Utrice Leid: Especially the people, that’s the true America. Hello out there in radioland, wherever you are on this day, Monday June 29th, 1998. I hope you’re safe and sound and healthy and ready to pick up with each other where we left off just last week. I’m Utrice Leid and you’re listening to TalkBack, the gathering place for the exchange of information, opinions, and ideas, and yes, that was the great Paul Robeson singing his signature song, The House I Live In. In these few days leading toward the 4th of July and certainly on the holiday itself, much will be made of our identity as a nation. What is America to me as Robeson asked. What is America to you? What is America to us? What is America, period. If we were to ask ourselves these questions would we respond like Paul Robeson? Would we agree with Robeson that it’s especially the people, but what do we know about the people? The one thing we know for sure is that we are a nation of immigrants except for the people that were already here, the people who can rightfully claim this land. Everybody came here. For this entire week we’ll be talking about the impact of immigration in the US, specifically exploring the relationship between immigration and citizens, immigration and refugee policy, human rights issues arising from immigration, and the social, cultural, economic and demographic impact of immigration. We will be looking at these areas in comprehensive detail because, you know, we probably have touched on these subjects many times before here on TalkBack, but this is a special series and I want to say that it is, in fact, a series we’re doing in partnership with this program and the Open Society Institute. We’re entering this week-long series as a way of doing a public education and a public service in raising the questions at a whole different level. Not from the frothing of the mouth that goes on in places like California and sometimes in the city of New York, not from the narrow perspective, but from an analytical view and we’ll be looking at it comprehensively. Under the guidance of some of the best experts in the field, and speaking of experts, I’m delighted to introduce my co-host for the series, Arthur C. Helton, who is the director of migration programs at the Open Society Institute, and Arthur it’s a great great joy to see you but before you get this chance let me tell people who you really are and why I so admire you. Arthur Helton is the director of migration programs at the Open Society Institute, which has offices here in New York City and in Budapest. He is a lawyer, an adjunct professor of law at the New York University School of Law, he teaches immigration and refugee law. He’s a visiting professor at the Central European University at which he teaches international affairs and European studies programs. He has served as chair of the advisory committee to the New York state interagency taskforce on immigration affairs. He has testified on numerous occasions as an expert in US courts and in congress on issues concerning the rights of aliens and refugee protection. He has written over 60 scholarly articles on immigration subjects and is a member of more than 20 organizational boards in the field. He is a recipient of the Ninoy Aquino recognition award, conferred by the president of the Republic of the Philippines in 1991 and the public interest award conferred by the NYU Law Alumni Association in 1987, He graduated from NYU Law School in 1976. He looks pretty good for a guy who graduated in 1976.
Arthur Helton: Well, you certainly know the way to my heart. Thank you very much Utrice.
Utrice Leid: Thank you and it really is a joy to have you with us. We’ll be expecting in studio, several guests, actually two guests and Arthur, I’ll leave it up to you to begin the conversation.
Arthur Helton: Thank you very much, Utrice. It seems to me there could be no more appropriate time to have this conversation than the week leading up to the 4th of July. As you said, we’ve had many opportunities in the past to touch on these issues and we’ve looked for an opportunity to explore these questions of identity, immigration, and politics. And today we’re beginning, where we live, with an examination of the situation in New York City. New York is many things, and it is certainly a city of immigrants. It is a setting in which the immigration experience has played out historically and continues to be played out today. Joining us in this conversation today is Hector Cordero-Guzman, who is on the faculty at the New School for Social Research’s Milano School of Management. I expect we’ll be joined shortly by Philip Kasinitz, who is on the faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center in Hunter College and, as I understand it, a regular guest at WBAI. I think it is important that we begin this examination focusing on the city we live in, New York City, and its circumstances. Hector, maybe I can just ask you to come in on this question and we can just begin the conversation.
Utrice Leid: Good.
Hector Cordero-Guzman: Well if we want to talk specifically about the numbers of immigrants that came to the US in the latest period that was analyzed using INS statistics which was 1990 - 1994. The data was analyzed by New York City’s department of city planning. Their population division which is distinguished around the country as being one of the very few public units, demography units that pays a lot of attention to immigrants and they publish occasional reports that are very detailed reports using both the decennial census and using special INS files. So if you use the latest INS files that they’ve analyzed between 1990 and 1994 there were approximately 562,000 legal immigrants coming to New York City. This is between 1990 and 1994. It gives you about 112 - 113,000 on an annual average of immigrants again coming to New York City. The top 20 countries and I’ll go through the list relatively quickly. The top country of course is the Dominican Republic and I’ll give you sort of the annual average from the group, with about 23,000 - again this is legal immigrants, with data from the INS - of 23,000 Dominicans a year between 1990-1994. The second largest country was the former Soviet Union which sent approximately 14,000 immigrants per year in the 1990 -1994 period. The third source country was China and total China, this includes Taiwan, Hong Kong and the mainland China. We know in New York City most of the immigrants currently come from the mainland and within the mainland particularly from the Fujian province in China. The fourth source country is Jamaica with about 6500 immigrants a year, then comes Guyana with about 6100, followed by Poland with about 3900, then it’s the Philippines with about 3400. This is followed by Trinidad and Tobago with about 3100, followed by Haiti, India, then Ecuador, then Ireland, then Colombia, then Bangladesh, then Korea, then Pakistan, Peru, Honduras, the United Kingdom and Israel. They round up the top 20 source countries to New York City. One of the things that we note when we look at that list of source countries is that there is heavy representation in that immigration from the Caribbean of course the Spanish Caribbean, Dominican Republic, mainly but also from the Anglo and Francophone Caribbean, Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Haiti, are represented in the top 20 countries in the list. We also see significant representation from China, the Philippines, India, Bangladesh, Korea. These are the top Asian countries in terms of sending immigrants to New York City. There is some representation from Europe in New York City an unusual in terms of the flow to the rest of the country, particularly places like California which is overwhelmingly Latino and Asian immigration. In New York there are several European countries in the top 20 list, including the former Soviet Union, Poland, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and there is also some representation from South America, particularly from countries in the Andean cone, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. So immigration to New York has representation from the major continents, the Caribbean, Asia, the Andean cone in South America, from Europe and immigration to New York is more diverse in a way in terms of its national origin composition than immigration to other destination states - Florida, Illinois, California. If you compare immigration to New York with immigration to California, Florida and Illinois, what you find is New York’s immigration is more diverse in terms of its source countries than immigration to these other states.
Arthur Helton: Interestingly enough, one of the findings of a recent report by the Urban Institute shows that the wide diversity in countries of origin have, in fact, contributed to immigration and integration success in New York City. New York is somewhat different than other immigrant receiving states inasmuch as New York’s immigrants tend to naturalize in greater numbers. When we talk about immigrants in New York, for the most part we’re talking about immigrants in legal status as opposed to undocumented immigrants. While there are upwards of a half a million undocumented people in New York, when we talk about immigrants, we are predominantly talking about those who are lawful permanent residents, who are naturalized, who are admitted refugees, or who are lawful non-immigrants. For that reason, they generate proportionately higher levels of income, and make higher levels of contribution in terms of taxes. All in all, they underscore what I suppose New York City’s politicians have long recognized - the great benefit of immigration.
Utrice Leid: Is there a reason that New York draws such a diverse group of immigrants more than, say, Atlanta?
Arthur Helton: New York is a world city, and it has been a place of reception for so many nationalities and anchor groups from the beginning of the century. New York and New Jersey are similar in that sense in terms of diversity in countries of origin of communication, as well as the globalization of not only transport, but communications and movement. New York has been a place of immigration for large numbers of highly diverse groups of persons.
Hector Cordero-Guzman: And New York also has this - aside from the historical reasons why New York has been and continues to be an attractive place for immigrants and the history what it does is creates communities of immigrants in New York that become the places where the new arrivals are received. These communities create organizations and institutions. There’s about 300 community-based organizations in the city that provide services of one form or another to a variety of immigration communities in this city. So history clearly plays an important role. But another factor that plays an important role is that New York is also everywhere else in the world that is companies that are based in New York, economic production that to a large extent was based in New York. It’s New York’s presence also in the world that makes it a very attractive destination for immigrants. It’s also the port of entry in a way for immigrants that come from European countries, and to a large extent also from Asian countries. New York is also still a border state even though it’s not a border state in the chasing immigrants through the desert sense. It’s still historically an entrance point. There are economic connections between various places in the world, the presence of these immigration communities and immigration organizations in the city - all of these factors clearly combine to make New York still a very attractive place to settle.
Arthur Helton: Well, speaking of immigration, we have been joined by Philip Kasinitz, who is on the faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center at Hunter College. Philip is the author of Caribbean New York, the editor of Metropolis, and chair-elect of the international immigration section of the American Sociological Association. I suspect he may already have a quick answer. We were beginning to reflect among ourselves why New York is such a diverse place of immigration. New York is by far and away, along with New Jersey, a place of immigration and reception in the US which enjoys great diversity and tolerance. Other than the fact that New York is a world city, is there another explanation for this phenomenon?
Philip Kasinitz: So I come in late and you start with the really hard questions.
Utrice Leid: As a penalty.
Philip Kasinitz: As a penalty. Well first of all let me apologize for coming in late, I’ve been -
Utrice Leid: You’re fine, you’re just in time
Philip Kasinitz: -doing research among the immigration communities of trying to get a taxi in New York so my view is maybe somewhat colored by that recent experience. Yes, New York is - well, part of it, I think is what Hector was touching on as we came in, is the heritage of immigration. At the same time, although New York is a border state in the sense that it’s a port of entry, it’s far enough from the border that it isn’t dominated by the people right on the other side of it. So whereas Los Angeles receives an enormous diversity of immigrants, it’s still effectively dominated by this very large and old flow from Mexico and to some extent Central America and while Miami which receives a huge and diverse number of immigrants but is still essentially dominated by a very large flow from Cuba only 90 miles away, New York being tied to the rest of the world initially as a port and then by sort of a transportation policy and a communication center and a trade center really opens up to almost everywhere. Traditionally, New York has a very strong and surprisingly old connection to the Caribbean. Being down here in the new WBAI studios on Wall Street, which was in and of itself something of a surprise, I was reminded of the whole seaport area and how New York has this trade connection with the Caribbean really going back to the 18th century, and people like Alexander Hamilton and then Samuel Francis and our early history in this -
Utrice Leid: The New York Post denies that Alexander Hamilton actually was Caribbean but -
Philip Kasinitz: He may not have been black but he was definitely from Nevis, there’s no question about that. I don’t know if they have a position on Samuel Francis. And Pierre Toussaint, we can, some of them are undeniable - New York was also a sugar refining center, it was a coffee refining center. New Jersey was a coffee refining center for many years. That’s not because the coffee and sugar was being grown in Albany and being shipped down the Hudson, right, I mean that’s because of the connection with the US south and the Caribbean. So that’s a very old connection. Of course the European connection dates back to the founding of New York as a European city but was really strengthened in the 19th century with the mass migrations from southern and eastern Europe which often again followed trade routes and New York remains a very large recipient of European immigrants. We sometimes think of the new immigration, the post-1965 immigration as being different in the sense that it’s not European, and of course it is predominately Latin American, Caribbean, and Asian, but there’s still a much larger percentage of the immigration flow from Europe coming in through New York than from anywhere else.
Hector Cordero-Guzman: 26 per cent.
Philip Kasinitz: Thank you. That was very impressive. So a large portion is from Europe. You have this old Caribbean connection which is different, you have the Latin American migration, you have this connection to Asia which is again by international trade. And most recently of course, the one thing New York always had relatively little of was Mexican migration which is of course the largest migration everywhere else in the country practically. The largest migration in the country as a whole, and of course in the last three or four years that has changed very dramatically.
Arthur Helton: That in some ways underscores a question that I have been mulling over today, which is: is New York really different in terms of immigration policy and circumstances than the rest of the country. Certainly, policy makers in Washington consider New York very different in terms of immigration issues, in fact so different that the staunchly pro-immigration city government is given little attention and little time in terms of national politics. New York is so different, so well founded on legal immigration, that what we’re talking about in New York is a peculiarity rather than a trend. Any response?
Philip Kasinitz: I think that’s essentially right. It’s not only that we have a pro immigration mayor but I think what’s particularly interesting is that we have an otherwise quite conservative pro-immigration mayor. That being conservative in New York is not really a conservative or a liberal stand per se, I mean it’s almost a completely universal - not completely universal, there are some local politicians, Frank Padavan, for example who made strong anti-immigration stances, but it really does seen to be pro-immigration fairly across the political spectrum at least in some sense, not necessarily in terms of services delivered to immigrants, but certainly in the idea of a lot of immigration. And I think that that’s right, I mean it’s partially the long tradition of immigration, it’s partially the fact that a higher portion of the New York immigration is legal than in other parts of the country, and I think that makes a difference in people’s minds. I think it’s partially because the tangible benefits of immigration are so apparent here and they’re so apparent even to fairly conservative middle class people. It’s - one recent survey done by the Taub center found that while by only a small majority New Yorkers favor more migration to this country the overwhelming majority thought that immigrants would be welcome as neighbors in their neighborhoods. There’s kind of a strong sense that immigrants make good New Yorkers here - I think that’s a very old and very rooted sentiment.
Hector Cordero-Guzman: Yes, I think again, partly going back to the particular history of the city, it’s difficult to hold any anti-immigrant positions if in your family background there is an immigrant. And the overwhelming numbers - 40% of working age adults in New York City are foreign born. So clearly and since they register and since they naturalize they become part of the mainstream much quicker than that is the case in California for example. I think another reason is that New York saw a big immigration from African Americans and from Puerto Ricans in the 40s and the 50s, and that was the beginning of New York having to deal with massive numbers of Latinos and blacks and so the new immigrants that are coming are coming in a way after New York has already absorbed the presence of other groups through this immigration of Puerto Ricans and blacks who couldn’t be attacked by - or sent back to where they came from because there were - one through colonial experience and the other through sort of the forced migration experience. They were part of America. There might have been differences and there may have been arguments about what the difference was, and where the difference came from, and that has led to what some people have called second class citizenship or Puerto Ricans being legal aliens. Just because you’re a citizen doesn’t mean you get the same rights as other citizens. But still from the point of view of the city, from the point of view of city politics, our city got used to Latino politicians a long time ago, it’s not a relatively new phenomenon. So I think if you have the history of immigration, the overwhelming numbers, the fact that a lot of them do become citizens and become mainstreamed in some way, and the historical experience of New York City in dealing with or trying to accommodate the Latino and African American population, has made life for immigrants and perhaps prejudices against immigrants less than what they otherwise would have been. The decisions that were made in court concerning bilingual education have benefited immigrants that have come after and have changed the city, with native born Hispanic population which makes it less likely that these folks will discriminate against foreign born Hispanic populations.
Utrice Leid: You made the point earlier that immigration in the sense facilitated by a trade by the establishment of a cultural infrastructure that basically received immigrants into a friendly environment and that was fair and connected to the economy. But I’m sensing by what you just said that there is a notable change in the nature of the immigrant as well, or the nature of the reasons compelling immigration as well.
Hector Cordero-Guzman: Well I don’t necessarily think that the reasons why people come are all together different. The usual reasons are economic motivations, limited opportunities in the country of origin, and the perception, true or not that in the US, those things could change. So I don’t think the reasons for the immigration have necessarily changed so much. The reasons why African Americans came from the south to the north and why Puerto Ricans came to New York City, I would say, in terms of the economics of it would be similar to the reasons why, say, Dominicans would continue to come to the US, there are limited opportunities in the south and on the island, so I don’t know that necessarily the reasons why people come have changed.
Arthur Helton: Now there’s one small category that is worth, I suppose, mentioning at this point, which is the humanitarian admissions and the refugee admissions. New York is the place of arrival for refugees particularly from the former Soviet Union; they from the largest category of refugee immigrants in New York City. About 200,000 refugees from the former Soviet Union have come to New York and they, historically and in terms of current characteristics, are probably less likely to contribute in the early stages of their resettlement to the community in terms of employment or paying taxes. They are more likely to access public assistance, given the nature often times of their uprooting. And in that sense, they probably don’t change the overall mix a great deal, but that’s one special category of particularly vulnerable people that we should simply take into account.
Philip Kasinitz: But that too underlines the history of New York as a receiving society. Here’s a group of people that one can certainly imagine circumstance in which they would receive a very hostile reception because they were very vulnerable, they were disproportionately dependent on public services, but precisely because of their relationship both to American Cold War politics, but also more importantly perhaps to the fact that they were seen as being successors to and in many cases were biographically related to a large portion of the native population. They were disproportionately Jewish, and there was a huge Eastern European Jewish population that had already been quite successful and established in NEW YORK that that group did not encounter the kind of hostility that let’s say Southeast Asian refugees in the northern mid-west have received. Or to some degree Vietnamese refugees in southern California. There was a host population ready, willing and in many cases quite able to aid in the absorption of this group. I think that’s made a very big difference.
Utrice Leid: Well, let’s take a break here. You’re listening to TalkBack on WBAI 99.5 FM. I’m Utrice Leid,, and my co-host for this entire series lasting all week on immigration is Arthur Helton. Our guests in studio are Hector Cordero-Guzman, professor of urban policy at the New School for Social Research, and Philip Kasinitz, professor of sociology at the CUNY grad center and at Hunter College. We’ll be back right after this.
Utrice Leid: You’re listening to WBAI 99.5 FM, and this is the first segment of a series lasting all week on immigration and it’s impact in New York City particularly, but also nationwide. Arthur?
Arthur Helton: Yes Utrice, I think we have probably eloquently established New York’s historical and current receptivity to immigrants, and in some ways distinguished New York from so many other places in the country where anti-immigrant sentiments seem to be normal in local politics. New York, at least in those explicit terms, doesn’t seem to follow these trends. Yet, this seems in some ways counter-intuitive in the sense that so much of immigration policy is a story of inter-governmental transfers of resources and economic impacts. The common wisdom is, of course, that localities, cities and states, bear the brunt in terms of school, police and emergency services, and like matters. To the extent there is a Proposition 187, or to the extent there are such initiatives, they are often times rooted in local politics and this seems to be a situation to which New York is largely immune. But it can’t be simply because the impacts are that different. Why is New York immune to this kind of local antagonism towards immigrants? Hector?
Hector Cordero-Guzman: Wow. Why is New York immune to local antagonism against immigrants? Again I think that (unclear) minimize compare to other parts of the country, I would argue the diversity of the immigration flow itself makes it more difficult to stereotype the immigrants and to attack them. When the image is of sort of the illegal Mexican crossing the border, having their kid on this side and putting their children in school, and that is the image that is built and that overwhelmingly says that 60% of these immigrants come from this one area. It’s a stereotype that though false - it’s easier for it to take hold in the minds of nonimmigrant populations. Whereas in New York the vast diversity demographically, economically, politically of immigrants makes it very difficult for the non-immigrant population and again the fact that a lot of non-immigrants also have ties, family ties to immigrants, but aside from that, the sheer diversity of the types of immigrants that there are, the differences in terms of socioeconomic characteristics make it very difficult to typify and stereotype. It makes it difficult for politicians to hold a false image that they can easily beat up. So I think the diversity itself explains, along side the fact that a lot of immigrants have connections to family and other non-immigrants. Those factors really make it very difficult for politicians to hold the stereotypes for too long without some kind of response, people know better than that.
Philip Kasinitz: Yes, we should of course, as I think I started to say, not exaggerate the warm welcome immigrants are given in New York, we were talking about less hostile in relative terms, less hostile than in many large cities in the US right at the moment. I think there’s still a fair amount of anti-immigrant hostility in New York, but I think Hector is quite right, the reasons are as much cultural as economic and I think that there are - in part also rooted in the fact that anti-immigrant sentiment does not neatly correspond with racial divisions in New York. The fact that a significant portion of the immigrants are white, Latino, Asian, and black, and that, in fact in all of those racial groups there is a large immigrant sub-division, I think that the kind of racial divisiveness and pro- and anti-immigrant divisiveness don’t line up neatly the way that they do say in California, so I think that has led it to become in some ways a less amount of racial hostility. But, the popular wisdom as you put it is essentially correct, immigration costs locally and benefits nationally. It’s ironic in that sense that many of the strongest anti-immigrant voices have come from parts of the country that are not negatively impacted by immigration at all and have benefited because of the massive benefits I think that immigration means to the federal government.
Utrice Leid: But what does this do to the undercurrent that I sense that would tend to challenge both your view, and yours Hector, about - on the surface these theories apply, but I see an interesting nativism developing where some people finally arrive at a point perhaps because of generational presence here in New York, by 6th or 7th generation they are no longer immigrants they no loner identify as immigrants and then or some would be recent arrivals but would in their minds qualify as Americans sooner than others, some would arrive with the same deep racist or cultural biases, saying, ‘well, I’m entitled to be an immigrants, that person is not entitled and we have the kind of natural conversion going on as regards immigrants so it is quite possible that even the mayor, a son of an immigrant could even as he espouses pro-immigrant policies is actually undermining that with extremely anti-immigrant policy making.
Hector Cordero-Guzman: Well, there is some resentment and it could go both ways. I’m going to run the risk of perhaps stereotyping, but we’ll hear from the public in a little while. One could argue that immigrants, as they come in assimilate to the pervading racial views of the country which means that they will be making distinctions between themselves and those that they perceive to be at the bottom, and they will think they’re not like them. At that can happen -
Philip Kasinitz: Remarkably quickly.
Hector Cordero-Guzman: They learn it very quickly and in fact sometimes they know before they get here, who’s at the bottom of the society and they want to make a distinction between those and us, and number two there’s resentment on the part of non-immigrant populations, the native population of minorities, and to some extent not of minority groups - that immigrants can come to the country and very quickly can benefit from being here, while the others have been here for generations and haven’t seen much progress. And I think that this is a real tension that is out there, and in part to the extent that immigrants are allowing employers to underbid wages compared to the non-immigrant population that resentment would have a slight basis in truth. Or one would have a reason to believe why that resentment would be there. What are the solutions - to create a fence around the border or at the airports, or the solution is to invest more in the education and training of the native population. It’s something that has to be debated. I would tend to think that the solution is to invest in the education and the training more aggressively of native born populations. And to the extent that immigrants are somewhat of a safety-valve for the labor market it doesn’t force the society to make those investments because they can always rely on the cheap labor. That is a problem and that is something that has to be dealt with. And we’ve already, we’ve mostly been dealing with one might one to say the positive side of immigration, this might be one of the negatives - the competition in the labor market among groups and between the immigrant and native minorities that are in a similar educational area, in a sort of lower part of the educational distribution. There’s real competition. In addition, studies have shown that are more protective or resentful of new immigration are the recent immigrants themselves. Public opinion studies of recent Latino immigrants found that they’d rather come in and close the door right behind them, and that’s not new and it’s not particular to Latinos, it happened at the turn of the century and it will continue to happen. People come here for opportunities but they also see that they also compete with other newer immigrants. So there is within immigrant competition there is immigrant/native competition and those are real issues. The question is will the response to that be to close the border in some way and continue to restrict immigration, or will the response be to invest more in the education and training of the native-born populations and immigrants. So yes there are some resentments, there are some tensions, and some are justified, but there are solutions.
Philip Kasinitz: I was slightly amused with your notion of 6th and 7th generation people saying I’m not an immigrant any more, it seems to me it’s more like 6th or 7th hour in the country that people start to say, ‘back when I came in, we were deserving and learned English and worked hard and walked ten miles through the snow to get to the school every morning, but these bus are coming today..’ Yes I think that’s a very old discourse in New York is very much part of the discourse in New York - it happens all the time but I don’t think it’s produced, at least thus far, and one has to qualify this because as the number of immigrants gets larger and larger, the kind of competitive effects that Hector is talking about become almost severe. And of course it depends on what’s happening with the rest of the economy, and where the groups that are competing with immigrants are ending up in the rest of the economy. All of that having been said we haven’t thus far seen the kind of local politically driven nativist movement that we have in California, or that you’ve had in Florida in various times. But there are still things about the New York situation that make these things play some what differently.
Utrice Leid: So why do we get the feeling that right now the city of New York - it’s more bad than good to be an immigrant. You have - well take a look at the recent rash of decisions by the city and the targeting of the particular population seen as politically unprotected, the cab drivers - mostly Asian and African, I see, in fact the whole question of who qualifies for a visa, and how many visas are allotted. I noticed than in none of the 20, the top 20, is Africa listed - I wonder why. I see the effort about punishing parents for registering their children if they’re undocumented workers in the school system. The whole question of, quote, welfare reform is predicated on this large immigrant population. The health system is said to be over-run, mostly by immigrants using services and taxing the health system to the hilt. The same thing with he board of ed. We have 90,000 kids with out a place to sit in the classroom. The vast majority of them are said to be children. And that’s just the tip of it. I’m getting the sense that even though this city would claim to be very liberal and very open-minded and very conscious of it’s history as an immigrant port. The vitriolic policies are in the making and gaining wide acceptance I think, because I’m seeing it happening not just in people’s attitudes everyday, but I’m seeing it happening in a more formalized way in criminal court system and in policy making.
Arthur Helton: There does seem to be a disconnect between the high rhetoric of the pro-immigration statements of the Mayor of the City of New York, and the uncontested arguments of politicians on the national level which emphatically state that the nation’s interests are found in placing limits on immigration. And yet a series of social initiatives that disproportionately affect immigrants, or which really are social dysfunctions, in which immigrants are blamed explicitly or implicitly by those same rhetoricians, indeed the same pro-immigrant rhetoricians. It seems like such a noteworthy disconnect.
Philip Kasinitz: It does seem to me though that you have to pull apart a number of elements that you’re bundling together as sort of this change in atmosphere. I mean some of the policies you’re talking about are federal policies, like for example who we’re actually letting in on the visa policies - which are driven largely by politicians from parts of the country that don’t get a lot of immigration. My big reform would be that Montana manages to get two votes in the senate but Brooklyn - you know - with eight times the population has two shares in New York state’s two. But I also think that there have been a number of recent policies that have directly impacted immigrant populations such as the attacks on the cab drivers, the attacks on the street vendors. And in that I think you do see this interesting disconnect between we like immigrants in general, in theory, certainly in this administration, but we don’t like them actually making a living and we’re going to beat up on them because they’re somewhat vulnerable. I would still say however that - there is some extent to which- not anti-immigrant rhetoric per se but certainly notions of the cost of immigration are very real. The school system is the classic example - the schools are terribly overcrowded, the health and hospital system is terribly overburdened. That’s not the fault of the immigrants per se but the reason that that’s the case is because well every other older north-eastern city is losing population, New York is staying steady and possibly gaining population to immigration and it’s gaining at the younger ends of the age structure. Immigration is expensive for localities to govern that it interests me, quite the counter, not that there is resentment, which is not to me a huge surprise, but that that resentment hasn’t coalesced in a really anti-immigrant movement per se, the way that it has in many parts of the country.
Utrice Leid: But still I just want to explore this point because I think it is so important. We have - well you call it Arthur, a sort of policy disconnect between what is said and what is done. It’s not that the schools suddenly have become overpopulated, it’s that the government has consistently refused to address the problem in a logical way but now we have government it seems reinforcing a social view developing in New York in a time that New York City , in New York City, at least according to the recent statistics that I’ve seen, no one ethnic group is dominant in New York and this is a historic development I think. And I think it is beginning to foster a mind set that is not necessarily helpful to the immigrant because when it was said, big shrieks went up about the browning of America, and now my God it’s happening here legally, what are we to do? And the policy decisions are reflecting social attitudes that whites are losing ground in this city. And it’s a matter of protecting turf that was one some time ago and you need to hold on to it.
Hector Cordero-Guzman: Well I think that there’s some of that but I think one factor that makes it difficult for New Yorkers to react against the local impacts of immigration is that New York, if you compare it to other cities around the country, has had a well developed welfare state and has had it for a very long time, has made some investments in the poorer segments of the population, more than any other city in the country. So for New York it was a matter of keeping the levels of investment at a time when the demographics of the population were changing. For other cities, it’s a matter of having to fund programs and activities that they’ve never funded. So in a way, that reality, the well developed welfare state in New York City, makes it more difficult for people to see that they have had to put more money out of their pocket over the decade, and that the money that they’re putting out of their pocket is going to a different population.
Philip Kasinitz: This is in some ways the glass half full, half empty kind of argument. In some ways many of the parts of the state investment, welfare state that we have, that immigrants have used to their benefit are terribly under attack and have been under attack really now for two and a half decades, and particularly in this administration. On the other hand, the fact that they are still there at all after two decades of attack,, that we still have a community system, that we still have a health and hospital system, embattled though they are, and I certainly wouldn’t want to minimize this as a CUNY employee, but the fact that they exist at all is a tribute to how much more of a welfare state New York had than other cities. There simply isn’t a city university to lose in most other parts of the country. And also I think that all these different areas bring out the kind of mixed feelings people have. It’s not that there isn’t anti-immigrant politics or anti-immigrant resentment, I think there is, there’s lots of it. It’s that it doesn’t focus around one specific issue that we take it as ‘here’s the issue of the cabdrivers, here’s the issues of CUNY, or here’s the issue of this or that’, a specific issue, but it hasn’t coalesced in one big anti-foreigner idea, the way it really more or less has in southern California. Anti-immigrant - this is a metaphor for all of these other social problems that. I think in New York they’re battled out one issue at a time, although as - I think you’re probably right, there is a current,, somewhat connecting them.
Arthur Helton: It’s interesting. Not only has it not coalesced, but it’s turned into a celebration of immigration as a positive value. At least, New York City advocates to the national government that it should be liberal towards immigrants, that there should be generous immigration laws and policies. And, in fact, in terms of restrictions placed on public assistance, that they shouldn’t be visited upon legal immigrants, a population particularly of concern in New York City. So what is surprising is not so that it hasn’t coalesced into a proposition 187, but rather than that there’s a virulent pro-immigrant political stake holder in the form of New York City which is highly unusual now in the United States.
Philip Kasinitz: And if there’s an ugly underside to that, I’m most concerned about it coalescing into an anti-immigrant kind of sentiment as the extent to which that pro-immigrant sentiment has at times been a coded anti native minority sentiment - the immigrants as in some ways the better minorities, and compared to Native Americans, blacks and Puerto Ricans. That’s also been there in the discourse, that immigrants good, naiv minorities are the problem.
Hector Cordero-Guzman: I think that there’s an incredible diversity of immigrants, but in the public discourse there are really two images that dominate. One is sort of the good immigrant, and one is the bad immigrant. And in California, the image that is dominating at the time is the image of the bad immigrant and we want to prevent those bad immigrants from coming. There’s always been a bad immigrant image in New York also. The issue in New York is that the good image of the immigrant is the one that dominated, but that I think explains what appears to be sort of an inconsistency. I think ideologically everyone speaks positively, but always has the image of the good immigrant in mind. And when it comes time to put forth policies which adversely affect immigrants, the image that dominates at the time is sort of the bad immigrant. We could cut welfare because the image that dominates is the immigrant who comes here to get welfare. We don’t want that. So I think that New York’s view of immigration has gotten very sophisticated, and there’s not a simple knee-jerk reaction, but there’s a processing going on and people say it’s not really going to attack all immigrants. We like the good immigrants, the ones that work 80 hours a week, never get sick, don’t send any of their children to school - they send their children to private school and they pay for it - these are the immigrants that we like and we’ve seen some of those, but that image is not that far from the truth and the imaginable and New York grabs on that image and defends the good immigrant. The issue for us is - is there such a thing as the good and the bad immigrant, or is most immigration somewhere in between. And some policies are put forth with the image that all immigrants are the bad immigrants, so you punish old ladies that have been here for 40 years and haven’t become citizens and you take their benefits away, because you’re not thinking that there are nuances in the immigrants that take welfare. You’re just lumping them all together as the immigrant that just comes in because the US has more welfare benefits than the country of origin, so you want to just come here to take our money, and you don’t have a right to do that. So I think that there is also a play, it is good politics in New York City to play the “I am for diversity” card in a population that is 60-70% non-white, you can not but to celebrate diversity. Celebrating diversity is very easy, investing in diverse populations equally is very hard. So I think that New York is very good at the celebration of immigrants and it’s also very good at knowing who to invest in and in a way playing off groups one against the other and we let the good immigrant come in and have a voice in politics, but the bad immigrants we want to make sure they don’t come. And I think that image is really the one that dominates the public discourse at the national level and explains what is not really an inconsistency, it’s just that we’re playing both sides in a way. We want the benefits of immigration but do not want to pay any of the costs or go through the kind of social/cultural change associated with increased numbers of immigrants.
Philip Kasinitz: And I think you hit on it to an extent when you talked about how there is no one dominate or racial group in this city anymore. As a result, I mean conceivably you could see a rainbow coalition politics of people of color and other marginalized groups emerging as kind of an advocacy- an alliance against the powers that be in lots of ways. But that hasn’t tended to be what has happened. What has happened is that you don’t have any - whites may not be the majority and whites may not be dominant anymore. But it also means the blacks are not going to be dominant either any time in the near future - it’s not an Atlanta or a Detroit scenario. It’s a huge multiplicity which means that political power comes to people who can effectively build coalitions and the celebration of diversity in theory with all of these small groups competing with each other is good coalition politics. Actually expanding the welfare state - that’s hard to do, that’s difficult and that requires - and so it’s very easy to play groups of f against each other sometimes and I think in that sense the notion that difference is not the problem, plays different in New York than it does in other places in the country where there is a homogeneous population to be different from. But that doesn’t necessarily - I don’t think that we should get caught up in that, while in some ways it makes good identity politics, it doesn’t necessarily give you a progressive agenda on all kinds of issues that you might like to see.
Utrice Leid: Well let’s take another break, you’re listening to WBAI, 99.5 FM in New York. I’m Utrice Leid, the program is TalkBack. We are in the midst of our first of four segments on immigration running this week. My co-host is Arthur C. Helton, director of migration programs at the Open Society Institute, which is cosponsoring and cohosting this entire series. We’ll be back with our guests, Hector Cordero-Guzman, professor of urban policy at the New School for Social Research and Philip Kasinitz professor of sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center and also at Hunter College, right after this.
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Utrice Leid: You’re listening to WBAI 99.5 in New York and that was the great Celtic voice of Connie Dover singing something I know I’m going to mangle but I’ll try --- It means ‘I hate cutting time’. That’s a wonderful Celtic song and I thought in the spirit of our discussion on immigration we’ll kind of do a lovely little trip around the world.
Hector Cordero-Guzman: Yes, I think immigrants provide some very concrete benefits for a lot of New Yorkers in terms of the kind of work that they do and the wages that they command for the kind of work that they do. But on the other hand, I think that we hold it against immigrants when they assimilate and learn what kinds of working hours and conditions are tolerated. So it seems to me on the one hand we accept immigrants and the immigrants that want to let themselves be exploited the most we like the most in a way. The immigrants that work the most and complain the least are the ones that we like the most but we don’t realize that over time individuals are going to be socialized in this society, their children are going to be socialized in this society and they’re going to learn that there are laws that limit the amount of hours a person can work, there are laws that regulate how many breaks a person can have, and what happens is that employers prefer these immigrants when they come in and don’t complain and are quote unquote good, docile workers, but then the more that immigrants become more radicalized, the more immigrants continue to fight or demand better working conditions, the employers become more reluctant to deal with them. For example if you look at the case of blacks and Puerto Ricans is one example -why employers prefer some immigrants versus some native minority groups. And part of the reason is employers have different perceptions as to who knows what their rights are, who is more or less docile, so I think that it is good for us to celebrate immigration, but it’s also important for us to point out some of the hypocrisies that are inherent in our immigration policy and in the way we act toward immigrants and in the way we perceive of immigration, and we need to put those things also on the foreground. Again, it is easy to buy the tomatoes for cheaper, but if you stop and think what are some of the consequences are of doing that, then it might become a little more problematic, and I think we hold it against immigrants when they learn to be part of unions and when they learn to demand their rights. They all of a sudden become too expensive for employers to hire and they move on to the next group. And I think we need to celebrate immigrants but we also need a process of forcing employers not to always have the easy way out, and how does one do that, it’s a very difficult question. Some people would suggest not to let any more immigrants in and that would force employers to deal with the population that is already there and if you cannot get someone to do a job for 5 dollars then you have to pay 6 and that might be a good thing. So there are some tensions, we are in a way somewhat addicted to the benefits that immigrants provide and don’t want to pay for some of the costs associated with development, and that’s problematic. We would rather have guest workers who come in, do their work, collect cheap wages, and go back to where they came from.
Philip Kasinitz: For me the key is to go beyond the false dichotomy of immigrants cost or immigrants hurt, obviously it’s more complicated than that. There are great benefits to immigration, particularly obvious in New York. There are also real costs. I think the issue really is how do you redistribute the benefits to those who pay the costs.
Hector Cordero-Guzman: Yes, unfortunately most of the research has focused very very very narrowly on the costs defined as use of the welfare system and the benefits defined as taxes paid. And if you really want to do a study on the impact of immigration, you cannot really stay at the level of the economic because within the level of the economic there is a question of income, there’s the question of taxes, there is the question of welfare, but there’s also the question of labor market effects, there’s also the question of business formation and the role that immigrants have played in the formation of businesses. There is the role that immigrants play in commerce, between New York and societies in the country of origin and the role that immigrants play in commercial ties between the US and other countries. So unfortunately most of the research on impacts has focused on the economic and unfortunately within that has focused very narrowly on welfare use and taxes paid and has not looked at the broader picture. If we were to look at the broader picture, what are some of the other impacts we might want to think about -- and this is no to make each case but just to throw out a couple of ideas. First would be the question of demographic impact, what are the population impact in terms of fertility, in terms of mortality, in terms of changing the age structure of the city. What are some of the social impacts of immigration - it’s not simply economic - in terms of language, in terms of the role of immigrants in community revitalization, in terms of the role of immigrants in housing, in maintaining and preserving the housing stock of the city. There are the political impacts of immigration. Political in terms of political participation, political in terms of elected officials, in terms of laws that are enacted. There are the cultural impacts of immigration, of course involves music, art, dance, theater. There are the ideological impacts of immigration, to what extent immigrants challenge our political perceptions, challenge our notion of patriotism for example, about what being an American is. There are organizational impacts of immigrants. Immigrants come in and they from organizations, they become members of organizations that are already here and they change those organizations, force them to be more responsive to address their community needs, and there impacts in terms of conceptions of citizenship, of membership, of rights. And we can then look at different areas, and say what are the educational impacts, what are the health impacts of immigrants, what are the crime impacts of immigrants, what is the role of immigrants in the socio-economic development of countries of origin. So in throwing all these different areas, all that it does is tells our audience and it tells us that immigration is a very complicated, a multi-faceted process that involves a number of important dimensions of social activity, and to reduce the question to the costs and benefits of immigration in terms of taxes paid, income received, and welfare used is really to do an injustice to the complexity of the topic. A true analysis really has to look at all these areas. How do we come up with a calculation or evaluation as to whether the cultural contribution is positive or negative. That’s something that each one of has to discuss, but is the cultural contribution diminished by point of one more percent of welfare use? How do we make those balances.
Philip Kasinitz: Where are those trade-offs?
Hector Cordero-Guzman: Right, and I think that unfortunately now, we’re focusing very narrowly on the economic, very narrowly on the taxes and incomes, and these again are important but if you are going to have a complete perspective of the impact of immigration, you have to look at the cost and benefits in each one of theses areas. There are educational costs, but there are educational benefits. Children in New York are - there’s a lot of criticism of the school system, but again, when you compare New York children to children in other cities, they are much more cosmopolitan, they know much more about many more things than children that are educated in a very narrow, provincial way. So is that something that is a cost - because more kids are in school or is a benefit derived that more children are going to classrooms with children from other places. There are costs in terms of kids in schools, there are benefits in terms of immigrants that come and teach in our educational system. So what I’m calling for is a very broad analysis, as opposed to a very narrow economic analysis which is always very unsatisfying.
Arthur Helton: It seems to me that you make a very strong case for that in terms of looking beyond what I would call the tangibles to the intangibles of immigration, which in some ways I’ve always regarded as more important than tangibles. Problems arise when you try to apply a kind of utilitarian or cost-benefit analysis to immigration. You reach questions that are very difficult to answer. When you’re looking at those kinds of subjective factors, you end up asking cost to whom, or benefit to whom, then you end up returning to the point that I thought was well-put by Philip: the notion of good identity politics, as opposed to bad identity politics. One of the failures is the disconnection between the rhetoric of pro-immigration, and the antagonism towards the measures taken to implement pro-immigration policies. Another failure is the failure to take beneficial or protective measures toward immigrants. What are the costs of having sweatshops in New York City? Certainly it costs, and of course your perspective varies depending on who you are and what role you play: the owners of the manufacturing enterprises understand the benefits in concrete terms. Consumers, less directly so, but they clearly benefit. The workers suffer, particularly those without status. But even those with status suffer because of the generally poor conditions and wages. And how does government then, at the national, state, and local level, try to manage that tension. It certainly hasn’t caused there to be concerted enforcement of labor laws or employment standards and conditions. There again is this rhetorical reach for the broad immigration ideal, without much in terms of what I would call a commitment to the footwork for realization behind it.
Utrice Leid: I would add to that this question of the incalculable loss of human capital. It occurs to me that many immigrants are arriving in their prime working years, many of them from countries that the INS readily admits that the most educated immigrant is coming from Africa. But how well matched is the African immigrant with a job opportunity commensurate with his training and experience and so forth. So if the world were fair, if we indeed did not have this disconnect, it is quite feasible that many of the cab drivers in the city of New York would be working as economists and physicists and researchers and so forth, and making maximum use of the human capital that is readily available to this city. But which finds a very hard way to gain entry to a closed market.
Silence
Utrice Leid: Oh gee, I was real profound, huh?
Hector Cordero-Guzman: Well it’s hard to tell. Clearly there is some evidence that individuals with a college education, that have received that college education abroad, find it difficult to translate that education into a job that we consider in this country to be a college level job. Lots of the people would argue that it has to do with what they would call the quality of the degree. Yes, you have a college degree but it’s from over there, it’s not from over here. And of course you can’t expect an employer from over here to pay you the same… So that’s in the mix. A lot of the labor markets abroad, as you know, do not have positions for those individuals. There’s a tremendous underutilization, those on the one hand say what we need to do is continue to educate the population more and more. On the other hand when we do that, the societies don’t find a way, or don’t manage to provide opportunities for all those they are educating. And that’s a problem of economic and political development and control that has to do with what is going on in the sending countries, but it also has to do with the international political economy. If an individual finds it more lucrative for him or herself to be earning a hundred an fifty dollars a day driving a taxi than what they would have earned with their college education in their country of origin, it’s a sad story, but it’s very difficult from a policy perspective to know what to do. Are you doing that person a favor by saying no because you have a college education you have to stay where you came from, even though you might be underused there also? Or is it a better decision to say, come and drive a taxi here and use those proceeds to invest back in the country of origin which is what a lot of immigrants do at least with a portion of their earnings. It’s a very difficult thing to say. I mean yes there are complaints that the relative openness of the US does drain, and creates a brain-drain from some Caribbean countries clearly and from Africa but on the other hand what do you do about it. Do you close, do you not let any more doctors from the Caribbean come to the US, who are you really benefiting by doing that, it’s a very difficult issue.
Arthur Helton: But surely we shouldn’t leave the regulation of immigration policy entirely to market forces. And there is, of course, an important strain in immigration policy that is labor market oriented. But even there, this is an almost unregulated circumstance. After initially passing the thresholds of qualifications whether based on family connection, employment, or even humanitarian or refugee admissions, people are authorized to work. Those without legal status are part of an unregulated economy that does have costs not only to the individuals, but certainly more broadly to the society to the extent that abuses are tolerated or in fact accepted as part of the outcome, whether it’s the mismatch in qualifications in jobs at the micro-level, or more broadly the failure to ensure adequate working conditions and standards at the macro- level.
Philip Kasinitz: Yeah, and I think that while the taxi driving is perhaps an extreme case - that certainly makes the case of underutilization of human capital, that doesn’t necessarily benefit the society that much and many instances in which new Yorkers are particularly aware of the extent to which underutilization of human capital has been beneficial to them as consumers. The fact that you have people with masters degrees in chemistry running dry-cleaning stores in New York typically, or people with MBAs opening small businesses have benefited New York in terms of the level of services available and all you have to do if you doubt that is go to another part of the country where immigration is low and partake in many of those services. Now to me it seems that the logical question is not well, you know, since that in some ways also has had very bad effects on some elements of the native labor force, and on the immigrant labor force as well, should we forgo all those benefits, including as Hector pointed out the many intangible or somewhat less tangible benefits of culture or of political participation, the demographic benefits that I think are considerable, or do you try to think about how is it that you can redistribute those benefits in a way that will also not harm the native population. I think certainly New York’s upper middle class benefit’s immensely from the presence of so many well educated immigrants, and how those benefits could be redistributed to the rest of the population, I think really is the policy question.
Utrice Leid: Well suppose we begin looking at the road ahead for immigration, especially in New York City. How do you se it? How do you see it unfolding, and what are the great milestones that we ought to be paying attention to?
Philip Kasinitz: Well if there’s one thing we know about the history of immigration in New York it’s that predictions predict very very badly and one prediction we can make is that whatever we say here today will inevitably turn out to have been wrong..
Utrice Leid: Good proviso, but…
Philip Kasinitz: But, certainly immigration works in terms of streams, the first few people who come from any given place have a very very hard row to hoe. As time goes on it becomes much much easier for those people from those same countries because they have connections, because they have networks, so it certainly would, I think seem that you’re going to start seeing more and more people from some of the places that first started to have large amounts of immigration in the late 80s and 90s. In addition I think to the continuing flow from the Caribbean which of course long fact of life in New York. There will probably be increased flows from Mexico, probably from Eastern Europe because those communities are so established now, and from Africa which was a relatively small contributing story as recently as ten years ago and has become a fairly large one in the last decade. The other of course proviso is that political situations, which we can’t possibly predict, somewhere in the world, are going to have a major effect on New York and sort of on our way of life here generally. That somewhere in the world some terrible crisis will occur, which is going to force a lot of people to uproot to the city.
Hector Cordero-Guzman: Well I would tend to think that immigration is going to continue pretty much at the pace that it is for the foreseeable future - 110-125, 000 a year. Perhaps we will see some changes in the composition and national origin due to the differential impact of the income requirements for sponsorship and other provisions of the 1996 law.
Philip Kasinitz: Short of some restrictionist legislation
Hector Cordero-Guzman: Short of some restrictionist legislation, the conditions in a lot of the countries of origin haven’t changed dramatically, the reasons why people are coming haven’t changed dramatically, so to the extent that those - of course -there was a lot of out-migration from El Salvador during the civil war. Once the civil war calmed down, immigration also calmed down, or was reduced. So to the extent that economic conditions in the sending societies, and that sending societies are more able to absorb their own middle class, then there will be slightly less immigration, but I don’t foresee any dramatic changes in that in the future. It seems to me that based on the national discourse that there is going to be an increase in anti- immigration sentiment even in New York. That the attitudes that were around 5 years ago are going to be less 5 years from now, and there’s going to be more of an anti-immigrant sentiment that the benefits of immigration are not going to be highlighted and the costs are going to be highlighted. I think that there’s also going to be an increase in rates of naturalization, so the immigrants that do come in, are going to have - much more quickly than before, to begin the process of naturalizing and turning themselves into American citizens and participating in the American political system, and once they become citizens, immigrants vote at a rate that’s higher than the native born. So I predict that relatively high immigration will continue, that anti- immigration sentiments will continue, and that there will be an increase in naturalizations, the process of becoming an American is going to accelerate, and the numbers of immigrants that would want to become Americans partly because of changes in the countries of origin, dual nationality laws, advances in transportation, telecommunications, globalization of the economy will increase. Those things are making it easier for people not to have to lose ties to the country of origin, which paradoxically makes it more likely that they will become American citizens. And I think that the real question, the real puzzle is what is going to happen to the sons and the daughters of the immigrants, of the diverse immigrants that are coming in today, of the immigrants of color, you know the one path is the old traditional assimilationist and upward mobility path, the argument there is the immigrants and the children of immigrants are going to do just like the children of the immigrants of yesterday. They are going to assimilate, they’ll become American and they’ll do more or less okay. Others question that partly because they say these are immigrants of color and the American society was able to turn the Italians and the Irish into white but it’s not going to be able to turn the West Indians and the Chines into white and there will be some differences within that but it’s going to be a very different process. But ultimately what’s going to happen to the children immigrants is not going to depend on their cultural adaptation, what is really going to continue to depend on the kinds of social investments that are made in those individuals. So if you have an immigrant from the lower classes of Central America, and you put their children in a community where you don’t invest in those schools, it’s likely that those immigrants are going to do very badly. If you don’t invest in their health and education, it’s likely that those immigrants are going to do very badly. So I think the question is not an automatic question of because they’re immigrants of color, they’re going to automatically do well because they’re not the native minorities, or do badly because they are of color. I think the real question is what is going to happen at the policy level, and what kinds of educational and welfare and health policies are put in place and how those impact those groups. Those groups become victims of the same forces that the blacks and the Puerto Ricans have become victims to, the outcomes are going to be very much the same. And it’s not sui generis, it’s not natural, it’s a function of the process that we put forth in this city. But if we put forth very different processes in the city then the outcomes are likely to be different.
Philip Kasinitz: But this really focuses I think on where the new debate is, which is regardless of what happens to immigration, the real question now is the second generation. The children of immigrants who are now ethnic New Yorkers, or part of native minority groups of New Yorkers. And in some ways, what kinds of New Yorkers they’ll become in their socialization experience and what kind of public services are they going to use, what their opportunities are going to be, what their lack of opportunities are going to be, this is really the question that’s facing New York now. Even if immigration were miraculously to cut off tomorrow, and I sincerely hope that it doesn’t, but even if that were to occur, that would still be the issue for the next generation.
Arthur Helton: It seems to me that that’s right. First of all, I’m not so sure that you’ll see sustained levels of immigration. The immigration offer is really a little less attractive now. These new welfare laws are more restrictive, barring new immigrants from temporary assistance, barring families from Medicaid for the first 5 years and from food stamps and SSI until they become citizens. So, the pull factors for immigration have lost strength. Now, if that is true and there are somewhat lower levels of immigration to New York, then I think these elements of identity politics may simply start to dissipate. If, however, we see sustained levels of immigration, then I think we will really see a call on local government to produce and make good on these rhetorical promises. There’s no reason why the Board of Education shouldn’t have an office of immigrant affairs. The police department could have a more sensitive approach and appropriate conduct towards immigrants. I think it’s going to be hard for a mayoral candidate in the future not to take a position on immigration if the levels of immigration remain as they are now. And it’s going to be harder not to deliver on some of the promises implicit in those rhetorical expressions of support. If, however, we do see a decline in the levels of immigration, which I think is a possibility, then I think you may see not only a dissipation of that sensibility, but also the rise of anti-immigrant resentment at the local level in terms of the financial burdens to the locality.
Utrice Leid: Well let’s take a break at this point. You’re listening to WBAI 99.5 FM in NEW YORK. We have begun the first segment, this is the first segment of a series held all week this week in collaboration with the Open Society Institute of which my co-host Arthur Helton is the director of migration programs, and we also are joined in studio by Hector Cordero-Guzman, professor of urban policy at the New School for Social Research and Philip Kasinitz, professor of sociology at the CUNY Grad Center and at Hunter College. We’ll be back to your calls at (212)209-2900 and remember the rules - ask your question as concisely as possible when you get on the air.
Utrice Leid: Well thank you, thank you. Jonas Gongua from South Africa, with “Time’s Up”. But not really, this is your time, at (212)209-2900. You’re on the air. Hello?
Caller: Good afternoon.
Utrice Leid: Good afternoon, who’s calling?
Caller: This is Gloria, Utrice, such a pleasure to hear you.
Utrice Leid: Thank you.
Caller: If I heard your last speaker correctly when he said he did not envision much change in the immigration law because of what there is to offer to the immigrants who are coming, like there would be a dwindling of the welfare availability, etceteras. Did I hear him correctly?
Arthur Helton: Yes, exactly. The recent amendments to the welfare law have cut aid, such as Medicaid, food stamps and social security income, to newcomers including legal immigrants.
Caller: Well excuse me, I find that, to put it nicely, distasteful that you should say that because what I’m reading into that is that what you’re saying is that immigrants are coming for (unclear), for these government handouts. And on the contrary, that is not the case. I came to this country at he age of 22 as a registered nurse, from my country and I never envisioned myself to be in line for any handout that government has to offer and I think that I can also speak for the majority of other immigrants from wherever - other parts of the world that they might come. People want to work. People want access to cars, access to dishwashers, access to television sets, access to the finer things of life. I would like - my question to you will be this - can you identify which segment of the immigrant population that you know for a fact that primarily is coming to America to make themselves available to these quote unquote handouts that government has to offer. I will hang up and listen to you.
Arthur Helton: Let me first say that I don’t really quarrel with the basic point that you made, that the predominant motives for those who immigrate are not to acquire access to public assistance. Often times, though, immigrants, who have fled their country of origin as a result of unforeseen circumstances or emergencies are not in a position to support themselves and thus must avail themselves of public assistance upon arrival. This is seen and felt by a portion of the U.S. population as a burden – one it doesn’t feel responsible for or compelled to carry. There’s no doubt that policy makers are trying to diminish the numbers of immigrants through these policies that diminish the social safety net. A positive correlation between social benefits afforded to immigrants and the levels of immigration does exist. This, however, does not mean that social benefits are the main or only reason that people make the decision to immigrate. Federal policy makers, reluctant to put official ceilings on immigration, have eroded the social safety net in a very conscientious attempt to reduce immigration.
Utrice Leid: Anything else you want to add to that?
Hector Cordero-Guzman: Well, when I said that immigration was going to continue - this is Hector Cordero speaking - partly in reflection to the fact that I don’t think a lot of immigrants come for the safety net or even know that the safety net is here until they arrive and need it. I think that Congress thinks that this increases the cost of immigration, and it does. The question is whether increasing the cost of immigration, whether making immigration more punitive, by taking aid from people who find themselves in need is actually going to result in them not coming here. And I personally tend to think, and personally I’m based on conversations and some research, that the push factors from the country of origin and the economic pull factors in the US are so overwhelming that a change in the costs of this nature is not going to do much to change the size of the flow. It’s going to make it more difficult for people to come, it’s going to make it more costly for people to come, but the pay-offs that people see in coming to this country, like the caller made reference to amenities, will overwhelm any change in cost of this nature. Yes it’s going to be harder, yes more immigrants might go sick, yes more immigrants might go hungry, but they’d rather be sick and hungry here in a lot of instances, then be sick and hungry where they came from.
Philip Kasinitz: Well I think that hits in the counter productive elements of the policy. I think you’re absolutely right, the policy makers envision these changes as a way of cutting down the number of immigrants, but as the caller quite rightly points out, immigrants aren’t coming for handouts. What it means is that these immigrants who come with every intention of working hard and every intention of simply looking for the better life as the caller suggests, but have some tragedy, or has some problem or become disabled in some way, or some other personal tragedy hits them, they won’t be able to access the same kind of safety net provisions that everyone else expects. And I don’t think anyone actually envisions that before they arrive, so I don’t think it will affect the number of people coming in, but it will increase the suffering of people who are already here.
Utrice Leid: (212)209-2900 is the number to call. Hello you’re on the air with Hector Cordero-Guzman professor of urban policy at the New School for Social Research, Philip Kasinitz, professor of sociology at the CUNY Grad Center and at Hunter College and co-host Arthur C. Helton, director of migration programs at the Open Society Institute. You’re on the air.
Caller: Hello? Yes, the lady who just called -
Utrice Leid: Who’s calling please?
Caller: Excuse me?
Utrice Leid: Who’s calling?
Caller: My name is Diego.
Utrice Leid: Thank you.
Caller: The lady who called now, maybe she came 25-30 years ago, because they do want, they do, there are people coming, right in the families, the world is very big, they have childrens here, they are getting a lot of services, and when they’re not working they get it too, and they write to the families and the families are knowing that this is a big safety net, they do. Now secondly, the way the (unclear) was talking before I was listening, it seems to be, I would criticize you because I am a socialist, but you’ve got to put your shoes, you’ve got to bring the shoes for Frankenstein too (?). First of all, if I would be the governor of New York, I would send (unclear) people to Washington because the federal government should be responsible. The schools are too overcrowded, the parents aren’t working sometimes. Yes, they’re working a lot, but they working off the books and they don’t pay taxes because there are no jobs, it’s not there fault, I don’t want to persecute, I’m an immigrant too, and they crowded the school - another thing, they have childrens, they don’t do like in China, it’s not organized, it’s all disorganized, they don’t have education, they not so simple, like they say about Guliani persecuting -
Utrice Leid: But Diego -
Caller: He might be persecuting taxi drivers, but don’t forget - excuse me?
Utrice Leid: I’m wondering if you have a question under all of this.
Caller: I don’t have a question, I can also give my opinion… the country has to have a policy for immigration. The way you’re talking you want to open the doors and everybody is going to come, so I am not complaining because I am not American born, but if some people with a few generations here, but if you go to Trinidad, if you go Jamaica, if you go to Argentina, and you tell them - Argentina by the way is the place I come- all the dogs are going to come, you happy? The people are not going to be happy in your own country. They’re not going to want to accept the mass immigration. Therefore, what happen, the corporations don’t care, the government don’t care and the people suffering are the people in the city who has to absorb a lot of people when there’s really no jobs.
Utrice Leid: Let’s get a reaction towards your offering so far Diego, thank you so much for your call.
Arthur Helton: I’m just going to add one fact to the caller’s point, which is on the governmental level. The problem of intergovernmental transfers of resources, this is the Urban Institute’s 1998 report. Of the 19.3 billion dollars paid in taxes by immigrants in New York state, 13.3 billion, or 69% goes to the federal government in the from of income tax, social security tax and unemployment insurance, the remaining 6 billion goes to the state and local governments. One of the recurring conventional wisdoms in this entire debate is the fact that the federal government does very well in terms of tax revenues, while impacted local and state governments do far worse, and that’s what historically had given rise in many instances to anti-immigrant sentiments and initiatives. Not the American west, the American west has never been populated, but it’s always been the place where nativists and restrictionist movements have begun. But this unfairness in intergovernmental transfers is something that I think has been insufficiently debated and discussed. It’s a differential impact where states and local governments are unfairly treated in terms of federal immigration laws.
Utrice Leid: But this reminds me of the very point that you made, Hector, about some immigrants coming in and kind of wanting to close the door behind them. Did you get that feeling from Diego’s comment?
Hector Cordero-Guzman: Well it seems to me that solution to the immigration problem, to the extent that one wants to call it an immigration problem, is not in making it more punitive for immigrants once they’re here, it’s not really making it more difficult for them to go to a hospital once they’re injured on a job here. The solution to the problem is to bring about true economic development in the countries of origin. That’s the first point I want to make. The second point to be made is there’s a need to work on better working conditions in the US to eliminate the incentive for employers to exploit blatantly the immigrants, and also abroad, and they’re related. The European Union, as my understanding, it calls for free mobility of nationals from one country to another country. Germans can now go work in France and French people can now go work in Germany and Italy, there’s also been free mobility of labor between Puerto Rico and the US for the last 80 years and that hasn’t emptied the island of Puerto Rico. So even though I’m not arguing for completely open borders, I’m willing to entertain the case for open borders and I would think that the case for open borders is nothing new, that the south is going to empty and the north is going to get full from one day to the next. So even though I’m advocating for open borders, there’s no evidence that suggests that open borders necessarily means that we’re going to have an emptying of the southern hemisphere and everyone’s going to go to the northern hemisphere, providing that you work on working conditions and labor rights. No one here has suggested an open borders policy, I think no one here has actually talked about the kind of immigration policy that they would like to see, but I think we all agree that what is happening today is increasing the punishment that is dished on immigrants and that it’s not clear A) that they deserve that punishment and B) that the punishment is going to have the intended effect. The punch is not going to prevent the fellow from coming, it’s just going to be a fellow working with a blue eye.
Utrice Leid: Or a black eye.
Hector Cordero-Guzman: Or a black eye.
Utrice Leid: Hello you’re on the air.
Caller: Hello how are you doing?
Utrice Leid: Fine thanks.
Caller: Richard from Brooklyn.
Utrice Leid: Thank you Richard.
Caller: The gentleman that just spoke mentioned something that I feel I talked about to Utrice about a year and a half ago, the problem is not here in the US, the problem is at the places where people are coming from. But I wanted to say was this, and it just is logical, I see you guys have all sorts of education, but any country where large numbers of the population are living below the poverty line, large numbers of the citizens of that country are living below the poverty line. It is absolutely nonsensical to be allowing other people to come into the country and further undercut that large percentage that’s living under the poverty line. You can talk about it any way you want to , you can dish it up, you can fluff it up, you can do what ever you want to with it, but when you have this large amount of poor people and they consciously allow more people to pour in , that’s absolutely ridiculous. Have a good day.
Utrice Leid: Thank you Richard, let’s get your reaction.
Hector Cordero-Guzman: I agree with the caller a hundred percent, but a lot of those folks that are coming in are the spouses of US citizens, the fathers and mothers of US citizens, the children of US citizens. That’s the bulk of immigration, I mean it’s not an individual who woke up one morning in country of origin and decides I’m going to go to the US tomorrow because the streets there are paved with gold. There’s a perception that coming to the US is extremely easy. It’s easier than going to a lot of other places in the world, but it’s not a cakewalk, it takes substantial resources and the folks that are coming in the majority of them are being reunified, on the family reunification criteria, which I would argue, makes it less likely for that particular household to then go down under poverty. What I think is the central point, that to the extent that we continue to subsidize the habit of employers for cheap labor, it doesn’t force us to have to increase the amount of education and job training that we provide our native population. And that also applies to immigrants. So I think your point is well taken but I think on the other hand you present it as if its relatively easy from one day to the next just to close shop and not let any one else come in, and you say the way we are letting people come in. Well, we let folks come in but the door is not as wide open as we might think it is.
Philip Kasinitz: Yes there’s two responses that immediately come to the callers question. One is, what exactly would shutting off immigration mean. Short of kind of Draconian conditions that would be politically unpalatable to the US it’s kind of hard to imagine how you would shut down the border completely, 100 percent in the US even if that is would you would want to do, and it’s not what I would want to do.. In addition I think you’ve got to do the counter factual. Hypothetically, assuming that you could shut off immigration, what would the affect be - would it necessarily raise wages, would it necessarily eliminate poverty. There are sectors in which by the way actually would raise wages, there are sectors in which it certainly would not. To just give an example, Hector earlier talked about the demographic effects of immigration. Without immigration, New York would be a city of about 6 million, because we’re losing a fair amount of the native population. Now there’s nothing necessarily wrong with having a city of 6 million people, but going from 8 million to 6 million is going to mean that you’re going to have hollowed out neighborhoods, it’s going to make local businesses much much harder to maintain. You can see in Detroit or Chicago, or Saint Louis, there are whole tracts of the inner city that have lost so much of the population, the corner stores are out of business, you have abandoned buildings everywhere. This has not happened in New York -
Hector Cordero-Guzman: Immigrants here have had the resources that the poor in the US have not had.
Philip Kasinitz: Yeah exactly, I mean if you want to run the counter example, look at the big US cities that don’t really have immigration. I mean do we really want to be Detroit.
Utrice Leid: But there’s another argument to, entirely, and that is could it be that immigration is a statement of a kind of political consciousness on the part of the immigrant, that he or she will be following the money, sucked out of the country of his birth or his or her birth, by corporations of the host country. I find that increasingly immigrants are identifying the fact that they have been relegated to the status in which capital can shift all it wants but the labor source has to stay put, and it may just be perhaps an unsophisticated way of responding to this kind of status quo, but we must wrap up and I couldn’t do it without asking my co-host Arthur Helton to describe what’s up tomorrow.
Arthur Helton: Well, I’m certainly looking forward to tomorrow’s discussion. We’re going to address issues of citizenship, national identity, and other issues that we began to touch on in today’s discussions.
Utrice Leid: Well I want to thank you all for being here today, and we just had a great start to this very very important discussion. Thank you Hector Cordero-Guzman, and thank you Philip Kasinitz for being our guests today. And absolutely thank you Arthur for being the co-host of this series, and thank you Matthew, for allowing me to steal some music, also thank you Bernard White, (unclear) stole some of his music, and thank you Michael G. We’ll see each other tomorrow from three to five.
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