Long Island has an immigration problem, but it is not what many would think.
We don’t have too many immigrants, we have too few.
Consider this: If not for immigration, Nassau County’s population would have declined in 2018, according to population estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau last week.
And a decline in population means fewer home buyers, fewer customers, fewer employees and fewer new business owners.
Even with current immigration, Suffolk County’s population continued to decline at least in part thanks to President Trump and his anti-immigrant rhetoric, which included several speeches on Long Island.
In 2018, like 2017, just 4,800 immigrants arrived on Long Island – down from the 6,000 who had been coming here several years before.
Need proof of immigration’s benefits?
Employment in New York City reached 4.55 million jobs in 2018, the highest level ever recorded, according to a report released last week by state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli.
“New York City is experiencing its largest and longest job expansion since the end of World War II and the city has been the driving force behind the state’s employment gains,” DiNapoli said.
The city added 820,400 jobs between 2009 and 2018, more than every other state in the union outside of California, Texas, Florida and New York, according to the study.
Much of this job growth is driven by immigration.
DiNapoli’s study pointed out that in 2017 there were more than 2 million immigrants employed in New York City, representing 42 percent of all workers. And the unemployment rate for immigrants was below the citywide rate of 4.1 percent.
Lawrence Levy, executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, said in a Newsday report he believed Nassau’s proximity to New York City was likely a key reason why Nassau’s population is slowly rising.
“With New York City gaining population and jobs, and housing prices increasing in the five boroughs, we may be seeing a bit of a boomerang effect that makes Nassau County a more desirable destination for people who want to work in New York City,” he said.
Levy was one of four panelists at an on-the-record Community Forum on immigration hosted by Blank Slate Media and the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Shelter Rock last week.
He was joined by Dr. Isma Chaudhry, chair of the Islamic Center of Long Island; Patrick Young, program director of the Central American Refugee Center; and activist Lisa Votino-Tarrant.
At the forum, Levy said he believed that Long Island’s economic future depended on a continued influx of immigrants – a point echoed by the other panelists.
Other studies support those claims both on Long Island and across the country.
The New York Times reported last year that the U.S. fertility rate has fallen to a record low with 500,000 fewer babies born in 2017 than in 2007, despite the fact that there were an estimated 7 percent more women in their childbearing years.
This trend is occurring at a time when Americans are getting older. In 2010 there were more than 40 million Americans over the age of 65. By 2050 the number will be closer to 90 million. That’s 90 million receiving Social Security and Medicare benefits.
The Federal Reserve has already reported labor shortages in multiple industries throughout the country.
“That inhibits business growth. Nor are the shortages only a matter of missing ‘skills’: The New American Economy think tank estimates that the number of farm workers fell by 20 percent between 2002 and 2014, accounting for $3 billion a year in revenue losses,” New York Times columnist Brett Stephens reported last year.
Much of rural or small-town America is emptying out. This includes almost every upstate New York county except Albany.
The United States is certainly not full as Trump has argued.
“America is vast, largely empty and often lonely,” Stephens said. “Roughly 80 percent of Americans live in urban areas, covering just 3 percent of the overall landmass.”
And the immigrants who have come here – legal and otherwise – are more entrepreneurial, more church-going, less likely to have kids out of wedlock and are far less likely to commit crimes, Stephen noted.
Trump has used Long Island as a backdrop on several occasions to tout his Draconian immigration policies, citing MS-13 gang violence here.
In July 2017, Trump falsely claimed that MS-13, a transnational gang that has ties to El Salvador and uses machetes to kill, had turned Long Island neighborhoods into “blood-stained killing fields.”
And when he returned to Long Island in May 2018, Trump repeatedly referred to gang members as “animals” and called for the country’s political leadership to toughen “horrible” immigration laws.
Trump was correct during his first visit that MS-13 was a problem on Long Island.
From January 2016 through April 2017, the Suffolk County police said there were 17 murders committed by MS-13. In Nassau County, there were six MS-13 murders.
But due to good policing, the gang has not killed a single person since then and gang members are facing jail time for their crimes.
Immigration panelist Patrick Young noted that Nassau County’s crime rate in 2018 was at a record low.
Unfortunately, he also pointed out that while the United States has always been a nation of immigrants, it has always been a nation of immigrant haters.
All four of the panelists at the immigration forum spoke of the moral outrage taking place on our southern border where migrant Latin American children are separated from their parents.
One of our panelists, Lisa Votino-Tarrant, who has twice visited the southern border, spoke of writing the name and other identifying information on the back of a 4-year-old with a Sharpie to prevent the child from being permanently separated from her parents.
But if stories of human suffering that violate the ideal of America as a shining beacon of hope are not enough, then just look at the numbers. We ought to be welcoming immigrants to this country, not turning them away.
