Mayor Eric Adams has blamed the rise in prostitution in a Queens neighborhood on an influx of female Venezuelan migrants who are struggling to find other work in the Big Apple.
Hizzoner said the surge in “illegal” activity taking place on street corners in Corona is just “one example” of how the nation’s ongoing migrant crisis is crippling the city.
It is unclear whether the Venezuelan migrants the mayor referenced are being sex-trafficked to perform these acts, or if they are soliciting sex of their own free will.
“This is what happens when you create an atmosphere that people can’t provide for themselves — you can’t work, you can’t provide for your job and have to turn to illegal activities to do so,” Adams told reporters during a Tuesday briefing.
“When I talk about the spiraling impact of how this is going to affect our city, this is what I’m talking about,” he said. “We are going to create generational problems based on the failure of the national government, and this is one example of that.”
Adams added that another of these red-light districts has emerged in East New York, Brooklyn, where he said prostitution is “overt during the day.”
An employee of one Queens business told The Post Wednesday that the area was brimming with migrant prostitutes — and had “tripled” in recent months.
“You have Chinese and Columbians out there, but it’s mostly Venezuelans,” the employee said, adding she could tell based on their accents.
“It started 4 or 5 months ago,” she continued. “From 70th Street and all over Roosevelt [Avenue], there is a lot of prostitution.”
A nearby business owner said the while he’d seen an influx of women working the streets of late, he wasn’t sure if they were newly arrived asylum seekers.
“There is more. A mixture of everyone, Asians, Latins … I see them day and night but more at night,” he said.
“I leave at nights and they are at the corners,” he continued. “I don’t know if they are new or not,” he added, referring to their immigration status.
Another store owner said he, too, had noticed an increase — but only in prostitutes who appeared to be Asian.
“I see a lot more Chinese on Roosevelt Ave but not more Latins,” he said. “You have families who come in here. It’s not supposed to be like this. It’s like a strip in Las Vegas.
“I’ve been here for 25 years and this is the worst I’ve seen it.”
Meanwhile, Adams on Tuesday also took aim at city officials who “believe it is a victimless crime” and are trying to get prostitution legalized.
“This is where idealism collides with realism,” he said.
“I’ve had elected officials tell me that the women are just trying to work [and ask], ‘Why are you trying to harm them?’”
But, the mayor said, “There are real issues around illegal sex work, not only from STDs to sex trafficking to young girls getting involved in it, to violence.
“So people who don’t understand how serious this is, they are impeding our progress,” Adams said of the city lawmakers pushing for prostitution legalization.
He added: “We need a real partnership to prosecute the johns, we want to focus on the johns, and we want to focus on giving assistance to those sex workers to make sure that they’re not being forced into this activity, but also abide by the law.”
Under New York law, prostitution is considered a Class B misdemeanor and is punishable by up to three months in jail and/or up to a $500 fine.
Patronizing a prostitute, meanwhile, is a Class A misdemeanor and is punishable by up to one year in prison and/or a $1,000 fine.
But the law has not yet stopped them from soliciting men on Roosevelt Avenue in Corona, which The Post exclusively revealed in July had become an open-air market for sex dubbed the “Market of Sweethearts.”
The women could be seen loitering in front of pool halls, dentist shops, and massage parlors day and night, and even recruit neighborhood children to hand out their X-rated business cards, concerned moms told The Post at the time.
It was featured twice in September on “The NYC Walking Show,” a YouTube channel that offers first-person tours of iconic Big Apple neighborhoods and attractions such as Yankee Stadium and Times Square.
“It just shocked me what’s happening in the broad daylight,” said Sifat Razwan, the YouTuber behind the channel. “It’s even more severe than in the day.”
“On the other hand it [is] very really eye-opening that this is what actually happens outside all those glamorous parts of New York,” added Razwan, 24, of Jamaica, Queens.
One resident even compared the neighborhood to the red-light district in Thailand’s capital that’s earned a reputation for prolific and cheap sex workers.
“But this doesn’t feel like New York anymore,” Ramses Frias told The Post. “It’s like Bangkok, the red-light district. It’s like a market in a Third World country.”
“We don’t want to have to walk around our streets walking through trash,” Frias added. “We want to walk like New Yorkers, with our heads held high.”
