New Yorkers love migrants until they meet some
The Harvard nerds found that suburban elites in Boston loved immigrants until they believed that immigrants were living among them: “After riding with Spanish speakers, white commuters favored anti-immigration policies”.
A different set of Harvard nerds found that elites profit from a flood of low-skill migrants almost exactly to the same extent that working class Americans lose money (a $500 billion annual wealth transfer in pre-Biden money; the elites get the higher rents and pay the lower wages while the peasants pay the higher rents and receive the lower wages that Econ 101 says are inevitable with an expansion in labor supply).
These studies are being repeated in New York City right now. Elites who own hotels are making bank while residents living in non-elite neighborhoods are the ones who incur costs, such as congestion, higher rents, and lower wages related to the tiny percentage of asylum-seekers who’ve found their way to NYC.
From today’s NYT, “Migrant Crisis Tests New Yorkers Who Thought They Supported Immigration”:
[State Senator John Liu] whose senate district includes a large immigrant population, said many of the complaints about migrants were not coming from areas that have been traditionally anti-immigrant. Instead, he said, protests followed the shelters, so “even in parts of the city that tend to be very pro immigrant, many of those residents are up in arms.”
Just like their brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters in Maskachusetts, New Yorkers love undocumented immigrants… so long as none live anywhere near them.
In College Point, Queens, a working-class neighborhood near La Guardia Airport, Jennifer Shannon, 53, said she believed in helping those in need, including the women in a homeless shelter that opened there in 2019. But after a respite center for migrants opened in July, Ms. Shannon was livid.
“We just added 500 more people to a community that’s already falling apart,” she said.
During the early days of the pandemic, Ms. Shannon started a neighborhood association to support food pantries and provide meals to emergency medical workers, earning citations from Mr. Adams — who was then Brooklyn borough president — and State Senator John Liu.
But now she says the migrants have devalued life in the neighborhood.
“We have people sitting all over people’s private property, drinking, smoking marijuana, hanging out until 4 in the morning in the municipal lot, blasting music,” she said. “It’s a disgrace.”
“It’s not everybody in there. You have people who are genuinely just trying to get away from hell and make a better life for themselves. But that’s not who you see sitting in the park benches at 11 o’clock at night, with their friends, men urinating in broad daylight. That’s what we’re seeing.”
Migrants are exempt from the sacred duty of vaccination!
In Astoria, Queens, Shabbir Suhal, 40, an accountant with three children in public school, said he was alarmed by published reports of students from shelters being permitted to attend school without being immunized against polio, measles, chickenpox and other diseases. Under state law, students in temporary housing have 30 days to start the process of getting immunized.
One great part of the article, which describes roughly 100,000 people who do not work and get their housing, food, health care, education, etc. at taxpayer expense… the NYT informs us that migrants come to NYC for “generous public services” and also that New Yorkers “reject the suggestion that immigrants want handouts“. Just as free housing, food, health care, home broadband, and smartphone is not “being on welfare” (because the person enjoying these means-tested programs may not receive a direct cash transfer), a non-working person who lives in an NYC hotel at taxpayer expense does not want a “handout”.
