enough.

“Our new estimates have us spending nearly $5 billion on this crisis in the current fiscal year,” Mr. Adams said. That tops the combined cost of the city’s sanitation, parks and fire departments.

The city based its initial cost projections on the rate of migrants arriving between last year and this spring. That missed the hundreds of thousands of migrants who delayed their arrival until after the end of Title 42, a border enforcement policy that the federal government suspended in May. Thousands of them are making their way to the Big Apple.

The biggest source of growing costs is the share of asylum seekers still in the city’s shelter—more than 57,000. “We spend an average of $383 per night to provide shelter, food, medical care and social services,” Mr. Adams said of the cost per family. That’s $9.8 million a day across the shelter population.

The bulk of the blame goes to the Biden Administration for all but waving through hundreds of thousands of migrants into the U.S. if they claim asylum. Blame also goes to a 1996 federal law that mandates a five-month waiting period before asylum seekers can apply for work permits, leaving them no productive options when they arrive.

Single adults who can live on low-paid, off-books work cycle quickly through the shelter system, according to the city. But among families with children, no access to jobs keeps more than 80% in shelters beyond the first month.

This has produced spectacles like last week’s at the makeshift shelter at the Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan near Grand Central Terminal. The hotel reached capacity, and hundreds of migrants spent days and nights sleeping on sidewalks in the center of the business district. The city is debating new shelters in parks or on Randalls island in the East River, but those will be expensive and take valuable space from recreation for young people.

“I’ve heard it directly from the asylum seekers I have spoken to: They want to work,” Mayor Adams said Wednesday. “They do not have the authorization to work, so we have to provide shelter.” Congress and the Biden Administration could change the law, but on immigration Washington is dysfunctional.

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey this week also declared a state of emergency amid a surge of migrant arrivals. She denounced “a federal crisis of inaction” and asked for faster work authorizations.

The political stunt of claiming to be “sanctuary” cities and states that Democrats pulled during the Trump years isn’t fun anymore. They’re learning how Texas and Florida feel. If they want relief, they’ll have to start putting more pressure on the Biden Administration by being honest about its immigration failures.