The data is in: the arrival of migrants to NYC has not, in fact, tanked the availability of jobs for Black and Hispanic native New Yorkers. That’s according to research published last week by the Center for NYC Affairs at The New School, which noted that employment for these populations has kept growing and is near record highs at the same time as the city has received tens of thousands of migrants.
NYC has of course been the national locus of immigration and its attendant benefits for generations, a legacy that most New Yorkers will point to with pride, yet this symbiosis has once again been cast into doubt by Donald Trump’s and JD Vance’s insistence that immigration somehow a threat to Black employment, or as Trump has repeatedly put it, “Black jobs.”
This is nothing new. The idea of immigrants taking away people’s jobs has been around as long as one group of immigrants felt settled and began fearing that the next was a threat to their viability. Americans from English and German backgrounds viewed Irish, Italian and Jewish newcomers with suspicion; these then came to view Chinese immigrants unfavorably and then all of the above were suspicious of Mexican arrivals.
Each group worried mightily that their footholds would be displaced, and political opportunists have always been all too happy to drive the wedges deeper to some end. From the 19th century Know-Nothings through Trump, immigrant-bashing has always had some currency in the political sphere, with the fear of economic backsliding always ready fuel.
What these opportunists are hoping for is that people won’t think too deeply about how the economy and employment dynamics actually work. Jobs aren’t just a finite pool that workers can dwindle until there are none left; jobs create other jobs, and immigrants have often been the people growing the economy in ways that benefit everyone.
In an inverse scenario, if immigrants simply stopped coming and New York’s population were to crater instead, we can guarantee that this wouldn’t magically leave more jobs open for the Black and other communities of color that would remain. It would sap at our economic vitality and ultimately leave every community worse off.
There are, of course, real issues with the city’s employment panorama and the status of Black and other disadvantaged workers, including persistently lower wages and higher unemployment than for white counterparts, but immigrants sure aren’t the problem there.
Taking aim at asylum seekers who are arriving without anything but a hope that this city provides as much opportunity as they’ve been led to believe by every bit of pop culture is counterproductive and a distraction from the policies and initiatives that might actually help the city’s Black workforce — things like support for workplaces that want to unionize and better enforcement of wage theft.
Not to mention, these groups are not at all separate; while many people still reflexively envision migrants as Latino people from South and Central America, for months now a huge percentage of arrivals have been Black migrants from West Africa and elsewhere, highlighting the absurdity of trying to pit them as a group against Black New Yorkers. With the proper support, these folks can establish themselves as a new generation of New Yorkers who will keep our economy humming along.