In NYC, It's Not Fear of Immigrants...

In reading Jimmy Higgins' earlier post here on anti-immigrant sentiment and the danger of nativism--and the interesting responses--something struck me sharply. Living for my whole life in New York City, it’s hard for me to analyze or even relate to the fear and loathing of immigrants that grips some parts of the U.S. What we in NYC fear is somewhat different, and was clarified for me by a conversation with a cousin at a recent family gathering.

My cousin, whom I’ll call Tony, has a semi-skilled job with a telecommunications company and recently moved with his wife and kids from Staten Island to a New Jersey suburb. Tony’s widowed mother, now about 70, had made her global proletarian passage from a small town near Naples to the industrial Red Belt of Bologna to a textile factory in Scotland to a laundry in Staten Island—where she met and married my late uncle, and still lives.

“I don’t feel good about where my mother lives,” Tony was telling me. His mother is in the house that had been my paternal grandmother’s, across the street from a city bus depot in a racially mixed poor and working class neighborhood. Though not an activist or a self-identified progressive, Tony is married to a woman of part-African descent who looks like a person of color (as do their kids), and he is sensitized to racial stereotyping on a gut level. He groped for words to articulate his concern about his mother’s neighborhood. “There’s too many people who—I don’t know what’s the right way to put it—lowlifes, people who don’t work.”

“People who don’t work” really captured for me what many folks in New York City fear. People who don’t follow the rules of civil behavior because they have no stake in keeping it together and getting ahead, in getting up in the morning and functioning. People who will turn a little brush or disagreement into a big fight because they have nothing better to do and no other way of feeling effective or gauging their impact on the world. People who leave their garbage in the hallway because they’ve given up on taking any pride or pleasure in how their surroundings look. People who might mess with your elderly widowed mother or throw garbage in her yard just for the hell of it….

Now, often the expression of fear and loathing of people who don’t work can be white people’s code for dumping on Black and Puerto Rican people, or a way of simply blaming the victim and ignoring the historical and structural economic dynamics that cut off some racially and nationally oppressed peoples from stable jobs, viable home mortgages, etc. But it’s not always that, or only that. And it’s not expressed only by white people.

I remember about eight years ago when I was working in a second chance high school for older teens, counseling one African American young woman who was very proud and happy that she was holding a part-time job. With no parents around, she was living in the projects with her grandmother and also with two uncles who were dealing drugs. Their apartment had recently been raided at 6 a.m. by a SWAT team who put 9 mm pistols to everybody’s head and asked where the drugs were. My student, with help from nobody that I could tell, had gotten her self back into school and found a job. Looking toward the future, she said, “ I just wanna come home at night and have to ask what was on Jerry Springer--‘cause I was working all day.”

For many working class people, especially those with the least economically secure lives, the contempt for people who don’t work is fueled by the terror of what you know could happen to you if you lose your grip and can’t make it into work—and could happen very quickly.

All of which goes to say that in New York City, most people seems to know that most immigrants work their butts off for very little money and came here because they do want to get ahead. And therefore, from what I can tell, there is very little of the classic anti-immigrant hysteria, but a lot of fear and loathing of people who don’t work.