Adams Floats Hiring Migrants For NYC Lifeguard Jobs

NEW YORK CITY — Mayor Eric Adams floated a solution to the city's lifeguard shortage: hire migrants because "they're excellent swimmers."

The mayor's off-the-cuff suggestion during a Tuesday news conference immediately made a splash.

"It has been ZERO days since Eric Adams' last nonsense," tweeted the Eric Adams Nonsense Tracker account.

"I really, (sic) am dying to know why the mayor thinks all migrants are all good at swimming...," tweeted CNN correspondent Gloria Pazminio.

Adams has a long history of making odd choices.

Related coverage: New NYC Mayor Eric Adams Has Long History Of Making Odd Choices

Hizzoner has warned parents, through a now-infamous 2011 PSA, that their kids can hide guns in pillows, bullets behind picture frames and "something as simple as a crack pipe" in a "popular knapsack."

He has proposed installing booze-filled traps to drown rats. (The less said about the traps' resultant rodent slurry the better.)

And he once said New York is the greatest city in the world because any day could be another 9/11.

Those are just a few examples of Adams, as City & State New York memorably tweeted, making "the weirdest comment you've ever heard" during what should be a normal appearance.

Adams' latest, arguably offensive, head scratcher came in response to a reporter's question about lifeguard staffing ahead of Memorial Day weekend.

The mayor, unprompted, brought up his past proposal to speed up work permits for the city's tens of thousands of asylum seekers.

"How do we have a large body of people that are in our city, in country, that are excellent swimmers and at the same time we need lifeguards?" he said. "And the only obstacle is that we won't give them the right to work to become a lifeguard?

"That just doesn't make sense."

But it turns out the city might not need to tap into a pool of migrant would-be lifeguards.

Meera Joshi, deputy mayor for operations, said the period for people to take the city's rigorous test to qualify for a lifeguard job is over.

The city has 560 people this year who passed the test, compared to 364 last year, she said.

"We are really proud of the new lifeguard recruitment," she said.