This Land Is Our Land

by Suketu Mehta

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, not known for his oratorical prowess, took a different tack. He went to Governors Island to talk about the Ground Zero center. He had been thinking about his own childhood, when his family had difficulty buying a house in the Boston suburbs because they were Jewish.

  We’ve come here to Governors Island to stand where the earliest settlers first set foot in New Amsterdam, and where the seeds of religious tolerance were first planted. We’ve come here to see the inspiring symbol of liberty that, more than 250 years later, would greet millions of immigrants in this harbor, and we come here to state as strongly as ever: This is the freest City in the world. That’s what makes New York special and different and strong. Our doors are open to everyone—everyone with a dream and a willingness to work hard and play by the rules. New York City was built by immigrants, and it’s sustained by immigrants—by people from more than a hundred different countries speaking more than two hundred different languages and professing every faith. And whether your parents were born here, or you came yesterday, you are a New Yorker.

  He brought up previous incidences of religious bigotry in the city’s history, such as when the Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant prohibited Quakers from holding services, and a group of non-Quakers signed the “Flushing Remonstrance,” as ringing a defense of religious liberty as the world has ever seen. He cited examples of persecution against Catholics. Then he came around to the present emergency.

  On September 11, 2001, thousands of first responders heroically rushed to the scene and saved tens of thousands of lives. More than 400 of those first responders did not make it out alive. In rushing into those burning buildings, not one of them asked, “What God do you pray to?” “What beliefs do you hold?” … There is no neighborhood in this City that is off limits to God’s love and mercy.

  * * *

  All manner of transactions happen on the sidewalks of Jackson Heights. Mexican abuelas sell tamales out of shopping carts lined with black garbage bags; day laborers stand under the elevated #7 tracks waiting for work. The municipal authorities seem to have agreed to suspend many of the laws that they might enforce in Manhattan. That’s also part of the vibrancy and part of the accessibility for immigrants. Because you don’t need a permit to sell food here; you can just stand on a street corner and sell it. Occasionally, a cop might come along and tell you to move. So you wait for the cop to pass and then resume. In neighborhoods like this, the line between formal and informal is thin to the point of invisibility.

  Every fifth store in the district is a place where you can send money back. The remittance economy is omnipresent—there are barbershops where you can get a haircut and send money back home, whether the money, like the sender, is documented or undocumented.

  Remittances in places like Jackson Heights are an example not so much of “untapped capital” but of “undocumented capital,” along with the people who produce it. We have no way of knowing precisely how much these unofficial, informal, illegal sectors of a city’s economy actually produce—because many of these people don’t file tax returns (even though they may pay social security taxes and do pay sales taxes). They aren’t counted by the census, and economists don’t speak all of their languages. But they show hard evidence of one fact: these migrants are not lazy; they’re not sitting around collecting welfare checks. They’re working, very hard, for themselves and their families back home.

  A few years ago, representatives of the giant warehouse shopping club Costco had come to New York City’s planning office with a question: Would it be economically viable to open a Costco in Sunset Park, in Brooklyn? There were executives at the chain who thought it might be profitable in the long term, but there were doubts. The economic data of the region wasn’t encouraging. There were lots of immigrants in the district, and their median income was on the lower end of the scale. There didn’t seem to be much money there.

  The statisticians in the city planning office, who know about the hidden cities of New York, told Costco, “Go in there—just trust us.” There was money in those undistinguished blocks of apartment buildings and wood-frame houses, they said, more money than met the eye. Being an immigrant area—it used to be full of Scandinavian longshoremen, who have now been replaced by Chinese and Vietnamese and Mexicans—it has a thriving underground economy. The official data underestimates the number of people living in the illegally subdivided units, and the large flows of start-up capital that some of the immigrants bring with them. “In those areas, income tends to be underreported,” as the planners put it. The store opened in November 1996, and immediately turned a profit in its first year. A decade later, it was among the highest-grossing Costcos in America, even though it’s half the size of the average Costco.

  16

  JOBS, CRIME, AND CULTURE: THE THREATS THAT AREN’T

  The arguments against immigration are most often about jobs, crime, and culture: that immigrants take away native jobs; that they increase the crime rate; that they are an alien culture.

  The first two arguments are demonstrably false.

  When people first immigrate, they compete most not with the native-born, but with immigrants who’ve gotten off the boat just before them. But the previous year’s immigrants don’t mind, because many of the newcomers are related to them. And in any case, the difference it makes in their wages is minuscule.

  In 2006, Mayor Bloomberg, then a Republican, testified in the Senate right after the mayor of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, who wanted landlords who rented to undocumented immigrants to be locked up.

  Bloomberg said there were half a million undocumented immigrants in New York City. “And let’s be honest: they arrive for a good reason—they want a better life for themselves and their families, and our businesses need them and hire them! Although they broke the law by illegally crossing our borders or overstaying their visas, and our businesses broke the law by employing them, our City’s economy would be a shell of itself had they not, and it would collapse if they were deported. The same holds true for the nation.”

  The self-made billionaire laid out the business case for immigration: many other countries are growing their economies faster than the United States is, reversing the century-long advantage America has enjoyed. Baby boomers are retiring, America’s birthrate is slowing, and there aren’t enough young workers to pay for the old folks’ pensions. “The economics are very simple: We need more workers than we have.”

  He called for increasing immigration, because it’s good for the economy, and for legalizing those who’re already here. “There is only one practical solution, and it is a solution that respects the history of our nation: Offer those already here the opportunity to earn permanent status and keep their families together.” It is a moral argument. “For decades, the Federal government has tacitly welcomed them into the workforce, collected their income and social security taxes, which about two-thirds of undocumented workers pay, and benefited immeasurably from their contributions to our country.”

  * * *

  But just as there are climate change skeptics, there are immigration skeptics. There’s a global consensus among 99 percent of legitimate economists that immigration is good for the economy. Then there’s George Borjas, an economist at Harvard. He is among the very few to have presented any kind of serious evidence that it is not so. “Although immigration makes the aggregate economy larger, the actual net benefit accruing to natives is small, equal to an estimated two-tenths of 1 percent of GDP. There is little evidence indicating that immigration (legal and/or illegal) creates large net gains for native-born Americans.”

  Borjas further argues that immigration has harmed those Americans who were already least able to withstand harm. He estimates that immigration has cut the wages of American high school dropouts by 3 to 5 percent, or an average of $1,800 a year. And, yes, for many, that $1,800 is a significant amount.

  In 2015, Borjas published a study claiming that the arrival of the “Marielitos,” the 125,000 prisoners that Castro emptied from his jai
ls in 1980 and put on boats to Florida, made the wages of high school dropouts in the area plunge by 10 to 30 percent. This study was cited by none other than Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller in support of his draconian restrictions on immigration.

  But later analysis showed that Borjas’s study was, at the very least, deeply flawed—in part because it used sample sizes as small as seventeen to twenty-four people per year, and focused on the people who could confirm his hypothesis. Borjas eliminated Hispanic dropouts, women, and workers who’re not between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-nine—who constitute a combined 91 percent of low-skilled workers in Miami—in his samples of people affected by the Marielitos. According to the U.C. Berkeley economists Giovanni Peri and Vasil Yasenov, the new immigrants may have actually had a positive effect on the local job market because they created a demand for services, from supermarkets to auto repair shops. In any case, the Marielitos are thriving, and the Florida job market quickly recovered from whatever short-term effects the influx might have had.

  Do immigrants steal jobs from the natives? Çağlar Özden, a lead economist for the World Bank’s Development and Research Group, maintains that they don’t. “In general Özden found that migrants often take jobs that locals don’t want or can’t fill … Özden also found that unskilled migrants tend either to have no impact on local wages and employment or to increase wages and employment,” summarizes the analyst Ruchir Sharma, the chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley. If you can have an immigrant nanny mind your children, you can go to work as a writer or a dentist and make more money than if you were home minding your children.

  The economist Michael Clemens makes a similar point. As The Atlantic explains,

  he [Clemens] and his co-authors, through study of all the available economic literature, have found that decades of immigration of tens of millions of people to the United States has reduced real wages for the average American worker by fractions of a percent, if at all … Clemens’s research also challenges the notion that immigrants take away jobs from Americans. In agriculture, for example, he has estimated that for every three seasonal workers who are brought in, one American job is created across all sectors. Directly, workers need managers, and more often than not those managers are Americans. Indirectly, workers buy things, which means more Americans are needed to sell and produce those things. And yet, Clemens told me, “when a bus of 60 Mexicans is coming up from the border, nobody looks at it and says ‘Ah, there’s 20 American jobs.’”

  Close to half of American farmworkers are here illegally. Expelling them will not only decimate American agriculture; it will make no difference to the wages of native farmworkers. When the Bracero “guest worker” program ended in 1964, and Mexican farmworkers, who had done backbreaking work in the fields to replace Americans shipped off to the battlefields of Europe, were asked to go back, they were not replaced by American workers. Their bosses simply shifted to less labor-intensive crops and introduced more machines in the fields.

  Instead, the nation would be better served if the farmworkers and most of the other undocumented who’re already here, like the Dreamers, got amnesty. There’s a precedent for this. In 1986, Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, also known as the “Reagan amnesty,” which gave green cards to 2.7 million undocumented people. After it passed, the wages of the legalized workers went up, tax revenues increased as they started filing tax returns, and the crime rate fell by 5 percent, as property crimes decreased because the undocumented could work legally.

  There will be winners from free trade and free movement of people—like technology corporations. And there will be losers, for a while—like the unskilled. But the winners could be made to give away a part of their winnings to the losers through taxes. One way to do this would be to make the earned income tax credit much more generous. This would help both immigrants and the high school dropouts whose prospects are most hurt by immigration. More federal funds should be made available for areas such as border towns that are struggling with the impact of rising migration, in the form of aid for schools and hospitals. These funds could also be raised through a fee that would be charged to companies for each skilled immigrant they sponsor.

  Ultimately, whatever the merits of Borjas’s argument, the solution isn’t to keep low-skilled workers out, which would be catastrophic for entire sectors of the economy. (For example, four out of eight of Maryland’s crab-picking businesses closed in 2018 because of the difficulty of finding seasonal migrant labor after Trump’s restrictions.) It’s to get more students through high school. Then the migrants with lower skills can begin their climb on the ladder of economic opportunity working as apple pickers and nannies, while those born here can work as clerks and call-center workers. And both can dream of their children becoming doctors and presidents.

  If you want to make the economy grow, let in more immigrants—and legalize the ones already here.

  * * *

  Immigrants, particularly the undocumented, are presented by politicians and Fox anchors as a feral horde of drug dealers and rapists. How criminally inclined are immigrants, really?

  Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute analyzed crime statistics in Texas for 2016. Native-born Americans were convicted of crimes at a rate of 2,116 per 100,000 people. For legal immigrants, that number plunged to 292 per 100,000; for illegal immigrants, 879. “The native-born criminal conviction rate was thus 2.4 times as high as the criminal conviction rate for illegal immigrants in that year and 7.2 times as high as that of legal immigrants,” writes Nowrasteh.

  A 2018 study in the journal Criminology studied the correlation between levels of undocumented immigration in American states and the prevalence of crime, from 1990 to 2014. The conclusion was unambiguous: “Increases in the undocumented immigrant population within states are associated with significant decreases in the prevalence of violence,” the study found. For every 1 percent increase in the undocumented population, there were 49 fewer violent crimes per 100,000 people. “Immigrants are driven by pursuit of education and economic opportunities for themselves and their families,” said Michael Light, one of the study’s coauthors. “Migration—especially undocumented migration—requires a lot of motivation and planning. Those are characters that aren’t correlated with a high crime-prone disposition.”

  According to a 2018 Yale survey, the number of undocumented immigrants in America now stands at 22.1 million—and could be as high as 29.5 million. This may mean that the undocumented commit crimes at half the rates originally attributed to them. “You have the same number of crimes but now spread over twice as many people as was believed before, which right away means that the crime rate among undocumented immigrants is essentially half whatever was previously believed,” said Edward Kaplan, a coauthor of the study.

  If you want to make the country safer, let in more immigrants—legal or otherwise.

  * * *

  The third complaint, that immigrants bring in a culture different from an existing one, is the most valid. So, if you’re living in a kind of Norman Rockwell America, you might not like a cantina to open up next door blaring salsa music. But your neighbor, bored out of his mind by the sterility of Norman Rockwell’s America, might welcome it. You don’t get to define what a national culture is. Americans don’t; even Europeans don’t, because go back a few decades and the definition of French, or British, or German culture—what religions and foods and ethnic origins constituted it—was radically different from what it is today.

  Might you consider that by our moving here we will make things better—not just economically but also culturally? That there is something worthwhile in the cultures we bring with us—all of us, not just the Asian model minorities—and some of it is something that you can learn from? It could be our work ethic, it could be our love of family, it could be our gorgeous dresses or soulful music, it could be our richly spiced cuisine or our complex myths. Our old gods will meet your newer gods and produce a hybrid better suited for wors
hip by all.

  The street food of Germany is doner kebab; of Great Britain, chicken tikka masala; of France, couscous. The most exciting music in Paris isn’t Edith Piaf but the Afropop playing in dozens of clubs in and around the city.

  We were also drawn here by your songs. My father moved himself, and his wife and three children, to America to expand his family diamond business. But there was a deeper, more long-standing attraction, which had begun in college in Calcutta, in the 1950s. It was when my father was first exposed to the great rock ’n’ yell of Chuck Berry and Elvis—music that the Jesuit deans of St. Xavier’s tried to ban because they couldn’t stand to see their students gyrating their pelvises. My father had never heard such an awesome caterwaul before, and—along with America’s decadent movies and books—it seeded the young man’s desire to go live there someday.

  And isn’t that, after all, what makes America work: this messy mix, this barbaric yawp, this redneck rondeau, this rude commingling? Isn’t this what permeates its films, movies, books; and isn’t it the principal product it can still export? It is American culture’s permissiveness, openness, and vigor that still attract the masses to the Golden Door, not its rigidity.

  An argument that’s been resurfacing is that this new crop of immigrants, unlike previous waves of migrants, doesn’t assimilate. “The vast majority of past immigrants changed their values, not America’s, when they came to this country. They came here to become American, not only in terms of language, citizenship, and national identity, but also in terms of values,” wrote the radio host Dennis Prager in National Review. “But while some immigrants still do, the majority does not. They want to become American citizens in order to better their lives—a completely understandable motivation—not to embrace American values and identity. The majority of today’s immigrants from Latin America, for example, wishes to become wealthier … Latin Americans.”