The loud, angry faction of New Yorkers that keeps screaming about the need to expel migrants has been on a tear lately. Ten protesters recently got arrested at Midland Beach, described by the NYPD as “disorderly and combative individuals confronting both police and the arriving bus which transported a group of migrants to be housed at the location,” according to a report in the Staten Island Advance. In that ugly incident, where hundreds of protesters were met by 200 police officers, a sample of the signs, chants, and speeches showed a depressing mix of hard-heartedness, xenophobia, and ignorance.
“Illegals Are Not Welcome Here,” “Americans Over Illegals,” and “Save Our Children — Our Youth Should Feel Safe” read some of the signs in Staten Island. A similar demonstration in Brooklyn last month included man-on-the-street interviews in which one protester said: “Take a bus, take a flight. Go to another country. They’re ruining us.” Another offered: “We have no idea who has what, who’s done what, who is who. I’m sorry, we just can’t have this. Close the border.”
Statements like “send them back” or “close the border” — as if either option were possible — are the inevitable result of a steady diet of fear and misinformation that people have been fed by some of the most cynical and irresponsible political leaders in New York.
“I have no problem with legal immigration,” Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate for mayor in 2021, told me recently. Sliwa, who is planning to run again in 2025, has been arrested at least three times at anti-migrant demonstrations he organized. Migrants, he says, should be housed on Rikers Island, the city’s central jail. “Legal immigrants have to have a sponsor. They have to have somebody who takes responsibility for them,” he said (falsely). “Nobody’s taking responsibility for these migrants. I call them illegal aliens. Others call them migrants.” (Our full conversation is online at You Decide, my podcast.)
Sliwa’s rhetoric, like much of the hot air coming from anti-migrant leaders, is mostly bullshit. It is legal to arrive at the border of the U.S. and request asylum, and when our government grants parole to someone at the border, they are legally admitted to the U.S., pending further proceedings that might result in anything from deportation, refugee status, or asylum. It has long been recognized throughout the world — and in federal law — that people fleeing war, famine, genocide, natural disaster, and other catastrophes have the right to try and save their own lives by requesting asylum in another country. An unwieldy tangle of legal procedures then comes into play: Each migrant’s legal situation is different, depending on their age, country of origin, reason for displacement, length of time in America, and other factors.
“When you evaluate a case, when they walk into your office, nationality plays a role. When they came in [to the U.S.] plays a role. How many times they came in plays a role,” immigration attorney Luis Gomez Alfaro told me. “We have to remember that there are other alternative forms of relief. For example, in New York City, if you are under 21 and you’re missing one of your parents, you can go to Family Court and you can ask for special immigrant juvenile status. Not only will that stop removal or deportation, not only will that give you a four-year work permit — it puts you on a path to a green card. So it is one of the most underutilized, most powerful tools. But every day, some youth is turning 21 without ever finding out that they could have found themselves in Family Court seeking protection from a Family Court judge.”
Alfaro, who has handled hundreds of immigration cases, recently helped a client from El Salvador win asylum after a ten-year wait that included two years spent in detention. He says the broad, ever-changing range of possible immigration pathways — including some created at the discretion of the secretary of Homeland Security — means there simply is no single immigration “line” to wait in (one of the myths that anti-migrant protesters like to yell about).
“It is complex. We have LGBT, we have country-specific,” he told me. “There are some countries where if you are a survivor of domestic violence like Guatemala, like Central America, you also qualify for asylum. It is just vast. And I don’t know a single immigration lawyer who is even able to use all the tools, not even the best firm.”
New York just got a case in point: President Biden’s announcement that Temporary Protected Status will be extended to an estimated 472,000 immigrants from Venezuela who arrived before July 31 means that about 10,000 people currently in city shelters and hotels are now officially and legally shielded from deportation and eligible to secure work permits. That probably won’t stop Sliwa and other conservative pols from falsely denigrating them as “illegals,” but it represents good news to the majority of New Yorkers, who by measurably large margins, are in favor of accepting and helping the waves of newcomers.
A recent Siena College poll of state residents found that 69 percent agree with the statement: “America should continue to live by the words written on the Statue of Liberty, ‘Give me your tired, your poor … send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.’” Nearly that many — 62 percent — disagree with the statement, “Many of the people trying to immigrate to the United States are dangerous potentially criminal people.” A solid 56 percent support using federally owned land and buildings as temporary shelters for the current migrants now in New York. And an overwhelming 78 percent agree that “Assimilating immigrants, that is, being a melting pot, is what has made America great.”
Obviously, absorbing the latest waves of migrants poses enormous logistical and fiscal challenges. All thinking, fair-minded people recognize a difficult conflict of rights and interests here, and want to see our government achieve a balance. The only proposition that is completely useless, either morally or practically, is the blindly xenophobic instance that we somehow “close the border” or “send them back” — a minority point of view in New York that also happens to be a violation of international treaties and federal law.
For perspective on all the recent shouting, I talked with historian Tyler Anbinder, author of City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York. He wasn’t the least bit surprised at the current controversy.
“Even back in the 1850s, when an immigrant arrived who was sick, they would be sent to Staten Island to get better. And even back then, the residents of Staten Island didn’t much like being forced to take immigrants who they didn’t particularly want,” Anbinder told me. “We tend to idealize our own immigrant ancestors and think they’re different than immigrants today. But what you find when you look at the 400-year history of immigrant New York is that every generation of immigrants comes to New York for the same reasons, has the same experiences, is hated by the people who are already in New York, and yet always they end up succeeding. And so every group is despised for a time, but every group ends up becoming an accepted New Yorker. We just forget that, generation after generation after generation.”
A timely reminder that everything old is new again in the United States of Amnesia.
