During the last couple of months, the “migrant” population in our area reached a new high, and it played out in the media and in politics as a crisis. The “crisis” is also being fed by the “bus and transport migrants to New York City” policies of the Republican governors of Texas and Florida, who have used vulnerable people as political pawns with almost 18,000 new migrants in New York City, Mayor Eric Adams declared a “state emergency”. The migrant surge, which contained my people from an imploding Venezuela, increased the number of immigrants living in the city to more than 4.1 million, giving New York City the third-largest Latin American immigrant population. The biggest questions I don’t think we’ve started to discuss are how this predicament is going to affect the Latinx community, and why this issue could potentially lead to the increased marginalization of Latinx people.
According to one teacher, “There is an anti-immigrant stereotype that xenophobes and racists embrace and weaponize. The demonizing sounds something like this: immigrants are overwhelming the borders, there’s no way of assimilating them, they have dangerous habits, they are criminals, they refuse to learn the language, they are a threat to our way of life, they take jobs and benefits away from long-established Americans. It’s a trope as old as Ellis Island.” We’ve all seen the videos and the newspaper reports of people who don’t look “American” or aren’t from America, a country rooted in white supremacy, and how they are treated because they weren’t born on American soil. There is a sharply critical response to these misrepresentations. And that response argues, “For a country that has built its entire economy off the backs of slaves and working-class people, it sure doesn’t like when “outsiders” come and fill the jobs the American people didn’t want. But hey, they’re stealing our jobs! Right?”
We’ve been down this hateful road before. According to MSNBC News, back in 2021 when COVID was on the rise, stereotypes around Asian Americans began to increase. This was due to propaganda regarding who and where COVID started. Hate crimes went up, and “compared to 2020 they had increased by 339 percent in major cities like San Francisco Los Angeles, and even New York.” In addition, during May 2021 Jewish hate crimes rose in New York that researchers linked to the 3-week-long Gaza War. The reason I bring these statistics up is that stereotypes cause hate crimes, and issues that relate in some way to a particular ethnic group cause hate crimes. The question we should be asking ourselves is why we as Americans always associate an issue with a particular group of people? Will this habit and ideology continue and will it affect Latinx people next during our most recent humanitarian crisis?
I interviewed Jen Tammi, who is the head of the History department and specializes in immigrant studies here at Fieldston. Dr. Tammi noted that “immigration history is very rife with different groups of immigrants being targeted by Americans at different times” and “often in terms of the Latinx community the discrimination is often connected to immigration and stereotypes. There is a perception, for example, that Mexican people aren’t “real Americans” that dates back really to the Mexican-American War when America steals land (now California) from Mexico.”
“One of the ways they immediately started discriminating against now Mexican-American people has been California creating a Foreign Miner tax, which taxes Mexican-Americans as foreigners even though they are supposed to be American citizens. Even at the moment when they were considered American citizens, they were not and became foreigners in their own land. This created a perception that was then applied to other people of Spanish descent and spread through Central American identities and South American identities,” said Jen Tammi.
Tammi then stated that “This meant when there is often surges of people coming into America from these areas of the world they are either welcomed because they are seen as helpful in terms of labor issues or targeted as not allowing other people to get jobs or more recently perceived as “bringing in drugs or a part of gangs”, those are some of the things being argued by people in Texas or Florida that are moving immigrants, asylum seekers or refugees by buses to places like New York City. There is a narrative that this is the case, which increases discrimination against these groups of people.”
Overall, this city is made up of immigrants. It has always been made up of immigrants. Our livelihoods are built on the backs of immigrants! So why are they disrespected and treated as less than others? This extreme migration crisis shouldn’t increase hate but should bring the people together. It’s important to know that everyone should be treated equally no matter where they are born and to treat all people with the respect that every New Yorker should have, especially in the Fieldston community.
