At about 7 a.m. one day last August, the first migrants sent by the governor of Texas to New York City arrived on a bus without warning, and entered a new life. sleepily.
They moved with others to shelters, then hotels, then white tents on an island in the East River, and as more people arrived, into empty office buildings and dormitories. education of the school. They enroll their children in nearby schools, eat canned meals served by the city, and wear pants and shirts donated by volunteers.
By June, the city had counted more than 80,000 newcomers. About half have moved to public shelters, and the city’s shelter system hit 100,000 that month. City officials have added housing costs to them: an estimated $4.3 billion next summer. Mayor Eric Adams pleaded for federal help, decrying President Biden and warning that the city was being “destroyed.”
But as economists and social scientists have never seen or heard, they point out that the immediate controversy overshadows a proven fact: Cities were built by waves of people. immigrate, pay taxes, support the workforce, start a business, and generally uplift the communities they’re in.
This latest group will do the same, they argue.
Without immigrants, New York City would shrink. Economists and historians argue that, even if New York never recovers what it spends today, the migrants will ultimately be good for the city.
“In many ways, immigrants have always created and remade America,” said Nancy Foner, an immigration historian at Hunter College. “And they’re doing it again.”
Some of the newcomers have begun to remake their lives and the city around them. They include Pedro Perez, a Venezuelan immigrant fluent in English who spent Monday morning studying for the SAT and planning to apply to elite universities.
“My dream is to graduate from Princeton and become a lawyer,” said 22-year-old Perez.
They include 29-year-old Wilfredo Yanez, who arrived from Venezuela on Friday and as of Tuesday got a job at a construction site in Manhattan.
“I don’t want to be a burden on the city, or depend on them for help,” Mr. Yanez said.
And there’s Belsy Antolinez, who uses a small blue scooter to deliver food across the city and shares an apartment with other migrants in Corona, Queens, where she is raising her three children.
Ms. Antolinez, 35, said: ‘My dream is to have a restaurant because what I love most is cooking.
Like most people who immigrated to New York City, these three Need help when they first arrived, but already impatient to become self-sufficient.
“Well, in the short term, maybe some of them need a little bit of support,” said Giovanni Peri, an economist at the University of California, Davis. “But if you take a deep breath, you will find that American cities will benefit from the people who come to do this.”
In the long run, economists and historians see a familiar picture: The spike in immigration sparks heated political debate, even as immigrants, both legal and illegal, start to take root and start contributing economically.
“Immigration is an integral part of a nation’s economic growth,” according to the National Academy of Sciences. report published by the nation’s 29 leading economists and demographers.
“It’s hard to find an economist who doesn’t think so,” said Tara Watson, an economist at Williams University.
Within this broad consensus lies a narrow group of disagreements. Economists including Mr. Peri stress that decades of research show that migrants improve wages for native workers in the United States, or have no impact at all.
Gordon Hanson, an economist at Harvard University, argues that migration can reduce the wages of native workers, but only in certain cities and economic conditions. These negative effects disproportionately affect Americans with less education, earlier immigrants And black workers.
However, Mr. Hanson said he still agreed on the larger economic benefits.
“I think the most important thing is that we’re going to agree on the main statement, that immigration is a positive thing for the United States,” he said.
The path of Ms. Antolinez and her husband, Darwin Valbuena, has been in line with economists’ expectations for migrants. The family fled San Cristobal, a small city in Venezuela, more than a year and a half ago, after a wine shop they owned was attacked by robbers. Ms. Antolinez is seven months pregnant.
After arriving in California, the couple applied for asylum, flew to LaGuardia airport, and in January 2022, moved into the two-bedroom apartment of Rut Ostos, a married Protestant pastor in their hometown.
Now, with hustle and a little help, the family has a strong foothold in New York City.
A member of Ms. Ostos’ church gave Valbuenas a four-bedroom apartment in Corona that they rented with two other families. Mr. Valbuena, a former professional footballer, has two football coaching jobs and plans to open his own soccer academy.
Valbuena, 37, says: “It’s hard to leave everything behind to make a fresh start in a foreign country. “But we are, we are always working.”
However, Mr. Valbuena has some advantages that many migrants do not enjoy. In addition to accommodation, he has a university degree and a temporary permit that allows him to work.
Others apply for asylum may not be successful. Hanson and Peri said they would become undocumented immigrants, who often receive lower wages and therefore pay lower taxes. They will also face greater risk of exploitation and possibly deportation. The housing shortage has made it particularly difficult for residents – New Yorkers as well as newcomers – to find permanent housing.
And many new people come without connection to help them navigate a challenging city, at least at first.
But the arrival of thousands of migrants, regardless of their legal status or education, comes at an ideal time to address the city’s demographic problems, experts say. Nearly half a million residents leave New York City between 2020 and 2023, down 5%, according to to the Census Bureau.
Colleges graduate And family with children have left the city in record numbers. New York City’s undocumented working population also fell by about 60,000 in the decade ending in 2018.
Those drops are bad for the economy, according to to the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. The Trump administration’s policies to reduce immigration, combined with the drop in immigration caused by the coronavirus pandemic, have left two million “missing migrants,” Peri said. establish.
“We’ve seen some more immigrants coming in, but we’ve only caught up a little bit with the dramatic drop” in immigration in recent years, Mr. Peri said.
Tom Wright, executive director of the Regional Planning Association, said the situation resembles the 1970s, when an influx of immigrants saved New York City from economic collapse as businesses and families white middle class leaving the city.
“The most successful public policy in New York in the 1970s was openness to immigrants,” Mr. Wright said. “If it weren’t for that, New York City might have entered the same trajectory as Detroit.”
According to Ms. Foner, without immigration, the entire metropolitan area would lose 600,000 people between 2000 and 2006.
Currently, New York City is facing a labor shortage and needs 10,000 bar and restaurant workers, while the state needs 40,000 home medical assistants And 70,000 nurses and nursing assistantsaccording to researchers and industry groups.
The growing labor shortage is partly due to the demographics of the US population, with 38.9 years old being longest life span median age in national history.
In just one sector – construction companies in New York State – the retirement of middle-aged workers could more than triple the number of job vacancies to more than 150,000 over the next five years, Brian Sampson, president of Empire State, said. Associated Builders and Contractors, a trade group.
Immigrants will be crucial to fill those vacancies, industry leaders said.
“Immigrants tend to come in prime working age, so they’re filling up,” said David Dyssegaard Kallick, director of the Immigration Research Initiative, a nonpartisan think-tank. exactly where we are missing.
Not all new migrants will stay. Some have left other parts of the country or for Canadaincluding mobilize legal migration to boost its economy.
Neeraj Kaushal, a professor at Columbia University’s School of Social Work who studies immigration, said the quicker immigrants find jobs and apartments of their own, the more they can help those in need. new immigrants sooner.
Mr. Valbuena is doing his part. Recently, he met some newcomers to the city: Mateo Miño, 14, and his aunt Cristina, from Quito, Ecuador.
On his second day in the city, Mateo experiences a panic attack. He had come here after a journey where he had witnessed the assault of his aunt Cristina in Mexico, and then spent three months in a U.S. shelter for immigrant youth.
Fortunately, the anxiety attack happened at Miss Ostos’ church in Long Island City, Queens. Cristina, who asked not to release her last name for fear of reprisals from the attackers, learned about the church at the shelter the family was staying at.
Ms. Ostos suggested that Miño join football through Mr. Valbuena’s team. Cristina started volunteering at the church. She also found work as a street vendor and is looking for something more stable.
“I have nothing,” Cristina, said of her arrival in New York. Until, she adds, “I found a community that helped me.”
