Immigrant Crossroads: Globalization, Incorporation, and Placemaking in Queens, New York [1 ed.] 1439915938, 9781439915936

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface | Ron Hayduk, Francois Pierre-Louis Jr., and Michael Alan Krasner
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Immigrant Crossroads | Tarry Hum
Part I: Globalization
1. Queens Neighborhoods: From European Strongholds to Global Microcosms | Joseph J. Salvo and Arun Peter Lobo
2. The Queens Economy: Where Global Meets Local | David Dyssegaard Kallick
3. The Restructuring of Manufacturing in Queens and Its Impact on Immigrant Workers | Lynn McCormick
4. Employee Ownership as an Immigrant Workforce Strategy | Christopher Michael
Part II: Incorporation
5. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA): On Reaching Queens’ Diverse and Eligible Immigrant Populations | Arianna Martinez
6. Advocacy for Immigrant Health: Language Access in New York Pharmacies | Alice Sardell
7. The More Things Change . . . : Machine Politics in Queens | Michael Alan Krasner and Ron Hayduk
8. The New Machine: Nonprofits and South Asian Political Incorporation | Sayu Bhojwani
9. How Would You Spend a Million Dollars? Immigrant Engagement in Participatory Budgeting | Ron Hayduk, Diana Tamashiro Folla, and Kristen Hackett
Part III: Placemaking
10. Placemaking and Public Space in Hyperdiverse Astoria | Sofya Aptekar
11. Flushing Meadows Land Grab: The Battle for the Heart of a Borough | Donovan Finn
12. The Politics of a “New Deal” for Roosevelt Avenue: Business Improvement Districts, Placemaking, and Community Resistance | Samuel Stein and Tarry Hum
13. Coalition Building in the Making of the Haitian Community in Queens: A Case Study of the Haitian American United for Progress | Francois Pierre-Louis Jr.
14. American Muslims: The Queens Experience | Nazreen S. Bacchus
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Immigrant Crossroads

Edited by

Tarry Hum, Ron Hayduk, Francois Pierre-Louis Jr., and Michael Alan Krasner

Immigrant

Crossroads Globalization, Incorporation, and Placemaking in Queens, New York

temple university pr ess Philadelphia    •    Rome    •    Tokyo

Temple University Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122 tupress.temple.edu Copyright © 2021 by Temple University—Of The Commonwealth System   of Higher Education All rights reserved Published 2021 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hum, Tarry, 1961– editor. | Hayduk, Ronald, 1958– editor. | Pierre-Louis, François, editor. | Krasner, Michael A., editor. Title: Immigrant crossroads : globalization, incorporation, and placemaking in Queens, New York / edited by Tarry Hum, Ron Hayduk, Francois Pierre-Louis Jr., and Michael Alan Krasner. Description: Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Analyzes contemporary urban immigration in the United States through the case study of Queens, New York. Questions taken up by the authors include: What does neighborhood change look like? What policies and practices facilitate or impede immigrant incorporation? What are the prospects for multiracial democracy in the 21st century?”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020013458 (print) | LCCN 2020013459 (ebook) | ISBN 9781439915936 (cloth) | ISBN 9781439915943 (paperback) | ISBN 9781439915950 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Immigrants—New York (State)—New York. | Urban policy—New York (State)—New York. | Globalization—New York (State)—New York. | Queens (New York, N.Y.)—Economic aspects. | Queens (New York, N.Y.)—Social conditions. | Queens (New York, N.Y.)—Politics and government. Classification: LCC JV7050.Q44 I56 2021 (print) | LCC JV7050.Q44 (ebook) | DDC 974.7/243044—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013458 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013459 The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992 Printed in the United States of America 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Preface  /  Ron Hayduk, Francois Pierre-Louis Jr., and Michael Alan Krasner

vii

Acknowledgments

xiii

Introduction: Immigrant Crossroads / Tarry Hum

1

Part I: Globalization 1 Queens Neighborhoods: From European Strongholds to Global Microcosms / Joseph J. Salvo and Arun Peter Lobo

27

2 The Queens Economy: Where Global Meets Local  /  David Dyssegaard Kallick

47

3 The Restructuring of Manufacturing in Queens and Its Impact on Immigrant Workers  /  Lynn McCormick

66

4 Employee Ownership as an Immigrant Workforce Strategy  /  Christopher Michael

95

Part II: Incorporation 5 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA): On Reaching Queens’ Diverse and Eligible Immigrant Populations  /  Arianna Martinez

121

vi / Contents

6 Advocacy for Immigrant Health: Language Access in New York Pharmacies / Alice Sardell

143

7 The More Things Change . . . : Machine Politics in Queens  /  Michael Alan Krasner and Ron Hayduk

170

8 The New Machine: Nonprofits and South Asian Political Incorporation / Sayu Bhojwani

193

9 How Would You Spend a Million Dollars? Immigrant Engagement in Participatory Budgeting / Ron Hayduk, Diana Tamashiro Folla, and Kristen Hackett

212

Part III: Placemaking 10 Placemaking and Public Space in Hyperdiverse Astoria  /  Sofya Aptekar

243

11 Flushing Meadows Land Grab: The Battle for the Heart of a Borough  /  Donovan Finn

268

12 The Politics of a “New Deal” for Roosevelt Avenue: Business Improvement Districts, Placemaking, and Community Resistance / Samuel Stein and Tarry Hum

299

13  Coalition Building in the Making of the Haitian Community in Queens: A Case Study of the Haitian American United for Progress  /  Francois Pierre-Louis Jr.

323

14 American Muslims: The Queens Experience  /  Nazreen S. Bacchus

338

Contributors

363

Index

369

Preface Ron Hayduk, Francois Pierre-Louis Jr., and Michael Alan Krasner

T

he county of Queens, one of the five boroughs of New York City, is certainly the most diverse community in the United States, probably the most diverse community in the world today, and perhaps the most diverse community in human history. Almost half of the more than two million residents are foreign born. No single racial or ethnic group makes up more than a quarter of the total population, a departure from the pattern in other immigrant gateway cities in the United States, where one or two groups make up the majority of immigrants. Immigrants in Queens hail from more than 120 countries, including those of Asia and the Pacific Islands, Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East. These people speak over 135 languages. The pace of demographic, economic, and spatial change in Queens has been extraordinary. A mere fifty years ago, the majority of residents in Queens were white European ethnics—German, Irish, Italian, Polish, Greek, and Russian, most of whom were Christian and Jewish—followed by a small but significant number of African Americans and Puerto Ricans. At that time, deindustrialization, suburbanization, and civil rights conflict— particularly regarding school integration and housing—contributed to white flight and declining property values. The 1965 Hart-Celler Act eliminated racial restrictions enacted in the 1920s and opened the doors to immigrants from non–Western European countries. A number of factors combined to spur such immigration. Acting through the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, U.S. economic and foreign policy fueled neoliberal

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globalization that exacerbated or created grinding poverty in parts of the developing world. U.S. military interventions undermined independent and socialist governments in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa—often by supporting brutal right-wing regimes and engineering outright coups d’état. As a result, huge swaths of the developing world suffered from the heightened effects of poverty, war, and environmental disasters (Gonzales 2000). All these factors combined to fuel mass migration on a global scale, including the influx that transformed Queens. As in other major metropolitan areas, immigrants have repopulated and revived Queens neighborhoods, turning blighted areas into thriving ethnic communities, filling vacant housing, and creating small businesses and community gardens. Immigration has helped revitalize New York by making communities safer, boosting the city’s population, stabilizing housing, stimulating local economic activity, and increasing public revenue.1 Such improvements have contributed to making these bustling neighborhoods desirable destinations and to attracting a crop of young white professionals (many of whom have been pushed out of Manhattan and Brooklyn by rising costs). This cohort and an influx of massive investment capital now spur gentrification and displacement, leaving native born and immigrants alike chafing at the dizzying changes “their” neighborhoods are experiencing (Gibson 2015; DeFilippis and Faust 2014; Kasinitz and Zukin 2015). As in other cities, the winners and losers in these processes are largely determined by the relative power different actors possess to shape and navigate such changing markets. Along with rising property values, the reduction in public housing investments and weakened rent control and rent stabilization protections have contributed to another feature of the modern urban landscape: overcrowded households and rising homelessness. The three densest immigrant neighborhoods in Queens—Corona, Elmhurst, and Jackson Heights—have New York City’s highest concentration of residential overcrowding, producing conditions reminiscent of those captured by Jacob Riis in the late nineteenth century.2 Similarly, commercial rents have soared—influenced by the influx of capital and big-box corporate chain stores and the absence of commercial rent control—displacing immigrant-owned small businesses and workers. Queens is home to nearly ev­ ery kind of big-box corporate chain and big bank, from Home Depot and Bed Bath and Beyond to Duane Read and Staples, to Chase and Citi banks, which collectively have been elbowing out immigrant-owned and immigrant-operated bodegas, pharmacies, restaurants, bars, and community organizations. Thus, class cleavages increasingly overlay long-time residential segregation—most blacks and West Indians continue to reside in South Jamaica—with immigrants residing in and between predominantly white

Preface / ix

and black neighborhoods. In these ways, the color line remains sharp and, along with increasing class lines, poses significant challenges to Queens’ now famous hyperdiversity (Hayduk 2020). In response, a growing immigrant activism—and immigrants’ increasing share of the vote and potential vote—successfully pressured elected officials to accelerate immigrant integration by providing protection from federal immigration agencies seeking to detain and deport the undocumented, including a mayoral executive order (also known as the New York City sanctuary city law), as well as provisions for legal assistance, language access, voter registration, and redistricting reform (Brown 2017; de Graauw 2016; Mollenkopf and Pastor 2016).3 Since 2013, New York City’s more progressive government has initiated additional programs aimed at mitigating federal and state budget cuts and boosting the standing of immigrants and working people, including enacting universal pre-K, paid sick days, and increases to the minimum wage and providing more English-language classes and expanding legal services; creating affordable housing initiatives, community health centers, community land trusts, and worker cooperatives; issuing municipal identification cards; and developing other participatory programs aimed at increasing pathways to inclusion, greater equity, and empowerment of marginalized groups (Gonzalez 2017; Milkman and Ott 2014; Su 2017; Hayduk and Coll 2018; DeFilippis, Fisher, and Shragge 2010). Yet although more than one in three New Yorkers—and one out of two Queens residents—are foreign born, new Americans still make up a small number of its elected officials, and most immigrant groups continue to score low on many indicators of social well-being (income, wealth, health, housing, education). Despite this beckoning opportunity, there are relatively few academic studies of this epicenter of transformative social and economic change. This book attempts to fill the gap by building on the work of three authors who examined similar trends in Queens nearly twenty years ago: Michael JonesCorrea (1998), Roger Sanjek (1998), and Steven Gregory (1998) examined issues ranging from economic and political restructuring to neighborhood change and community activism.4 Even before the 2016 election, which brought to power one of the most anti-immigrant and antiurban federal administrations in recent memory, our country had been embroiled in sharp debate about the impacts of immigrants on everything from labor markets and crime to electoral outcomes and social identity. As happened in earlier periods, today we hear nativist rhetoric and witness policies that increase mass detention and deportation, as well as efforts to sharply reduce future family-based legal immigration to

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the United States (i.e., eliminating so-called chain migration). More ominously, immigrant rights leaders have been increasingly targeted for detention and deportation, and we see a sharp rise in hate crimes (Pinto 2018). Immigrants have responded with remarkable resiliency and strength, forging their own pathways to flourish in their new home by claiming legitimate rights as local stakeholders—even while under threat—and building a sense of belonging and a plethora of organizations to increase their capacities (Hayduk and García-Castañon 2018). They have made allies among labor unions and community organizations as well as some Democratic politicians—prompted especially by dreamers. This coalition celebrates immigrants and their economic, social, and cultural contributions. They project a vision of a multiracial and egalitarian society—a “gorgeous mosaic” as former New York City mayor David Dinkins famously stated (Thompson 2007; Hayduk and Jones 2008). The question of the moment is which version of America will prevail? Will our country return to xenophobia or will we embrace diversity? Will the well-to-do or working people prevail? Nowhere in the United States have these forces been experienced more powerfully and the implications of this question been felt more strongly than in Queens County, the birthplace of Donald Trump. Thus, most powerfully and urgently, immigrants and the cities in which they are concentrated are at a crossroads. So too is the field of immigration studies. Drawing on Queens as the epicenter for contemporary immigration in New York City, the chapters in the book address these issues in fresh and insightful ways, presenting original analyses and unique data sets by a highly qualified and well-regarded group of interdisciplinary scholars. Our design is not to privilege any particular approach or theory but rather to offer many perspectives with the aim of producing a rich presentation of a place that embodies key elements of our collective past, present, and future. In so doing, we strive to understand how varied and contending forces produce the current patterns of inequality that affect pathways for political action by immigrant groups themselves and the possibilities for all of us to forge a multiracial, egalitarian democracy. Notes 1.  One report presents data showing that immigration has reduced New York City’s crime rate by up to two-thirds over the last two decades, increased the city’s housing wealth by $188 billion since 1980, and significantly contributed to the city’s population growth, thereby helping the local economy to thrive and remain strong. Americas Society/Council of the Americas 2014. 2.  According to a report by Jihee Kim (2016) using 2013 census data, “Corona, East Elmhurst and Jackson Heights each had a crowding rate that exceeded 20 percent, mak-

Preface / xi

ing them the most crowded neighborhoods of New York City in 2013. Perhaps not coincidentally, these neighborhoods also had the highest percentage of immigrants in the city.” The report uses the U.S. Census Bureau definition of crowded, or a household with “more than one person per room. A severely crowded household is one in which there is more than 1.5 persons per room. The number of rooms may not be the same as the number of bedrooms” (Kim 2016; see also Semple 2016). A 2015 film by Frederick Weisman, In Jackson Heights, vividly captures the vitality and struggles of these neighborhoods. 3. In addition, the city has sought to improve services and expand public benefits for all residents, including police reform, health care delivery, universal pre-K education, public housing, and affordable housing initiatives. Several studies examine the impacts of immigrant activism on public policy, including Brown 2017 and de Graauw 2016. 4. Michael Jones-Correa explored the lives and politics of Latinos in Corona and Jackson Heights; Roger Sanjek described changes in the daily lives and neighborhood quality of Elmhurst-Corona residents—both new immigrants and long-time residents— as a result of post-1970s demographic and economic restructurings; and Steven Gregory examined the political culture and activism in an African American neighborhood in Queens through struggles over the built environment and neighborhood quality of life. References Americas Society/Council of the Americas. 2014. “Immigration and New York City: The Contributions of Foreign-Born Americans to New York’s Renaissance, 1975–2013.” https://​w ww​.as​-coa​.org/​sites/​default/​fi les/​NYCImmigrationReport2014​.pdf. Brown, Heath. 2017. Immigrants and Electoral Politics: Nonprofit Organizing in a Time of Demographic Change. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. DeFilippis, James, and Benjamin Faust. 2014. “Immigration and Community Development in New York City.” Urban Geography 35 (8): 1196–1214. DeFilippis, James, Robert Fisher, and Eric Shragge. 2010. Contesting Community: The Limits and Potential of Local Organizing. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. de Graauw, Els. 2016. Making Immigrant Rights Real: Nonprofits and the Politics of Integration in San Francisco. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gibson, D. W. 2015. The Edge Becomes the Center: An Oral History of Gentrification in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Overlook Press. Gonzalez, Juan. 2000. Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America. New York: Penguin. ———. 2017. Reclaiming Gotham: Bill de Blasio and the Movement to End America’s Tale of Two Cities. New York: New Press. Gregory, Steven. 1998. Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in and Urban Community Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hayduk, Ron. 2020. “Migration and Inequality: A Structural Approach.” Cosmopolitan Civil Societies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12 (1): 1–20. Hayduk, Ron, and Kathleen Coll. 2018. “Urban Citizenship: Campaigns to Restore Immigrant Voting Rights in the United States.” New Political Science 40 (2): 336–352. Hayduk, Ron, and Marcela García-Castañon. 2018. “Xenophobia, Belonging and Agency: Citizenship in Immigrant America.” New Political Science 40 (2): 309–316. Hayduk, Ron, and Susanna Jones. 2008. “Immigrants and Race in the US: Are ClassBased Alliances Possible?” Socialism and Democracy 22 (3): 75–95.

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Jones-Correa, Michael. 1998. Between Two Nations: The Political Predicament of Latinos in New York City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kasinitz, Philip, and Sharon Zukin. 2015. “From ‘Ghetto’ to Global: Two Neighborhood Shopping Streets in New York City.” In Global Cities, Local Streets: Everyday Diversity from New York to Shanghai, edited by Sharon Zukin, Philip Kasinitz, and Xiangming Chen, 29–58. New York: Routledge. Kim, Jihee. 2016. “Doubled Up: Exploring the Crowding Phenomenon in New York City.” Street Easy, February 18. https://​streeteasy​.com/​blog/​doubled​-up​-crowding​ -in​-nyc/. Milkman, Ruth, and Ed Ott. 2014. New Labor in New York: Precarious Workers and the Future of the Labor Movement. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mollenkopf, John, and Manuel Pastor, eds. 2016. Unsettled Americans: Metropolitan Context and Civic Leadership for Immigrant Integration. New York: Cornell University Press. Pinto, Nick. 2018. “ICE Is Targeting Political Opponents for Deportation, Ravi Ragbir and Rights Groups Say in Court.” The Intercept, February 9. https://​theintercept​ .com/​2018/​02/​09/​ravi​-ragbir​-ice​-immigration​-deportation/. Sanjek, Roger. 1998. The Future of Us All: Race and Neighborhood Politics in New York City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Semple, Kirk. 2016. “When the Kitchen Is Also a Bedroom: Overcrowding Worsens in New York.” New York Times, February 29. https://​w ww​.nytimes​.com/​2016/​03/​01/​ nyregion/​overcrowding​-worsens​-in​-new​-york​- as​-working​-families​- double​-up​ .html. Su, Celina. 2017. “From Porto Alegre to New York City: Participatory Budgeting and Democracy.” New Political Science 37 (1): 67–75. Thompson, J. Philip, III. 2007. Double Trouble: Black Mayors, Black Communities, and the Call for a Deep Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Acknowledgments

Tarry Hum

T

his book has been several years in the making. I thank the contributing authors for their chapters and great patience. I also thank Queens’s stakeholders and frontline activists for their leadership on immigrant rights and justice and for their generosity in sharing their knowledge. Most importantly, I am grateful to Temple University Press’s editor in chief, Aaron Javsicas, for his thoughtful guidance and counsel. I also thank his team, including Ashley Petrucci and Gary Kramer, for their dedication to bringing the book to fruition.

Francois Pierre-Louis Jr., Ron Hayduk, and Michael Krasner

W

e heartily thank the contributing authors, whose perseverance and commitment made this book possible, and the immigrant community members who contributed to this book’s chapters and who make life in their neighborhoods worthwhile. We also express our gratitude to the editors and production staff at Temple University Press.

Immigrant Crossroads

Introduction Immigrant Crossroads Tarry Hum

I

mmigration and citizenship rights are integral and fraught subjects in the making of the polity and social fabric of the United States. The current climate of heightened anti-immigrant rhetoric and actions is evidenced by President Donald Trump’s escalating cruelty that, for example, resulted in the death of two Guatemalan children in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Trump has sought to end travel from certain majority Muslim countries;1 strip Haitians, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, and Hondurans of Temporary Protected Status;2 rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA); and detain and deport undocumented immigrants, long-settled Southeast Asian refugees, and others with no criminal convictions. Perhaps one of the most egregious actions of the Trump administration, to date, has been to separate young children (including babies as young as nine months) from their parents at southern border crossings, resulting in thousands of unaccompanied minors being detained by the Department of Homeland Security, such as several hundred youth housed in New York City (Robbins 2018a). After a grueling monthlong trek from Guatemala to the Mexico-U.S. border, seven-year-old Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquín was in the custody of the U.S. Border Patrol when she died December 8 of septic shock and cardiac arrest (Miroff and Moore 2018). Later that month, on Christmas Eve, eight-year-old Felipe Gomez Alonso, also from Guatemala, died after being held in several border facilities known as hieleras (Spanish for “iceboxes” or “refrigerators”), where children sleep in cages on

2 / Tarry Hum

concrete floors with only Mylar blankets for warmth (Jordan 2018a; Merchant 2018). Trump’s zero tolerance for refugees and undocumented immigrants has generated substantive profits for privately owned and operated prisons and detention centers, a $4 billion industry dominated by two corporations— CoreCivic and GEO Group (see Haberman 2018; Luan 2018). According to the New York Times, an unprecedented thirteen thousand or more migrant children were held in federally contracted detention centers and shelters in mid-September 2018 (Dickerson 2018). Five congressional representatives visited an unregulated tent city described as a “child prison” in west Texas and affirmed the troubling conditions found in a November 2018 inspection by the Department of Health and Human Services (Levinson 2018). In addition to their miserable conditions, immigrant detainees were forced to do unpaid labor, as claimed by several lawsuits (Levy 2018). National immigration policy pivoted toward enforcement, surveillance, and antiterrorism in the post-9/11 era, evidenced by the passage of the 2002 Homeland Security Act. The act dismantled the Immigration and Naturalization Services agency and transferred its functions to the new Department of Homeland Security, whose functions are carried out by three component agencies: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.3 In the first week of the Trump administration, the numbers and categories of immigrants considered a priority for deportation were greatly expanded beyond those Trump deemed “bad hombres” (Bennett 2017). ICE made 10,800 noncriminal arrests (of immigrants whose only crime was that they lacked regularized status) in the early months of the Trump administration—a threefold increase from the same period in 2016 when Barack Obama was president (Mark 2017). In his mission to greatly increase the number of foreign born eligible for expulsion, Trump has targeted Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees who settled in the United States in the 1980s, resulting in a sudden and significant uptick in their deportations (Dunst 2018). In the case of Cambodian refugees, deportations increased dramatically as soon as Trump took office. Since October 2017, ICE raids occur every four months, in which between fifty and one hundred Cambodians across the country are picked up for deportation (Lo 2018). While Trump’s actions are an affront to humanity, the racialized discourse and practices of dehumanization, scapegoating, and banishment are not unprecedented. The evolution of U.S. immigration policies is replete with accounts of a deeply divided and contested national discourse about migrant illegality and criminalization and about citizenship rights for nonwhites (De Genova 2004; Ngai 2014; Hernández 2017). A 2017 Ric Burns documentary, The Chinese Exclusion Act, explores the political interests and

Introduction / 3

alliances that coalesced to pass the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the only immigration policy that banned the entry of a class of people, Chinese laborers, explicitly on racial grounds. Moreover, Chinese nationals already in the country were barred from citizenship. In 1894, native-born Wong Kim Ark tested the principle of birthright citizenship after he was denied reentry after traveling abroad. The ensuing legal decision in the 1898 United States v. Wong Kim Ark established territorial birthright citizenship for the children of all aliens (Ngai 2007). Because Asians were early nonwhite immigrants, their treatment was integral to testing the tenuous citizenship rights of those perceived as perpetual outsiders. Today, in a city with more than half a million undocumented residents, accounts of the detention and deportation of immigrant New Yorkers have become alarmingly commonplace (Devereaux 2018). In January 2018, Jean Montrevil, founder of the New Sanctuary Coalition of New York, composed of 150 faith-based organizations, was deported to Haiti, while the coalition’s executive director, Ravi Ragbir, was detained several days later when he reported to ICE for a regular check-in (see Hawkins 2018). A protest march of Ragbir’s supporters from the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building to city hall in Lower Manhattan ended in the arrest of eighteen people, including two New York City Council members—Jumaane Williams and Ydanis Rodriguez (Neuman and Robbins 2018). A news account of Jean Montrevil’s deportation reported that an ICE agent responded, “Don’t you see who we have as president now?” when Montrevil, who has no criminal record and never missed an ICE check-in, asked the reason for his arrest (McMullenLaird 2018). In May 2018, Xiu Qing You of Flushing, Queens, was also detained at ICE during a scheduled interview for his application for permanent residency (i.e., a green card) (Fuchs 2018a). A married father of two young children and small-business owner, You was immediately separated from his family and sent to Bergen County Jail, a federal detention facility in New Jersey, where he was detained for a month. Even with an IDNYC card, a cornerstone of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s progressive agenda that provides a government-issued identification card for all New Yorkers regardless of citizenship status, immigrants have been detained. A prominent case is that of a pizza delivery worker at a U.S. Army base in the summer of 2018 (Robbins 2018b). As he had done in a prior food delivery to the Brooklyn military base, Pablo Villavicencio Calderon presented his IDNYC card at the gate, but this time his official municipal ID was rejected. A background check showed a 2010 open order of deportation for illegal entry to the United States. Villavicencio was subsequently turned over to ICE and detained in a New Jersey facility for nearly two months. To assist New York immigrants caught up in “ICE’s cruel and fanatical crusade” (Fuchs 2018b), Mayor de

4 / Tarry Hum

Blasio has allocated over $30 million for free legal counsel (City of New York 2018). As an epicenter of immigration, the New York metro area has also seeded mass mobilizations to resist Trump’s racist and xenophobic actions. Upon Trump’s Executive Order 13769 (Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States), referred to as the Muslim ban, the response was immediate as hundreds of protestors and attorneys gathered at the site of two major international airports—John F. Kennedy and ­LaGuardia—in Queens to welcome and offer assistance to immigrant arrivals in the waning days of January 2017 (Walters, Helmore, and Dehghan 2017; Knefel 2017). Immigrant activists and supporters similarly gathered at LaGuardia Airport in June 2018, anticipating the arrival of children who had been separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border (Surico 2018). Growing numbers of New York’s elected officials have joined the call to abolish ICE, including New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand. Part of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s winning strategy against her tenterm opponent, Joe Crowley, who retains leadership of the Queens Democratic Party, was her dogged demand that he account for voting to pass the 2002 Homeland Security Act (which established ICE) (McElwee 2018). Trump’s zero tolerance extends to legal immigrants, as evidenced by the White House web page titled “It’s Time to End Chain Migration” (White House 2017). Chain migration refers to the family reunification provisions in the 1965 immigration act (Hart-Celler Act) that eliminated racist nationalorigin quotas, replacing them with qualifications based on priority relationship categories. According to the Asian American Legal Defense and Edu­ cation Fund, “It’s the way many of our Asian American families have been built for generations. In immigration terms, we don’t have family trees so much as a strong family unit in the multi-generational homes we build in America” (Guillermo 2018). Trump’s rant on “shithole countries,” crimi­ nalization of Mexicans, and preference for immigrants from countries like Norway make clear his policies are motivated by a deep-seated racism and white supremacist ideology. In 2018, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services eliminated “nation of immigrants” from its mission statement (Jordan 2018b). This political climate lays bare the crossroads where we find our­ selves today. The history and contemporary politics of migration and settlement in the United States underscore that the concept of an immigrant crossroads is not new. Immigration studies is an interdisciplinary social science field. It examines the processes of settlement and community formation, incorporation, assimilation and hybrid identities, and second-generation mobility, and it deploys disciplinary methodological approaches and theoretical frames to study migration, diaspora, transnational and translocal networks,

Introduction / 5

and social and economic conditions. Robert Park’s classic studies of race relations in Chicago in the early 1920s and into the 1930s laid the intellectual foundation for urban sociology and immigration studies. Contemporary immigration scholarship focuses on the continuities and disruptions represented by renewed migration and settlement in the United States as a result of the transformative 1965 immigration act. Scholars have developed analytic frameworks to address the “context of reception” and entrepreneurial enclaves and immigrant economies (Zhou 1992; Portes and Rumbaut 2006; Vitiello and Sugrue 2017); racial constructions and identities of nonwhite immigrants (Cordero-Guzman, Smith, and Grosfoguel 2001; Waters 2001; De Genova 2004); opportunity structures for second-generation mobility (Kasinitz et al. 2008); impacts of deindustrialization and economic globalization for immigrant labor market incorporation (Mahler 1995; Ness 2005; Mize and Swords 2011); rise of neoliberal governance and austerity in shaping a migrant civil society composed of nonprofit, community-based, and political organizations that mobilize immigrant activism and coalitional alliances (Theodore and Martin 2007; Varsanyi 2010; de Graauw 2016); and transnational lives, social practices, and networks heightened by technology (Foner 1997; Levitt 2001; Smith 2006). Our book contributes to this rich interdisciplinary scholarship by acknowledging the centrality of race and racialization processes in shaping post-1965 immigrant politics and lived experiences (Romero 2008; Omi and Winant 1994), and our focus on Queens underscores the necessity and value of a place-bounded approach in studying the mutual dynamics of transnational migration, racial capitalism, and the socio-spatial and political processes of transformative neighborhood change. Space is not a neutral backdrop for immigrant lives and experiences. As the urban theorist Saskia Sassen (2015) notes, “Cities are the spaces where those without power get to make a history and a culture, thereby making their powerlessness complex.” Concretizing place-based immigration studies is critical to enriching a theory and praxis of immigrant urbanism that centralizes migration (overwhelmingly nonwhites from the Global South) in the politics of planning, policy, and development in postindustrial urban economies and centralizes migration in mobilizing coalitions and actions for social inclusion and for racial and economic justice.

Why Queens? The unparalleled hyperdiversity of Queens’ 2.3 million residents, of which nearly one in two (48 percent) is foreign born (see Chapter 1) cements its status as an immigrant epicenter. If Queens were considered a separate city,

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it would follow Los Angeles, Chicago, and Brooklyn (the most populous New York City borough at 2.6 million) as the fourth-largest city in the United States. Apart from its demography, Queens is an outer borough that exemplifies a social and spatial crossroads of urban and suburban formations and sensibilities. After all, Trump, who grew up in the wealthy enclave of Jamaica Estates, is a product of Queens. He was mentored by his father, whose real estate business practices deepened the patterns of residential segregation that disadvantaged black citizens (Mahler and Eder 2016; Horowitz 2015). By focusing on Queens, our book examines the local placebased processes of economic globalization and postindustrial urbanization and the contestations centered on residential patterns and neighborhood identities, immigrant incorporation and mobilizations, and community building and activism. Even though New York is the world’s most racially and ethnically diverse city, residential segregation persists in shaping local neighborhood landscapes, and this remains evident in a hyperdiverse Queens where the color line is largely redrawn along black and nonblack spaces (Navarro 2016; see also Chapter 13 for a description of succession from African American to Afro-Caribbean in southeast Queens). Middle-class African American and Afro-Caribbean immigrants are well established in the stretch of neighborhoods, such as Laurelton, Cambria Heights, and St. Albans, that make up southeast Queens. Along with Corona and East Elmhurst, these neighborhoods are also renowned among jazz enthusiasts as the home of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Count Basie, and Louis Armstrong.4 Similar to black neighborhoods in central Brooklyn, southeast Queens was targeted by predatory mortgage lenders, and in the aftermath of the 2008 Great Recession, these neighborhoods had the highest rates of foreclosure, putting at risk the primary assets of New York City’s black middle class (Dunn 2011). Three-term governor Andrew Cuomo and his father, Mario Cuomo, also a three-term New York governor, have deep roots in Queens. As a local attorney, Mario Cuomo was recruited by Mayor John Lindsay’s administration to negotiate a compromise in a highly contentious proposal to develop a public housing complex of three towers, each twenty-four stories, in Forest Hills, Queens. This project was part of Mayor Lindsay’s scattered-site housing plan to desegregate New York City. Like much of Queens in the early 1970s, Forest Hills was an exclusively white, middle-class neighborhood. Fierce resistance to the proposed complex was fueled by racist stereotypes of public housing tenants and led by Forest Hills Residents Association president Jerry Birbach, who also owned properties on the West Side of Manhattan (Roberts 2017). Mediation led by Mario Cuomo resulted in a compromise that reduced the proposed housing units by half and set aside

Introduction / 7

40 percent for seniors. In current debates on affordable housing, some urban planners have proposed upzoning—that is, increasing housing density—in neighborhoods like Forest Hills (Gates 2015). Notable Queens neighborhoods are characterized as global microcosms because of the hyperdiversity of Latino and Asian immigrant residents, including new and fast-growing groups such as Ecuadorians (Castano 2017), Indo-Caribbeans (Haller 2013), Bangladeshis, Tibetans, and Nepalese (see Chapter 1). The urban anthropologist Roger Sanjek conducted an extensive ethnographic study of Queens Community Board Four, and in The Future of Us All argues for the promise of community boards in building interracial relationships and leadership in neighborhoods experiencing rapid demographic change due to immigration (1998). More than two decades later, a long-time member of Community Board Four (which includes Elmhurst and Corona) was removed for saying and defending a provocative and hateful statement about immigrant cyclists (Kilgannon 2017). To address a persistent and significant representation gap between community board members and majority residential groups, New Yorkers passed a controversial measure to impose term limits on board members (Honan 2018; Murray 2018). Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire businessman, served three terms as New York City mayor, from 2001 to 2013 for a symbolic one dollar a year, and had an enormous impact in remaking and rebranding New York as a luxury commodity for affluent residents and tourists (Brash 2011; Busa 2017). His legacy includes rezoning approximately 40 percent of the city to facilitate denser and more vertical commercial and residential development and repurposing the city’s extensive industrial infrastructure and waterfronts for luxury residential and recreational uses. Bloomberg was first elected in the aftermath of the September 11 tragedies, and one of his top priorities was to demonstrate that the city could rebound and rebuild. This open-for-business attitude informed his administration’s approach to urban governance and use of planning tools such as zoning and eminent domain to restore market confidence and facilitate private investments (Doctoroff 2017). Changes to Manhattan and Brooklyn receive more attention in the press, but Queens continues to be a site of transformative development.5 Before serving as Bloomberg’s deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding, Daniel Doctoroff worked on a plan to bring the 2012 Olympics to New York City. Doctoroff’s 2017 book, Greater than Ever: New York’s Big Comeback, details how his NYC 2012 vision evolved into the Bloomberg administration’s cornerstone five-borough economic development strategy that catalyzed northern Queens real estate investments in formerly industrial waterfront neighborhoods such as Flushing and Long Island City. The post-9/11 rebuilding priority to diversify New York City’s economy was

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echoed in an earlier plan outlined by New York senator Charles Schumer’s Group of Thirty-Five that advocated for new central business districts in outer boroughs like Long Island City (Bagli 2001). Flushing and Long Island City are on opposite ends of northern Queens, and both neighborhoods have evolved into “dynamic economic growth poles” (Sánchez 2016). Flushing, in northeast Queens, a hub of cross-border Pacific Rim real estate investment and development, has a high concentration of Asian banks and ancillary professional services in real estate, law, and finance. The ubiquity of construction cranes accounts for the rise of a dramatic skyline in the downtown center. The 2004 Downtown Flushing Framework exemplified Bloomberg’s five-borough economic development strategy to promote public-private partnerships and facilitate the influx of transnational real estate finance to underwrite the growth of outer-borough commercial districts. A key initiative of the 2004 Downtown Flushing Framework was the redevelopment of a municipal parking lot in the heart of downtown Flushing. With spaces for over a thousand cars on five acres, the two-story, above-ground parking lot was the pilot project in the city’s early 1950s initiative to generate revenues through constructing off-street parking lots (New York Times 1949, 1954). It was part of the federal urban renewal program that was overseen by Robert Moses in his role as chairman of the city’s Slum Clearance Committee. To accommodate the parking lot’s 2004 redevelopment, a largely black neighborhood was razed, and some displaced residents were relocated to the New York City Housing Authority’s Bland Houses near the Flushing waterfront. The old parking lot was sold below market value (at $20 million) to a consortium of developers that included the Rockefeller Development Group, AECOM Capital, and the F&T Group to build Flushing Commons, a mixeduse development featuring “premier luxury condominiums” (Trapasso 2014).6 One of the most prolific Flushing developers, F&T Group is a Chinese transnational real estate development company whose development vision is to build an Asian Times Square in Flushing, Queens (La Guerre 2016). Just two of F&T’s numerous projects, Flushing Commons and nearby Tangram, add three million square feet of luxury residential, retail, and commercial space including hotels. Increasingly, Flushing is evolving into a live, work, play enclave for the Chinese fuerdai, or “rich second generation” (Fan 2016). Immigrants make up a disproportionate share of the New York City workforce and remain concentrated in labor-intensive sectors in formal and informal economies (Hum 2011). Even though industrial manufacturing has provided scores of jobs for immigrants and workers of color for generations, manufacturing land uses, especially in Manhattan, is generally not supported by city elites and their urban growth coalitions (Schwartz 1993).

Introduction / 9

The demise of the city’s industrial sectors such as garment manufacturing tells a story of both economic globalization and exploitation of more profitable land uses. The dismantling of Willets Point (also known as the Iron Triangle and separated from downtown Flushing by a narrow creek) is a particularly stark example of the city’s disdain for industrial businesses (deMause 2019; Kensinger 2018).7 Despite decades of city neglect and lack of public investment in basic services such as paved streets and sewage infrastructure, hundreds of auto repair shops employing over a thousand mostly Latino immigrant workers created a vibrant industrial ecosystem that included the nation’s largest Indian and Pakistani food manufacturer and distributor, House of Spices (Wisloski and Lauinger 2008). The redevelopment of this sixty-plus-acre site was so integral to Mayor Bloomberg’s luxury city agenda that he engineered a change to the city charter to allow mayoral third terms, in part to ensure his administration’s oversight of development of the city’s “next great neighborhood” (Salazar 2012).8 Even though new construction has yet to commence as of 2020, most of the small immigrant-owned auto repair shops and their employees have already been displaced. While the New York City Economic Development Corporation provided support for the relocation of a handful of businesses, who formed an owners’ collective, to a renovated warehouse in the Bronx Hunts Point neighborhood, prospects for these auto-body repair shops appear grim (Bagli 2016). Long Island City is in the geographic center of New York City and has a long history as an industrial waterfront neighborhood, with manufacturing firms such as the Swingline Stapler factory, which still employed 225 workers when it closed in 1999 (Toy 1999). Occupying several city blocks near Long Island City’s industrial warehouses and factory buildings is Queensbridge Houses, the country’s largest public housing development, comprising twenty-nine apartment buildings and over six thousand residents. Starting with Mayor Edward Koch in the 1990s, New York City has invested heavily to shift perception of Long Island City, with its proximity to Midtown Manhattan and its expansive waterfront, as a modern commercial, retail, and residential district (Tarquinio 2009). As a New York Daily News article predicted, “Nothing this close to Manhattan can remain factory land forever” (Sheftell 2008). Initiatives to diversify New York City’s economy to reduce its dependence on Wall Street accelerated after the 2008 Great Recession, and the tech sector has become one of the city’s top economic development priorities (Glaeser 2012; David and Eisenpress 2018; NYCEDC 2018). Public and private investments in massive Long Island City warehouses such as the Falchi Building and the Factory produce spaces (with industrial loft aesthetics) for accommodating the city’s technology, advertising, media, and information and artisanal manufacturing sectors (La Guerre 2015).9

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In mid-November 2018, Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo held a joint news conference to announce the decision of e-commerce giant Amazon to locate a second headquarters in Long Island City, Queens (and a third in Northern Virginia). New York’s winning proposal promised $3 billion in public money, largely tax credits, along with a capital grant of $505 million from the state, purportedly to help defray the cost of Amazon’s planned build-out of a four- to eight-million-square-foot facility along the Long Island City waterfront. In return for this massive public commitment, Amazon promised to add twenty-five thousand jobs, reportedly at an average salary of $150,000, to the city’s economy and establish an East Coast tech center to rival Silicon Valley. Immediately after the Amazon announcement, widespread and wideranging criticism of this ambitious public-private partnership was evident in street protests and rallies, a packed teach-in at City University of New York’s LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, and the formation of social media groups such as PrimedOut NYC. Notable criticisms focused on how the negotiations on New York’s benefit package to Amazon were shrouded in secrecy (Kimmelman 2018); massive public incentives had been offered to Amazon while the city’s public housing, transportation infrastructure, and education systems remain severely underfunded (Colon 2018); Amazon’s central role in developing facial recognition technology (ReKognition) and software such as the Investigative Case Management System that are integral to the ICE databases is highly problematic in a dense, hyperdiverse immigrant borough such as Queens (Hao 2018; Lander and Menchaca 2019); and Amazon’s headquarters would supercharge residential and commercial rents, deepening a housing insecurity crisis and threatening to displace working-class and working-poor New Yorkers from Long Island City and surrounding neighborhoods (Goodman and Fitzsimmons 2018; Garun and Liao 2018). Finally, local public review through the city’s uniform land use review procedure had been circumvented because the megadevelopment project is deemed a General Project Plan, allowing the Empire State Development Corporation (a state agency) to control the development and review process (Geiger 2018). In a sudden and unexpected move, Amazon withdrew its plans to relocate a headquarters in Long Island City’s Anable Basin on Valentine’s Day in 2019 (Goodman 2019). Just a little over a week later, the New York City Economic Development Corporation announced it would resume working with the Anable Basin property ­owners–developers on a transformative rezoning and redevelopment plan (Gannon 2019). The growth poles of Long Island City and Flushing are connected by Roosevelt Avenue, a heavily trafficked five-mile commercial corridor, with the elevated 7 train, that links the dense, diverse Latino-Asian immigrant

Introduction / 11

neighborhoods of Woodside, Sunnyside, Elmhurst, Jackson Heights, and Corona. These neighborhoods exemplify the dynamism, informality, and juxtapositions of “the immigrant city within its narrow corridor” (Heathcott 2008, 17). Roosevelt Avenue and its elevated 7 train serves as a metaphor for the immigrant city in scholarship on political incorporation and diversity in urban life (Jones-Correa 1998; Tonnelat and Kornblum 2017). In 2015 the final stop for the Manhattan–Queens 7 line was extended to the far West Side, described as “Manhattan’s last frontier” by the Bloomberg administration (Doctoroff 2017, 49), and now links the massive mixed-use luxury commercial and residential Hudson Yards site to Queens. Spatially bounded immigrant neighborhoods are vital social, cultural, and economic spaces that are often distinguished by new forms of transnational practices (e.g., satellite babies).10 Small businesses, including street vendors, distinguish the ethnic commercial corridors that anchor neighborhood economies and provide their distinctive character, lending to monikers such as Little Colombia and Little Guyana. Numerous community studies document the social reproduction functions of immigrant enclaves (Zhou 1992; Kwong 1996; Lin 1998). Immigrant spaces also foster the formation of a migrant civil society to counter pervasive housing and labor precarity and advocate for immigrant participation in city planning and redevelopment (Theodore and Martin 2007). Many of these neighborhoods and their vital functions are at risk because the search by urban growth coalitions and real estate investors for undervalued properties is frequently accompanied by efforts to sanitize, regulate, and police immigrant spaces (see Chapter 12). Queens is an incubator for immigrant political leadership and trailblazers. Most notably, New York’s first Chinese American elected to public office is John Liu, who made history with his 2001 election to represent Flushing, Queens, on the New York City Council. He went on to become the first Chinese American in a citywide office when he was elected New York City comptroller in 2009. In this position, he proved to be an effective counterbalance to Bloomberg’s New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC) by demanding transparency and “light shining into the black hole that has been EDC” (Liu 2012; see also Crain’s New York Business 2013). His 2013 mayoral run, however, was doomed by a federal investigation of his campaign finance practices that ultimately resulted in the conviction of his campaign finance manager and a donor (Rashbaum, Chen, and Weiser 2011; Chen 2012). Described as the comeback kid at his January 2019 swearing-in ceremony, Liu was elected to the New York State Senate to represent northeast Queens in an election season that swept out virtually all the Independent Democratic Conference, breakaway Democrats who had helped R ­ epublicans

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maintain control of the state senate for several years. The 2018 midterm elections witnessed the election of numerous trailblazers, including Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose Fourteenth Congressional District includes Queens’ dense immigrant neighborhoods of Astoria, Jackson Heights, Corona, Elmhurst, and Woodside. While Queens is an epicenter of transformative social and economic change, the borough has been the subject of relatively few scholarly studies. This book seeks to fill this gap by building on the work of authors who examined the dynamics of political and economic restructuring, neighborhood change, and community activism and civic engagement in Queens two decades ago, including Roger Sanjek (1998), Michael Jones-Correa (1998), Steven Gregory (1998), Madhulika Khandelwal (2002), and Milagros Ricourt and Ruby Danta (2002). As in the field of immigration studies, the scholarship in this book is interdisciplinary, with authors based in urban studies and planning, political science, sociology, history, anthropology, economics, and demography. Several of the contributing authors are at Queens College of the City University of New York. Queens College’s motto “We learn so that we may serve” is exemplified by the heroism and leadership of our students in advancing racial and social justice. Andrew Goodman was a Queens College student when he joined the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project in 1964 to register African American voters. He and two other activists, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, were kidnapped and brutally murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. The distinctive clock tower at the Rosenthal Library building is named in their honor and the accompanying plaque, “They Died for Our Freedom,” continues to inspire faculty and students (Newman 2014). Queens College students will shape the future of the city and country. They reside in surrounding immigrant neighborhoods, and along with their families, our students exhibit the grit, determination, and aspirations that working-class New Yorkers are famous for. At age thirteen, Cristina Jiménez Moreta entered the United States with her parents and brother in 1998 as undocumented immigrants from Ecuador. Through social networks, her family initially found a home in Elmhurst and later moved to Jackson Heights, where she “lived the immigrant experience,” which in Cristina’s case, included the constant fear of deportation (Jiménez Moreta 2018). She credits Queens College for exposure to the borough’s rich cultural diversity and introduction to friends and mentors who helped cultivate the intellectual foundation and skills that propelled her to become a national leader of a youth-led immigrant rights movement. Shortly after graduation from Queens College, Cristina Jiménez Moreta cofounded United We Dream, and in 2017 she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow (MacArthur Foundation 2017).

Introduction / 13

The genesis for this book on immigrant Queens is based, in part, on ­CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College seminars—in particular, the seminar “The People of New York City.”11 The seminar introduces students to the interdisciplinary scholarship on the ways that migration and immigration have shaped New York City’s past, present, and future and engages students in experiential learning through community-based research. In the semesters I taught this seminar, I noted the need for an updated compilation of current social science research on the city’s most dynamic immigrant borough. Glob­ alization, incorporation, and placemaking emerged as the key themes my students lacked, the lens needed to frame their introduction to post-1965 immigration and the making of New York City. I hope this book will be a useful resource for all those interested in the study of immigration and global cities.

Book Organization Our interdisciplinary collection of essays uses a mix of qualitative and quantitative research methods to ask several questions: Who are the actors in the social production of space (on the neighborhood level), and how is this process contested? What global and local political economic conditions shape the conditions in a postindustrial context of reception? What public policies and private practices facilitate or impede immigrant incorporation? What kinds of activism and strategies do immigrants engage in and to what ends? What are the challenges and prospects for a multiracial egalitarian democracy in the twenty-first century? The implications of the answers to these questions extend beyond this borough, because Queens shares important similarities to other large- and medium-sized cities, including contextual factors such as rapid demographic change, global and local economic restructuring, rising inequalities, persistent racial hierarchies, and enduring political structures—all of which affect the processes and outcomes involved in immigrant activism, political incorporation, and placemaking that shape future possibilities. The first part of the book focuses on globalization and details the unprecedented racial and ethnic diversity as a result of international migration during a period of massive deindustrialization and constriction of historical avenues of immigrant mobility. From the extraordinary diversity and the formation of global microcosms that Joseph Salvo and Arun Peter Lobo describe in Chapter 1, the segmented labor markets that David Kallick depicts in Chapter 2, and the decline of manufacturing documented by Lynn McCormick in Chapter 3, we can simultaneously see seismic demographic shifts and restructuring economic sectors that combine to shape employment opportunity and outcomes. In Chapter 4, on worker cooperatives, Christopher Michael presents possible models of economic democracy. He

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elaborates on nonmarket community economic development strategies (including community land trusts) that gained traction in this century. The book’s second part, on incorporation, focuses on immigrant participation and representation in electoral politics and on advocacy for immigrant inclusion in urban governance and service provision. Chapters 5 and 6, by Arianna Martinez and Alice Sardell, respectively, focus on the critical role of Queens’ extensive migrant civil society, composed of grassroots groups, nonprofit organizations, worker centers, and community activists, in protecting and advancing immigrant rights and access, especially for those who lack regularized status. Arianna Martinez provides an account of DACA, which granted temporary protections to undocumented immigrants who entered the United States as children. Although President Trump ended DACA in 2017, Martinez’s insights underscore that a vibrant migrant civil society is essential to effective community outreach and mobilization. Alice Sardell, in a comprehensive case study, examines the opportunities and limitations of the coalitional efforts led by Make the Road New York, a membership-based immigrant rights advocacy organization, to win language access in pharmacies throughout New York State. In Chapter 7, Michael Krasner and Ron Hayduk examine the relationship between the Queens Democratic Party and new immigrant groups. The chapter points to gains that immigrants have made through formal electoral mechanisms and representational systems. Sayu Bhojwani’s chapter on South Asian political incorporation, Chapter 8, emphasizes how a shared panethnic identity as desi cultivates a more inclusive definition of community that helps promote a unified political agenda. Bhojwani lays out the challenges and opportunities faced by nonprofit desi leaders who act as the “new machine” in facilitating the political incorporation of Queens’ expansive and highly diverse South Asian population. In Chapter 9, Ron Hayduk, Diana Tamashiro Folla, and Kristen Hackett investigate how the New York City Council’s participatory budgeting process created innovative and accessible participatory mechanisms to facilitate immigrant engagement and a more inclusive and responsive governance. The third part, on placemaking, focuses on the production of neighborhood spaces and identities and looks at immigrant activism for community control of development. Sofya Aptekar, in Chapter 10, reveals the multiple interactions of past and present—old-timers and newcomers who jostle to define the community in gardens, parks, commercial areas, and residential blocks. Donovan Finn’s case study, in Chapter 11, of Flushing Meadows– Corona Park is an example of insurgent placemaking. Alliances formed among different park users, particularly from the surrounding immigrant neighborhoods of Flushing, Corona, Jackson Heights, and Elmhurst, to reject the soccer stadium supported by Mayor Bloomberg that would have

Introduction / 15

privatized and reduced the green space. In Chapter 12, Samuel Stein and Tarry Hum examine the different modes of populism mobilized by community stakeholders in response to a proposal to expand a business improvement district along Roosevelt Avenue (the commercial heart of immigrant Queens). Stein and Hum’s case study contextualizes these districts as a mode of neoliberal placemaking and analyzes the campaign against the business improvement district waged by Queens Neighborhoods United as a model of successful antigentrification organizing against long odds. We also define placemaking broadly as creation of social identities that are geographically based and those that are based on ethnic, national, or religious lines. Francois Pierre-Louis Jr., in Chapter 13, describes Haitianimmigrant community building in southeast Queens, a middle-class area predominately African American and Afro-Caribbean that is also experiencing immigrant succession with increasing numbers of South Asians. Nazreen Bacchus’s study, in Chapter 14, is of a relatively lesser known (but much feared and misunderstood) immigrant group, Muslim Americans, whose communities were targeted for surveillance in the aftermath of the 9/11 tragedies. Bacchus explores Queens’ diverse Muslim populations, including the sizable Bangladeshi community in Jackson Heights.

Conclusion Immigration and cities are at a crossroads yet again. Cristina Jiménez Moreta (2018) describes this current crossroads as an ideological crisis because Trump is testing a fundamental principle of liberal democracies to uphold and protect basic human rights. At the center of this crisis is contemporary immigration, and Queens, as a preeminent site of global migrants, presents an ideal focal point for research and inquiry about the urban condition and immigrant crossroads. Our interdisciplinary book investigates the local forms of socio-spatial restructurings and the persistence of inequality in shaping urban life in Queens. We also study strategies and examples of immigrant engagement and mobilization to strengthen democratic institutions and processes. Queens exemplifies a “frontier zone” for immigrant urbanism (Sassen 2015). Immigrants are integral to the borough’s dynamic cosmopolitanism and robust ethnic economies. The influx of global or transnational finance capital into property ownership and development in local neighborhoods is a signature quality of urbanization that followed the 2008 Great Recession (Hum 2017). Manhattan proclaimed itself the “real estate capital of the world” (Angotti 2008, 37). Manhattanization of the outer boroughs proceeds with massive capital investments and transformative developments that threaten neighborhoods that have provided sanctuary to working-class

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immigrants. In a Huffington Post column, Mayor Bill de Blasio (2016) describes working-class tenants in rent-regulated units and public housing as embodying the soul of their neighborhoods. Migrant civil society organizations such as Queens Neighborhoods United and Make the Road New York along with newly elected representatives are leading the fight to save the soul of our city. We believe this collection of essays on immigrant Queens contributes to a robust analysis of contemporary immigration and urbanism and provides productive directions for future research and strategies to build a just city. Notes 1.  Trump’s executive order, known as the Muslim ban, sought to suspend travelers from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. 2.  Temporary Protected Status is a provision of the 1990 Immigration Act, which provides temporary immigration status to certain nationals who are at risk if they return to their countries. 3.  The text of the Homeland Security Act is available at https://​w ww​.dhs​.gov/​ homeland​-security​-act​-2002. 4.  The research collections of the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Corona are housed at Queens College. 5.  City and State describes Queens as a “hotbed of redevelopment and rebuilding.” Dervishi and Parrott 2018. 6.  See also the Flushing Commons website, at http://​f lushingcommons​.com. 7.  The several films on Willets Point include the 2017 documentary The Iron Triangle. For more about the film, see its website, at http://​t heirontrianglemovie​.com. 8.  For more on Bloomberg’s neighborhood projects, see “Neighborhoods,” n.d. 9. See also the websites of the Factory, at http://​w ww​.thefactorylic​.com/​the​ -­­building/, and the Falchi Building, at https://​falchibuilding​.com. 10.  The Flushing office of the Chinese American Planning Council offers an innovative program to address the developmental needs of satellite babies, or children reared by family members in China and then sent back to the United States when they are school age. Chinese American Planning Council 2016. 11.  See a description of the seminar at https://​macaulay​.cuny​.edu/​academics/​nyc​ -seminars/​people​-of​-new​-york​-city/. References Angotti, Tom. 2008. New York for Sale: Community Planning Confronts Global Real Estate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bagli, Charles V. 2001. “Schumer Proposals Address Shortage of Office Space.” New York Times, June 11. https://​w ww​.nytimes​.com/​2001/​06/​11/​nyregion/​schumer​-proposals​ -address​-shortage​-of​-office​-space​.html. ———. 2016. “Auto Shop Owners Forced out of Willets Point Struggle to Rebuild in the Bronx.” New York Times, October 6. https://w ​ ww​.nytimes​.com/​2016/​10/​07/​nyregion/​ auto​-shop​- owners​-forced​- out​- of​-willets​-point​-struggle​-to​-rebuild​-in​-the​-bronx​ .html.

Introduction / 17

Bennett, Brian. 2017. “Not Just ‘Bad Hombres’: Trump Is Targeting up to 8 Million People for Deportation.” Los Angeles Times, February 4. https://​w ww​.latimes​.com/​ politics/​la​-na​-pol​-trump​-deportations​-20170204​-story​.html. Brash, Julian. 2011. Bloomberg’s New York: Class and Governance in the Luxury City. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Busa, Alessandro. 2017. The Creative Destruction of New York City: Engineering the City for the Elite. New York: Oxford University Press. Castano, Javier. 2017. “Ecuadoreans and Colombians.” In Latinos in New York: Communities in Transition, edited by Sherrie Baver, Angelo Falcon, and Gabriel HaslipViera, 201–228. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Chen, David W. 2012. “Former Campaign Treasurer for Comptroller Is Indicted.” New York Times, April 27. https://​w ww​.nytimes​.com/​2012/​04/​28/​nyregion/​john​-lius​ -former​-campaign​-treasurer​-is​-indicted​.html. Chinese American Planning Council. 2016. “CPC Increases Awareness for the Developmental Needs of Satellite Babies.” December 29. https://​w ww​.cpc​-nyc​.org/​news/​ 1087/​cpc​-increases​-awareness​-developmental​-needs​-satellite​-babies. The Chinese Exclusion Act. 2018. Directed by Ric Burns and Li-Shin Yu. New York: Steeplechase Films. https://​w ww​.pbs​.org/​wgbh/​a mericanexperience/​fi lms/​chinese​ -exclusion​-act. City of New York. 2018. “De Blasio Administration Allocates $4.1 Million to Provide Legal Assistance for Migrant Children and Separated Families.” September 17. https://​w ww1​.nyc​.gov/​office​-of​-the​-mayor/​news/​472​-18/​de​-blasio​-administration​ -allocates​-4​-1​-million​-provide​-legal​-assistance​-migrant​-children. Colon, Dave. 2018. “A Closer Look at the Tax Incentives in the Amazon Deal.” Gotham Gazette, November 29. https://​w ww​.gothamgazette​.com/​state/​8110​-a​-closer​-look​-at​ -the​-tax​-incentives​-in​-the​-amazon​-deal. Cordero-Guzman, Hector R., Robert C. Smith, and Ramon Grosfoguel. 2001. Migration, Transnationalization, and Race in a Changing New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Crain’s New York Business. 2013. “Liu Targets City’s Marriott Marquis Lease.” February 11. https://​w ww​.crainsnewyork​.com/​a rticle/​2 0130212/​HOSPITALITY​_TOURISM/​ 130219983/​liu​-targets​-city​-s​-marriott​-marquis​-lease. David, Greg, and Cara Eisenpress. 2018. “Tech Takes Over.” Crain’s New York Business, February 25. https://​w ww​.crainsnewyork​.com/​article/​20180226/​FEATURES/​1802 29939/​new​-york​-is​-the​-tech​-sector​-s​- official​-second​- city​-and​-the​-boom​-is​-just​ -beginning. de Blasio, Bill. 2016. “The Soul of Our City.” Huffington Post, June 5. https://​w ww​ .huffingtonpost​.com/​bill​-de​-blasio/​t he​-soul​-of​-our​-city​_b​_10307708​.html. De Genova, Nicholas. 2004. “The Legal Production of Mexican/Migrant ‘Illegality.’” Latino Studies 2 (2): 160–185. de Graauw, Els. 2016. Making Immigrant Rights Real: Nonprofits and the Politics of Integration in San Francisco. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. deMause, Neil. 2019. “How a Mythical Soccer Stadium Became Queens’ Biggest Political Futbol.” Gothamist, January 8. https://​gothamist​.com/​news/​how​-a​-mythical​-soccer​ -stadium​-became​-queens​-biggest​-political​-futbol. Dervishi, Kay, and Max Parrott. 2018. “The Projects Transforming Queens.” City and State, July 16. https://​w ww​.cityandstateny​.com/​articles/​policy/​policy/​projects​-trans forming​-queens​.html.

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Devereaux, Ryan. 2018. “ICE Has Conducted Hundreds of Raids in New York Since Trump Came to Power.” The Intercept, July 23. https://​t heintercept​.com/​2018/​07/​23/​ ice​-raids​-in​-new​-york/. Dickerson, Caitlin. 2018. “Migrant Children Moved under Cover of Darkness to a Texas Tent City.” New York Times, September 30. https://​w ww​.nytimes​.com/​2018/​09/​30/​ us/​migrant​-children​-tent​-city​-texas​.html. Doctoroff, Daniel. 2017. Greater than Ever: New York’s Big Comeback. New York: PublicAffairs. Dunn, Catherine. 2011. “Foreclosure Crisis Fades to Black and Brown.” CityLimits, August 15. Dunst, Charles. 2018. “Dozens More Cambodian Immigrants to Be Deported from U.S., Officials Say.” New York Times, December 12. https://​w ww​.nytimes​.com/​2018/​12/​ 12/​world/​asia/​trump​-deport​-cambodians​.html. Fan, Jiayang. 2016. “The Golden Generation: Why China’s Super-Rich Send Their Children Abroad.” New Yorker, February 22. https://​w ww​.newyorker​.com/​magazine/​ 2016/​02/​22/​chinas​-rich​-kids​-head​-west. Foner, Nancy. 1997. “What’s New about Transnationalism? New York Immigrants Today and at the Turn of the Century.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 6 (3): 355–375. Fuchs, Chris. 2018a. “Chinese Citizen Arrested, Detained at Green Card Interview.”  NBC News, June 17. https://​w ww​.nbcnews​.com/​news/​asian​-america/​chinese​-na tional​-arrested​-detained​-green​-card​-interview​-n884066. ———. 2018b. “Deportation of Chinese National Detained at Green Card Interview Temporarily Stopped.” NBC News, June 21. https://​w ww​.nbcnews​.com/​news/​asian​ -america/​deportation​-chinese​-national​-detained​-green​-card​-interview​-temporarily​ -stopped​-n885306. Gannon, Devin. 2019. “Plan for Affordable Housing and Industrial Space Back on the Table for Ex-Amazon Site in LIC.” 6sqft, February 25. https://​w ww​.6sqft​.com/​plan​ -for​-affordable​-housing​-and​-industrial​-space​-back​-on​-the​-table​-for​-ex​-amazon​-site​ -in​-lic/. Garun, Natt, and Shannon Liao. 2018. “For Queens Residents, Amazon’s HQ2 Isn’t Arriving without a Fight.” The Verge, November 20. https://​w ww​.theverge​.com/​2018/​ 11/​2 0/​18093040/​a mazon​-hq2​-long​-island​- city​- queens​-resident​-reactions​-neigh borhood​-impact. Gates, Moses. 2015. “To Prevent Worsening Inequality, Put Affluent Neighborhoods on NYC Rezoning List.” Metropolitics, November 17. http://​w ww​.metropolitiques​.eu/​ To​-Prevent​-Worsening​-Inequality​.html. Geiger, Daniel. 2018. “Cuomo Likely to Steer Amazon Project around City Council.” Crain’s New York Business, November 9. https://​perma​.cc/​YG9X​-9BS7. Glaeser, Edward L. 2012. “Wall Street Isn’t Enough: Finance-Heavy New York Must Recapture Its Economic Diversity.” City Journal, Spring. https://​w ww​.city​-journal​ .org/​html/​wall​-street​-isn​%E2​%80​%99t​-enough​-13461​.html. Goodman, J. David. 2019. “Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Headquarters.” New York Times, February 14. https://​w ww​.nytimes​.com/​2019/​02/​14/​nyregion/​a ma zon​-hq2​-queens​.html. Goodman, J. David, and Emma G. Fitzsimmons. 2018. “What Amazon May Mean for Queens: Gentrification and (More) Packed Trains.” New York Times, November 6. https://​w ww​.nytimes​.com/​2018/​11/​06/​nyregion/​a mazon​-long​-island​-city​.html.

Introduction / 19

Gregory, Steven. 1998. Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Guillermo, Emil. 2018. “State of the Union? Truthfully—Chaotic, unless Trump Says This.” Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, January 26. https://​w ww​ .aaldef​.org/​blog/​e mil​- guillermo​- state​- of​-the​-union​-truthfully​- chaotic​-unless​ -trump​-says​-this/. Haberman, Clyde. 2018. “For Private Prisons, Detaining Immigrants Is Big Business.” New York Times, October 1. https://​w ww​.nytimes​.com/​2018/​10/​01/​us/​prisons​-im migration​-detention​.html. Haller, Vera. 2013. “Indo-Caribbean Content, Victorian Style.” New York Times, January 11. https://​w ww​.nytimes​.com/​2013/​01/​13/​realestate/​living​-in​-richmond​-hill​-queens​ -indo​-caribbean​-content​-victorian​-style​.html. Hao, Karen. 2018. “Amazon Is the Invisible Backbone of ICE’s Immigration Crackdown.” MIT Tech Review, October 22. https://​g vwire​.com/​2019/​07/​22/​amazon​-is​-the​ -invisible​-backbone​-behind​-ices​-immigration​-crackdown/. Hawkins, Derek. 2018. “Federal Judge Blasts ICE for ‘Cruel’ Tactics, Frees Immigrant Rights Activist Ravi Ragbir.” Washington Post, January 30. https://​w ww​.washing tonpost​.com/​news/​morning​-mix/​w p/​2018/​01/​29/​federal​-judge​-blasts​-ice​-for​-cruel​ -tactics​-frees​-immigrant​-rights​-activist​-ravi​-ragbir/. Heathcott, Joseph. 2008. “The World on Roosevelt Avenue.” On Site Review 19, Spring/ Summer, pp. 16–17. https://​issuu​.com/​onsitereview/​docs/​19streets/​19. Hernández, Kelly Lytle. 2017. City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Honan, Katie. 2018. “NYC Initiatives Seek to Curb Campaign Contributions and Board Term Limits.” Wall Street Journal, November 5. https://​w ww​.wsj​.com/​articles/​nyc​ -initiatives​-seek​-to​-curb​-campaign​-contributions​-and​-board​-term​-limits​-154142 2800. Horowitz, Jason. 2015. “Donald Trump’s Old Queens Neighborhood Contrasts with the Diverse Area around It.” New York Times, September 22. https://​w ww​.nytimes​.com/​ 2015/​09/​23/​us/​politics/​donald​-trumps​-old​-queens​-neighborhood​-now​-a​-melting​ -pot​-was​-seen​-as​-a​-cloister​.html. Hum, Tarry. 2011. “Persistent Polarization in the New York Workforce: New Findings of Labor Market Segmentation.” Regional Labor Review 13:22–29. ———. 2017. “‘Get Ready Sunset Park, “Brooklyn” Is Coming’: The Real Estate Imperatives of an Innovation Ecosystem.” Progressive City, July 11. https://​w ww​.progres sivecity​.net/​single​-post/​2017/​07/​11/​%E2​%80​%9CGET​-READY​-SUNSET​-PARK​-​%E2​ %80 ​ % 98BROOKLYN ​ % E2 ​ % 80 ​ % 99 ​ - IS ​ - COMING ​ % E2 ​ % 80 ​ % 9D ​ -THE ​ - REAL​ -ESTATE​-IMPERATIVES​-OF​-AN​-INNOVATION​-ECOSYSTEM. Jiménez Moreta, Cristina. 2018. Interview by the author, June 1, New York City. Jones-Correa, Michael. 1998. Between Two Nations: The Political Predicament of Latinos in New York City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jordan, Miriam. 2018a. “8-Year-Old Migrant Child from Guatemala Dies in U.S. Custody.” New York Times, December 25. https://​w ww​.nytimes​.com/​2018/​12/​25/​us/​ guatemalan​-boy​-dies​-border​-patrol​.html. ———. 2018b. “Is America a ‘Nation of Immigrants’? Immigration Agency Says No.” New York Times, February 22. https://​w ww​.nytimes​.com/​2018/​02/​22/​us/​uscis​-nation​ -of​-immigrants​.html.

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Introduction / 21

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Introduction / 23

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I Globalization

1 Queens Neighborhoods From European Strongholds to Global Microcosms Joseph J. Salvo and Arun Peter Lobo

T

he borough of Queens has an immigrant population nearing 1.1 million, bigger than the foreign-born populations of forty-four U.S. states. Immigrants in Queens are synonymous with diversity, which the statistics bear out: the largest group is just 14 percent of the total, and every country in the United Nations and every major ethnicity is represented within the borough’s 112 square miles. This diversity is built on a foundation of tolerance whose origins date back more than three hundred years, when the citizenry of Flushing (then called Vlissingen) first became part of the colony of New Netherland. When the governor of New York, Peter Stuyvesant, a member of the Dutch Reformed church, attempted to suppress the practices of Quakers, residents protested with a document now known as the Flushing Remonstrance of 1657. This declaration challenging the governor’s attempts to curtail their religious freedom has been widely viewed as a precursor to freedom of religion enshrined in the U.S. Bill of Rights. The collective local push for ­religious freedom was emblematic of a strong identification with town and village life in places such as Flushing, Ravenswood, and Corona, which persisted through the centuries (Jackson, Keller, and Flood 2010). Beginning in 1836 the newly constructed Long Island Rail Road allowed migrants from Manhattan to more easily settle in Queens. By the end of the nineteenth century, native- and foreign-born blacks, as well as native- and foreign-born whites (particularly Italians, Germans, and Irish) migrated to West Flushing–Corona in search of employment and homeownership

28  /  Joseph J. Salvo and Arun Peter Lobo

(Gregory 1999). When Queens County was incorporated into New York City in 1898, it was the only one of the five boroughs with independent towns and villages, reflective of the strong local ties that characterized the county. (To this day, the U.S. Postal Service uses the governmental structures in existence at the time of consolidation for mail services.) After incorporation, many white and black women, the latter frequently recruited from southern states, found jobs as domestics among the wealthier white residents of Corona. In addition, a small but distinct group of black landowners settled in the area around Corona, which grew between the two world wars into a haven for the black elite. Given its openness, it is not surprising that Queens invited the world to come and visit New York—in 1939 and 1964—for the World’s Fair. The enactment of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act (Hart-Celler Act) opened up immigration to non-European sources, and this time, Queens invited the law’s beneficiaries from across the world to come and stay. The embrace of all that is diverse can be seen in modern times along the path of the number 7 train. The route of the train, dubbed the “International Express,” was named a National Millennium Trail in 2000 and is steel-andconcrete testimony to the large number and mix of immigrants who have become synonymous with the borough (Tonnelat and Kornblum 2017). This chapter examines how this diversity emerged in the aftermath of the 1965 immigration law. We start by showing how the population of Queens grew throughout the twentieth century, with growth in the post1965 era primarily a result of sharp increases in the immigrant population (we use the terms immigrant and foreign born interchangeably). We then divide the world into areas of origin, to show the declining share of the European born in the post-1965 period and the dramatic increase in immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean; we also note the countries that have emerged in the last four decades as the top sources of immigrants to Queens. The overall statistics for Queens—more than one million foreign-born residents composing about half the total population—fail to convey the degree of dynamism present in this polyglot borough. More than anything, Queens is as much a process as a place; the borough is about the invention and reinvention of neighborhoods that comes about through the constant ebb and flow of ethnic groups. We explore this process, identifying major patterns that have turned neighborhoods across Queens into global microcosms and provide a sociodemographic context for this neighborhood diversity. In the final section we show how recent immigrants have reshaped the racial/ethnic landscape of Queens as it pertains to neighborhood settlement,

Queens Neighborhoods / 29

with the emergence of new patterns of coresidence of racial/Hispanic groups. We examine how these patterns of neighborhood integration and segregation changed between 1970 and 2014 as the immigrant component of the borough’s population marched steadily upward.

Population of Queens, 1900–2014 The left side of Table 1.1 shows the total and foreign-born populations of Queens by selected year for the period 1900–2014. In 1900, two years after the consolidation of the five boroughs of New York, the population of Queens stood at 153,000 but increased sevenfold in just three decades, reaching 1.1 million in 1930. Much of this growth occurred in the 1920s as the rapidly expanding subway lines transported native- and foreign-born New Yorkers from Manhattan. With the onset of the Great Depression and World War II, the flow of immigrants tapered off in the 1930s and 1940s. Nevertheless, Queens grew by 20 percent each decade thanks to the continued inflow of the native born, which resulted in the borough’s population crossing the 1.5 million mark in 1950. Immigration began to rebound in the 1950s and 1960s, and by 1970 the population of Queens reached just under 2 million, with the foreignborn component at 417,000. The enactment of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act dramatically increased the flow of immigrants to Queens in the post-1970 period, with the foreign-born population increasing by 30 percent in the 1970s alone. This was accompanied by a new dynamic—a decline in the nativeborn population, because native-born natural increase (the difference between births and deaths) could not fully counter the large out-migration to the suburbs. Consequently, there was a slight drop in the borough’s overall population for the only time in the twentieth century. The foreign-for-native succession continued in the 1980s and 1990s, with substantial increases in the foreign born accompanied by a decline in the native born. These large increases in the foreign born propelled the borough’s immigrant population past the 1 million mark in 2000, while the total population climbed to 2.2 million. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the foreign-born population increased only modestly, to 1.1 million in 2014,1 accompanied by a continued decline in the native born; the total population inched up to 2.3 million, though it marked a new peak. At the turn of the last century, the foreign born made up 29 percent of the borough’s population. For most of the next six decades, the native-born population grew faster than the foreign born, resulting in a decline in the immigrant share of the population, to less than 19 percent in 1960. Since

1,550,849

1,809,994

1,986,473

1,891,325

1,951,598

2,229,379

2,280,602

1950

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

2014

810,770

1,190,179

1,201,040

1,244,445

1,350,507

1,569,583

1,474,371

1,262,652

1,018,697

1,090,423

1,028,339

707,153

540,818

416,887

335,623

288,197

278,937

268,359

112,171

79,329

44,812

Foreign born

47.8

46.1

36.2

28.6

21.0

18.5

18.6

21.5

24.9

23.9

27.9

29.3

Foreign born (%)

11.9

16.4

24.5

42.3

67.1

91.8

92.8

93.7

93.9

97.5

97.3

97.4

Europe

30.0

31.4

27.3

22.5

16.0

0.0

0.2

1.2

0.7

0.1

—

0.1

Latin America

37.6

32.2

27.0

16.3

7.3

1.2

1.8

1.3

1.0

0.0

0.2

0.5

Asia

17.9

17.6

13.9

11.7

3.9

—

—

—

0.3

0.3

—

0.1

Caribbean, non-Hispanic

Area of origin (%)

2.3

2.0

1.5

1.2

1.0

—

—

—

0.1

—

—

—

Africa

0.4

0.4

5.9

5.9

4.7

7.0

5.2

3.0

3.1

1.6

2.2

1.9

All others

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

99.2

99.2

99.6

99.7

100.0

All foreign born

Source: Data from 1900–2000 censuses and 2010–2014 American Community Survey, available at https://data.census.gov. Note: 2014 data refer to the entire 2010–2014 period. For 1910 to 1950 censuses, data on the foreign born are available for the white population only. The 1960 entries use language data of the foreign born as an approximate of place of birth. In the last column, percentages do not add up to 100 when nativity and place of birth data were based on different samples.

1,079,129

1,297,634

469,042

1940

284,041

1910

1920

1930

204,712

152,999

1900

356,871

108,187

Total

Year

Native born

Population

Table 1.1 Population of Queens by nativity, 1900–2014

Queens Neighborhoods / 31

then, torrid growth in the immigrant population has been coupled with modest growth in the native born in the 1960s, followed by declines in subsequent decades. As a consequence, the immigrant share of the population increased each decade, reaching 48 percent in 2014. With immigrants constituting nearly half the borough’s population—the highest immigrant concentration in the city—they have become the defining demographic feature of Queens.

Changes in the Composition of the Immigrant Population, 1900–2014 For the first six decades of the twentieth century, more than nine in ten immigrants in Queens were from Europe, but the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality amendments greatly diversified the origins of immigrants. To illustrate this, we divide immigrants in Queens into six areas of origin (Table 1.1): Europe, Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean, Africa, and all others. (In this chapter, the term Caribbean refers to countries in the non-Hispanic Caribbean.2 Countries in the Hispanic Caribbean, such as the Dominican Republic, are included under Latin America.) By 1970, two-thirds of the 417,000 immigrants in Queens were from Europe and 16 percent were from Latin America. The top four source countries were all European: Italy, Germany, Poland, and the USSR; Cuba was the only non-European country in the top five. By 1980, the emerging immigrant diversity of Queens was apparent because Europeans, for the first time, accounted for only a plurality (42 percent) of all immigrants. The count of Italians, and especially Germans, fell dramatically, but both remained in the top five and were joined by Greece, which saw a spurt in immigration during the prior decade. Latin Americans increased their share to over one-fifth, with Colombians ranked second among all countries of origin, eclipsing Cubans, who bypassed the city for other parts of the New York region. The Asian share increased to 16 percent, with China emerging in fifth place among source countries. By 1990, Latin Americans, Asians, and Europeans each accounted for approximately one-quarter of the immigrant population. China emerged as the largest immigrant group in Queens, a position it has maintained to this day, while Colombians remained in second place, followed by Koreans and Dominicans. Italians were ranked fifth and were the only European country in the top five. By 2000, the European share had dropped to just 16 percent and there was no European country present on the list of top five source countries—or the top ten. The transition from a European-dominated immigrant population was complete. As in the prior decade, no single area of origin accounted

32  /  Joseph J. Salvo and Arun Peter Lobo

for a majority, but Asians emerged as the largest group (32 percent), with China ranked first among all source countries. Immigrants from the Caribbean had an 18 percent share, with Guyana emerging in second place among all countries of origin. Latin Americans accounted for 31 percent, with a surging Ecuadorian population moving into third place, followed by Colombians and Dominicans. The top three source countries—China, Guyana, and Ecuador—maintained those positions in 2014. While the overall Asian share increased to 38 percent, China was the only Asian country in the top five, and India, Korea, and Bangladesh made the top ten list. The Latin American share dropped to 30 percent, with suburbanizing Colombians and Dominicans experiencing population declines in the borough. Colombians, the longest-established Latin American group in Queens, were no longer in the top five, replaced by a surging Mexican population that was the fourth largest in the borough, while Dominicans remained in fifth place. The African-born population in Queens totaled fewer than 25,000, or 2 percent of the borough’s immigrant population. The 1970 census, when Europeans accounted for two-thirds of the borough’s immigrants, marked the last time immigrant Queens was truly dominated by just one continent. Since then, Asians have become the largest group; however, ascendant Asians make up only a plurality, a contrast with the European dominance of earlier decades.

Patterns of Immigrant Settlement and Neighborhood Diversity, 2014 The immigrant population of Queens is not distributed equally across the borough (Figure 1.1). Northwest Queens, for example, has traditionally been home to a disproportionate share of immigrants—accounting for 44 percent of immigrants in 2014. Moreover, the composition of immigrant neighborhoods3 dramatically varies across Queens. To better understand this dynamic, we subdivide the borough into four sections, or quadrants— the northwest, northeast, southeast, and southwest—and provide information on the area of origin (Table 1.2) of immigrants and discuss the country composition in each quadrant. As we see later in this chapter, given the size of the foreign-born population, immigrant settlement affects overall patterns of integration and segregation in the borough. Characterizing major patterns in a borough where change is the norm is a special challenge. Nonetheless, several patterns stand out in this analysis and emerge as themes that can enhance our capacity to understand the dynamics of current and future demographic change in the borough’s neighborhoods.

Queens Neighborhoods / 33

Northeast

Whitestone

College Point

LaGuardia Airport

Steinway

Old Astoria

Northwest

Astoria QueensbridgeRavenswoodLong Island City

Jackson Heights

Ft. TottenBay TerraceClearview

Murray Hill

East Elmhurst North Corona

BaysideBayside Hills

Flushing East Flushing

Woodside

7

Elmhurst Hunters PointSunnysideWest Maspeth

ElmhurstMaspeth

Middle Village

Ridgewood

Queensboro Hill

Fresh PomonokMeadowsFlushing Heights- Utopia Hillcrest Kew Gardens Jamaica EstatesHills Holliswood BriarwoodJamaica Hollis Kew Hills Jamaica Gardens

Rego Park

Maspeth

Forest Hills

Glendale

Woodhaven

Southwest

Oakland Gardens

Auburndale

Corona

Douglas ManorDouglastonLittle Neck Glen OaksFloral ParkNew Hyde Park

Richmond Hill

Ozone Park

South Jamaica

South Ozone Park

Bellerose

Queens Village

Cambria Heights

St. Albans

Baisley Park

Laurelton Gardens North

LindenwoodHoward Beach

Gardens SouthBrookville John F. Kennedy International Airport

Rosedale

Southeast

Foreign born 40,000 or more

(5 neighborhoods)

24,000 to 39,999 (11) 12,000 to 23,999 (18) Under 12,000

(22)

Far RockawayBayswater HammelsArverneEdgemere

Breezy PointBelle HarborRockaway ParkBroad Channel

Figure 1.1  Foreign born in Queens by neighborhood. (Source: Data from 2010– 2014 American Community Survey, available at https://data.census.gov/cedsci.)

Northwest Queens: The Immigrant Gateway to the Borough Northwest Queens has the largest number of immigrants (475,000), with the heaviest immigrant presence along the much-heralded international express—the number 7 train that connects Hudson Yards in Manhattan with Flushing in Queens. This line passes through three neighborhoods that are the epicenter of immigrant settlement and home to over one-fifth of the borough’s immigrants: Elmhurst, Jackson Heights, and Corona. Nearly

4,090

0.4

17.9

30.0

2.3

37.6

11.9

100.0

47.8

100.0

Percent

2,434

12,380

206,565

10,106

161,628

82,060

475,173

475,173

914,270

0.5

2.6

43.5

2.1

34.0

17.3

100.0

52.0

100.0

Percent

Northwest Number

731

11,969

39,543

2,895

180,878

29,286

265,302

265,302

527,231

0.3

4.5

14.9

1.1

68.2

11.0

100.0

50.3

100.0

Percent

Northeast Number

559

117,869

40,914

9,939

35,006

8,748

213,035

213,035

555,745

0.3

55.3

19.2

4.7

16.4

4.1

100.0

38.3

100.0

Percent

Southeast Number

366

52,455

39,832

1,692

33,007

9,561

136,913

136,913

283,356

0.3

38.3

29.1

1.2

24.1

7.0

100.0

48.3

100.0

Percent

Southwest Number

Source: Data from U.S. Census Bureau, “Total Population: Queens, New York,” 2014, https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?q=B05006%20%20B01003%20Queens,%20New%20 York&tid=ACSDT5Y2014.B01003; U.S. Census Bureau, “Place of Birth for the Foreign-Born Population in the United States: Queens, New York,” 2014, https://data.census.gov/cedsci/ table?q=B05006%20%20B01003%20Queens,%20New%20York&tid=ACSDT5Y2014.B05006.

  All others

194,673

 Caribbean,  non-Hispanic

24,632

 Africa

326,854

410,519

  Latin America

129,655

1,090,423

Foreign born

 Europe

1,090,423

  Foreign born

 Asia

2,280,602

Total population

Number

Queens

Table 1.2 Area of origin of the foreign-born population by subsections of Queens, 2014

Queens Neighborhoods / 35

seven in ten residents in Elmhurst were foreign-born, as were approximately six in ten residents of Corona and Jackson Heights. This portion of the number 7 line runs along a very dense corridor of the borough, with some 108 persons per acre in Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, and Corona, over three times the borough average of 33 persons per acre. This section continues to act as a gateway for new immigrants, with many neighborhoods characterized by high population and housing densities, proportionately more rental housing, a below-average median household income ($54,100 versus $57,700 for the borough), and above-average poverty (17 percent versus 15.3 percent for the borough)—characteristic of areas flush with new immigrants. Indeed, over one-third of all foreign-born residents (182,000) in the northwest quadrant arrived in the United States in 2000 or later, accounting for onefifth of the total population, higher than any other area of Queens. Even more than the concentration of immigrants in this part of the borough, the range of origins best characterizes the neighborhoods. If Queens is the epitome of the city’s diversity, then northwest Queens is the quintessence of diversity within the borough. Northwest Queens on its own can be said to represent a global microcosm of immigrant groups. Its 475,000 immigrants included 207,000 from Latin America, 162,000 from Asia, 82,000 from Europe, and over 22,000 from the Caribbean and Africa. With respect to country of origin, the largest immigrant group in northwest Queens is from Ecuador (55,000), but it accounts for only 12 percent of all immigrants, a telltale sign of the plethora of nations represented by the area’s immigrants. Each of the top ten groups had a population exceeding 11,000, and there were thirtysix foreign-born groups with at least 2,000 residents in this quadrant. Even by the standards of New York City or Queens overall, this mix is impressive and likely unprecedented. It is fitting that in 2009 National Geographic attempted to link the entire world to this part of Queens (Shreeve 2009).

The Asian Predominance in Northeast Queens Northeast Queens has some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the borough and a median household income ($60,700) well above the borough average. Increasingly, Asians have made their home in this section of Queens—their share was 44 percent in 2014, up from under one-third in 1970. Indeed, Asians account for a disproportionate percentage of all immigrants in this quadrant. The Chinese alone accounted for over one-third of the 265,000 immigrants in northeast Queens, followed by Koreans with 13 percent and Indians with 4 percent. Overall, over two in three immigrants were of Asian origin, making it the most heavily Asian immigrant section of the city. The neighborhood of Flushing, the last stop on the international express, and the adjacent neighborhood of Murray Hill were the largest

36  /  Joseph J. Salvo and Arun Peter Lobo

i­mmigrant neighborhoods in this quadrant of Queens, with 50,000 and 30,000 foreign-born residents, respectively. Flushing was 71 percent foreign born, the highest neighborhood concentration of immigrants in the city. Two-thirds of the immigrant population in Flushing and Murray Hill were either Chinese or Korean, and Asians accounted for over eight in ten of all immigrants. The high density of Flushing stands in stark contrast to many neighborhoods to the east and south, where owner occupancy was high and housing density low in most areas. But the dominant position of Chinese and Korean immigrants was evident across all northeast Queens: in thirteen of the sixteen neighborhoods in this section of the borough, Chinese were ranked first, and Koreans were among the top three in eleven neighborhoods. Bordering southeast Queens, Briarwood–Jamaica Hills and Jamaica Estates–Holliswood were the only two neighborhoods without a strong Chinese and Korean presence. Here the large Asian contingent was primarily Bangladeshi, Indian, and Filipino—along with a substantial presence of immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean. While the bulk of the Asian population lived in northeast and northwest Queens, other pockets of the borough had a distinct presence. In southwest Queens, the Asian presence was tied to Caribbean immigrants in South Ozone Park and Richmond Hill, who are primarily of Indo-Caribbean origin (70 percent of Indo-Caribbean immigrants in the borough lived in southwest Queens4). But the newest trends point to the movement of South Asians into southeast Queens, a theme explored further in the section that follows.

Transitions in Afro-Caribbean Neighborhoods in Southeast Queens The predominantly black, middle-class neighborhoods of southeast Queens have long stood out because of their relatively high socioeconomic profile— indeed, their overall median household income ($59,800) is similar to that of northeast Queens. Southeast Queens has been the destination of choice for blacks in the borough, initially for African Americans associated with the great migration from southern states and, more recently, for the large influx of immigrants from the Caribbean. Indeed, over half the foreign born in this section of Queens is from the Caribbean. However, given the substantial native-born African American population, this quadrant has the lowest percentage of foreign-born residents (38 percent), though it is still home to 213,000 immigrants. Four of the top five immigrant groups are Caribbean: Jamaica, Guyana, Haiti, and Trinidad and Tobago. Immigrants from these sources are primarily of Afro-Caribbean origin.5 But settlement patterns are changing. As has happened repeatedly in New York City, the earlier waves of immigrants are leaving, succeeded by

Queens Neighborhoods / 37

new groups from South Asia and Latin America. These transitions, and increased diversity, are most evident in Jamaica, Hollis, and Queens Village. While southeast Queens is still largely Afro-Caribbean, there is a notable increase in settlement from India (now the fifth-largest foreign-born source in southeast Queens), Bangladesh, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Moreover, in the eastern part of the Rockaway Peninsula, especially in Far Rockaway, there is now a blend of groups from Latin America, especially Central Americans, with a sizable number of Eastern Europeans in the mix. These new groups have increased the level of diversity in a number of neighborhoods that have long been the bastion of African American and Afro-Caribbean groups.

Latin America: Patterns of Concentration and Dispersion The 327,000 Latin American immigrants in Queens have unique settlement patterns: 207,000, or 63 percent, live in the northwest quadrant, but the remainder is almost equally distributed over the other sections of the borough. Thus, Latin Americans have a considerable presence in neighborhoods across Queens. In the northwest, Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, and Corona alone were home to four in ten of all Latin American immigrants. In addition, Ridgewood, near the boundary with Brooklyn, is now being redefined by a large number of immigrants from Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico, all of whom are in the top five countries of origin and constitute upward of one-third of the 31,400 immigrants residing there. While Latin American immigrants were concentrated in northwest Queens, 12 percent resided in each of the three other sections. Dominicans, for example, have a substantial presence in northwest Queens (29,700) but also make the top ten list in every quadrant, including the southwest, where they were ranked second, with over 11,000 foreign-born persons. Similarly, smaller but still significant numbers of other Latin American groups can be found among the top three groups in the northeast neighborhoods of College Point (Colombia) and Murray Hill (El Salvador), in the southwest neighborhood of Woodhaven (Dominican Republic, Ecuador), and in the southeast neighborhoods of Far Rockaway and Jamaica (El Salvador) and Hammels-Arverne (Dominican Republic).

Enclaves of New (and Old) European Groups The earlier discussion emphasized the decline in European immigrants in Queens over the last few decades, which was mostly a result of an aging population not being replenished with fresh flows. The decline in Europeans

38  /  Joseph J. Salvo and Arun Peter Lobo

has been somewhat stemmed by the small, continuing flow of immigrants from Eastern Europe: from the former Soviet Union, Poland, and the former Yugoslavia. In 2014, the European-born population numbered 130,000, with 63 percent living in the northwest quadrant and most of the remainder in neighborhoods to the east. While Poland was the only European group in the top ten in the northwest quadrant, many neighborhoods have a firm European footprint. Eastern European sources, each with at least 1,000 immigrants, ranked in the top five in Forest Hills and Rego Park (Russia, Uzbekistan) and in Glendale, Ridgewood, Maspeth, and Middle Village (Poland). European groups that entered earlier still maintain a presence in Middle Village (Italy), Astoria (Greece), and Steinway (Greece, Italy). In addition, a significant older European cluster resides in the northeastern neighborhood of Whitestone (Italians, Greeks) and in Lindenwood–Howard Beach (Italians) in the southwest section of the borough.

A Wave of New Groups The dynamic nature of immigration in Queens is closely related to its capacity to adapt to change by integrating new groups that have arrived on the scene. Some of these groups are small and often concentrated in their residential distribution. But it is important to take note of them because some may turn out to be major players in the future. Of all the groups that have been emerging in Queens over the last decade, one of the most notable is Bangladeshis. As a result of initial settlements associated with lottery visas in the late 1980s, Bangladesh has now emerged as a top source of immigrants to New York and especially to Queens where 62 percent of Bangladeshis in the city live. This group’s presence is now being felt in a number of places throughout the borough, including Jamaica, Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, Briarwood–Jamaica Hills, Woodhaven, Woodside, and Hunters Point–Sunnyside–West Maspeth. Bangladeshi immigrants, while still few in number, are leaving their stamp across the borough, as opposed to the much larger number of Chinese immigrants, who are primarily concentrated in the northwest and northeast. Another South Asian country with a growing presence in Queens is Pakistan, in neighborhoods such as Jackson Heights, Briarwood–Jamaica Hills, and Bellerose. But among South Asians, it is the Nepalese population that has the highest propensity for settling in Queens: 82 percent of Nepalese immigrants in the city settled in the borough and can be found in Elmhurst and Hunters Point–Sunnyside–West Maspeth. Groups from Southeast Asia have also found a niche in Queens, with Thai immigrants in Elmhurst and Jackson Heights, Burmese in Elmhurst and Maspeth, Indonesians in Elm-

Queens Neighborhoods / 39

hurst and Forest Hills, and Malaysians in Flushing. While many of these groups are relatively small, their presence is likely to grow over time. The big groups from Latin America found in some Queens neighborhoods, especially in the northwest—Ecuador, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic—are giving way to increases in Mexicans and a rich blend of nations from Central and South America. Most prominent are the large numbers of Mexicans and Peruvians in Corona, in Jackson Heights, and in other neighborhoods of northwest Queens. Among South American nations, Brazil is represented in significant numbers in Astoria and Jackson Heights. As we noted earlier Eastern European groups, such as Poles and Russians, have established footholds in neighborhoods that were once home to Western European groups. But smaller European groups such as Albanians have also found niches in Ridgewood and Lindenwood–Howard Beach, while Croatians, three-quarters of whom live in Queens, have established a toehold in Astoria. Finally, while the numbers are still relatively small, several Arab nations, such as Egypt and Morocco, are showing an increasing presence in neighborhoods across the northwestern quadrant, especially in Astoria.

The Role of Immigrants in the Rise of Integrated Neighborhoods While the previous section examines the extraordinary cast of immigrants from different source countries living in Queens, this section places immigrant settlement—and immigrant neighborhoods—in the context of spatial patterns of the overall population. Historically, the arrival of new groups has prompted the departure of older groups, given the perceived social distance between the new arrivals and the old guard. This process, known as invasion-succession (Park, Burgess, and McKenzie 1925), often led to high levels of residential segregation from whites. But post-1965 immigration in Queens has resulted in new patterns of coresidence with whites that challenge old theories of immigrant settlement. To assess these patterns of integration between whites and primarily nonwhite, post-1965 immigrants, we first examine each neighborhood’s overall population (including its immigrant component) in the context of the U.S. ethno-racial structure and its four major mutually exclusive categories: white non-Hispanic, black non-Hispanic, Asian non-Hispanic, and Hispanic.6 Depending on a neighborhood’s racial mix, we initially classify neighborhoods into the following types: dominant white, absent of whites (minority), or shared with whites (integrated).7 In dominant white neighborhoods, whites composed 70 percent or more of the population, and each

40  /  Joseph J. Salvo and Arun Peter Lobo

other group accounted for less than 10 percent. Minority neighborhoods were those where whites were under 10 percent of the population, and in integrated neighborhoods whites and at least one other group each composed a minimum of 10 percent of the population. We identify traditionally defined integrated areas that include whites and blacks, often with a notable presence of Asians or Hispanics, or both. But we also highlight a new pattern of integration that is widespread across Queens, in which neighborhoods include whites and Asians or Hispanics, or both, but not blacks, and may be a bellwether of future patterns of immigrant settlement across the country. We thus end with four neighborhood types: white dominant neighborhoods, minority neighborhoods, integrated neighborhoods with blacks, and integrated neighborhoods without blacks. To provide context to the evolving pattern of residential settlement in Queens, we use this scheme to first analyze patterns of coresidence in 1970 (Figure 1.2), soon after the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality amendments, and then in 2014 (Figure 1.3), to highlight the role immigrants have played in the new patterns of integration that have emerged in the borough. In 1970, whites accounted for nearly eight in ten residents of Queens. Given the overwhelming white presence in the borough, it is not surprising that thirty-four of fifty-six Queens neighborhoods were white dominant— that is, whites made up 70 percent or more of the population of these neighborhoods. The northeast section of Queens had the largest white con­ centration, with every neighborhood in this quadrant classified as white dominant. In contrast, the three minority neighborhoods in the borough— South Jamaica, Baisley Park, and St. Albans—were located in southeast Queens, which was also home to eight of thirteen integrated neighborhoods with a black presence. The racial/ethnic composition of minority and integrated neighborhoods in this section of Queens primarily involved nativeborn blacks and whites—immigrants overall accounted for just over onetenth of the population. The section with the highest proportion of immigrants was northwest Queens, where immigrants composed 29 percent of the population. Immigrants were primarily European, with strong Latin American and Asian components. This partly explains why the borough’s six integrated neighborhoods without a black presence were all located in northwest Queens, primarily along the number 7 line. But this quadrant was also home to four integrated neighborhoods that included blacks—on its western and eastern ends—and to seven white dominant neighborhoods, on its southern and northern fringes. The post-1965 growth in Queens of immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean was accompanied by a precipitous decline in whites—native-born whites, as well as longer-resident foreign-born whites— who saw their share drop from 80 percent in 1970 to 27 percent in 2014.

Queens Neighborhoods / 41

Northeast LaGuardia Airport

Northwest

Neighborhood type White dominant

(34 neighborhoods)

Integrated, including blacks (13) Integrated, without blacks

(6)

Minority

(3)

Southwest

John F. Kennedy International Airport

Distribution of the foreign born by neighborhood type

Foreign born

Europe Asia Africa Latin America Caribbean, non-Hispanic All others

White dominant

58.9

67.1 62.8 56.3 34.3 9.8 60.8

Integrated, including blacks

16.3

13.3 7.3 11.0 23.2 58.4 15.0

Integrated, without blacks

23.2

Southeast

Minority

1.6

19.1 29.6 32.4 41.7 5.5

0.5 0.2 0.3 0.8 26.3

22.0

2.1

Figure 1.2  Racial/ethnic patterns of coresidence in Queens by neighborhood, 1970. (Source: Data from 1970 census, available at https://data.census.gov/cedsci.)

Indeed by 2014, Hispanics (28 percent) had eclipsed whites as the largest group in Queens, and the share of Asians and blacks stood at 24 percent and 18 percent, respectively. This extraordinary change was reflected in the fade-out of white dominant neighborhoods from the borough’s demographic landscape—in just over four decades they declined from thirty-four to zero—with most turning into racially integrated communities. While whites still constituted a majority in some neighborhoods—even an overwhelming majority—these neighborhoods were also home to at least one additional race/Hispanic group with a substantial presence. Indeed, thirtytwo integrated neighborhoods—or 60 percent of all neighborhoods—were home to whites and Asians or Hispanics, or both. These thirty-two ­integrated neighborhoods were as pervasive as white dominant ­neighborhoods in 1970

42  /  Joseph J. Salvo and Arun Peter Lobo

Northeast LaGuardia Airport

Northwest

Neighborhood type White dominant

(0 neighborhoods)

Integrated, including blacks (7) Integrated, without blacks

(32)

Minority

(17)

Southwest

John F. Kennedy International Airport

Distribution of the foreign born by neighborhood type

Foreign born

Europe Asia Africa Latin America Caribbean, non-Hispanic All others

Integrated, including blacks

White dominant

8.8

Integrated, without blacks

54.4

Southeast

Minority

36.8

– – – –

8.3 8.4 15.0 8.7

85.8 64.9 40.6 52.1

5.9 26.7 44.3 39.2

–

9.6

16.4

74.0

–

8.4

72.0

19.6

Figure 1.3  Racial/ethnic patterns of coresidence in Queens by neighborhood, 2014. (Source: Data from 2010–2014 American Community Survey, available at https:// data.census.gov/cedsci.)

but did not have a black presence, indicating a shift in what might be considered the mainstream neighborhood—from white and middle class to integrated and middle class but without blacks. In 2014, these integrated neighborhoods without blacks were home to a majority (54 percent) of immigrants—including nearly two-thirds of Asian immigrants and 52 percent of Latino immigrants. This is also indicative of the social mobility of new entrants from Asia and Latin America, many of whom have the resources to buy their way into home-owning neighborhoods. As Queens became increasingly diverse, however, blacks were unable to access housing in these thirty-two integrated areas; in only seven integrated neighborhoods did blacks coreside with whites and Asians or Hispanics, or

Queens Neighborhoods / 43

both. Blacks primarily lived in seventeen minority neighborhoods that were disproportionately black. Immigrants from the Caribbean, for example, lived overwhelmingly (74 percent)8 in minority areas, unlike Asian and Latino immigrant groups, most of whom lived in diverse neighborhoods. These settlement patterns are emblematic of an emerging black-nonblack divide that reflects the incorporation of select Asians and Hispanics into the larger white community to the exclusion of blacks (Flores and Lobo 2013).

From European Strongholds to Global Microcosms The status of New York City as one of the most diverse places on the planet is cemented into the consciousness of the nation. Metaphors abound about the patchwork quilt, the magnificent mosaic, and the gorgeous mosaic. What is remarkable is that these phrases were used in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when New York was still a majority European city and had not yet experienced the full force of the 1965 Immigration Amendments. Since then, Queens has led the way into the age of hyperdiversity, and it now ranks as the most diverse borough in one of the world’s most diverse cities. The demographic transformation of Queens points to the borough’s astounding capacity to embrace change. This transformation is visible across the borough’s neighborhoods as departing groups are succeeded by new entrants. In recent decades, the pace of change has increased and now involves more groups, resulting in an unprecedented mix of ethnicities. This is particularly evident in northwest Queens, the quintessence of diversity within the borough. While this section of Queens remains a gateway for immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Europe, new sources of immigration have emerged. Among Asians, the traditional Chinese presence is now coupled with myriad new groups from places like Bangladesh and Nepal. Among Latin Americans, the Cuban and Colombian presence has been eclipsed by the entry of Ecuadorians and Mexicans along with a considerable flow from Peru. Among Europeans, Russians are again leaving their mark, as are Uzbeks from Central Asia. What is remarkable is that these ongoing demographic changes are occurring smoothly, even when they involve racial transitions. There are three salient examples of these changes. The first is the Chinese and Korean sweep across northeast Queens, filling in the vacuum created by the decline in the native-born white population. The second involves changes occurring in southeast Queens: Neighborhoods that were once dominated by Afro-­ Caribbean immigrants are now beginning to show signs of racial/ethnic transition with the influx of South Asians and Latin Americans. Finally, while Latin Americans are concentrated in northwest Queens, they are now the most dispersed, with a considerable presence across most ­neighborhoods.

44  /  Joseph J. Salvo and Arun Peter Lobo

It is a testament to the level of tolerance in Queens that it has largely escaped the neighborhood turmoil that accompanied demographic change in other boroughs in the 1960s and 1970s. While Queens is ethnically diverse, its neighborhood diversity exists alongside a high level of black residential segregation. The decline in whites in neighborhoods across Queens, coupled with the entry of Asians and Latin Americans, has resulted in integrated neighborhoods that often do not have a black presence. Integrated neighborhoods that were home to whites and Asians or Hispanics, or both, but not blacks, accounted for nearly 60 percent of all neighborhoods. These integrated neighborhoods without a black presence were the overwhelming majority of neighborhoods in northwest, northeast, and southwest Queens. Most black residents of Queens, including immigrants, still live in neighborhoods that are largely black, and they are concentrated in the southeastern section of the borough. While some of these enclaves have become national models of middle-class, homeowning black settlement, the fact remains that they are still largely separate. But there are signs that this, too, is beginning to change. There has been an influx of immigrants from Bangladesh, Guyana, India, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and a host of other nations who have settled on the periphery of black neighborhoods. These immigrants are coresiding with black residents in neighborhoods such as Jamaica, increasing the level of racial and ethnic heterogeneity. And this is, perhaps, the next phase of that grand experiment that is Queens, one that may allow every neighborhood to truly own up to the borough’s reputation as the most diverse place on the planet. Notes Acknowledgments: We thank Donnise Hurley for her research assistance, table compilation, and map making. She also edited the document, along with Joel Alvarez. The views expressed in this chapter are ours and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of City Planning, where we are employed, or the city of New York. 1.  Though referred to as 2014 data throughout this chapter, these data are for the entire 2010–2014 period. 2.  The non-Hispanic Caribbean comprises primarily countries in the Caribbean Basin that are not Spanish speaking. It includes large source countries of the city’s foreign born, such as Jamaica, Guyana, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, and Barbados. It also includes smaller source countries, such as Anguilla, Antigua-Barbuda, Aruba, Bahamas, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Dominica, French Guiana, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Montserrat, Netherlands Antilles, St. Kitts–Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and Grenadines, Suriname, Turks and Caicos Islands, and the Central American nation of Belize. 3.  Given the relatively small sample size in the American Community Survey, five years of data had to be aggregated for reliable estimates at the neighborhood level. Neighborhood boundaries used in this chapter are identical to the Neighborhood Tabu-

Queens Neighborhoods / 45

lation Areas (NTAs) created by the New York City Department of City Planning. These are aggregations of census tracts and are subsets of New York City’s fifty-five Public Use Microdata Areas. Primarily because of these constraints, NTA boundaries and their associated names may not definitively represent neighborhoods. There are also significant gaps in American Community Survey data specific to particular neighborhoods within New York. The 2010 census undercounted the population in northwest Queens because of erroneously deleted housing units and housing units mislabeled as vacant. Because post-2010 American Community Survey data are essentially controlled to 2010 census counts, readers should exercise caution when examining that survey’s data for this quadrant of Queens. 4.  Census tract data on immigrants from the non-Hispanic Caribbean are not available for the Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean components of this population. As a proxy for the Afro-Caribbean component, we use the foreign-born non-Hispanic black population. To obtain this, we examined the 2006–2010 American Community Survey at the census tract level and computed the ratio of the foreign-born black population to the foreign-born non-Hispanic black population. This was then applied to the 2010– 2014 American Community Survey tract count of foreign-born blacks (the number of ­foreign-born black divided by foreign-born non-Hispanic black and the result multiplied by foreign-born black). The resulting foreign-born non-Hispanic black population was then subtracted from the original foreign-born non-Hispanic Caribbean population to get the Indo-Caribbean and other component. In 2014, an estimated 137,000 AfroCaribbean immigrants and 57,000 Indo-Caribbean immigrants lived in Queens. Over 38,000 Indo-Caribbean immigrants made their home in southwest Queens. 5.  In 2014 an estimated 137,000 Afro-Caribbean immigrants lived in Queens. Three-quarters (103,000) lived in the southeast section of the borough. 6.  The 2000 census was the first in which respondents were allowed to check off more than one race group, and these respondents were tabulated as having “two or more races.” To compare the 2014 data with earlier censuses, the 122,482 non-Hispanics who checked off more than one race were proportionately reclassified into each of the race groups that made up their racial identity on the basis of the 2010 distribution, since this detail was unavailable in 2014. Note that an immigrant’s area of origin does not perfectly correlate with these race/ Hispanic designations. This is particularly true for immigrants from the non-Hispanic Caribbean, who tend to be primarily of African or Asian descent. 7.  The neighborhood classification scheme is determined by the share of whites because integration and segregation are usually viewed through the prism of white settlement. Defining a neighborhood as being integrated or segregated is tricky because it depends on establishing a threshold to recognize the presence or absence of whites and other groups in a neighborhood. Moreover, since this analysis covers a four-decade period, it is important to maintain the same thresholds over time while taking into account the changing proportions of race/Hispanic groups. In this analysis a group had to reach a 10 percent threshold to be considered as having a notable presence in a neighborhood. 8.  This, however, masked differences in the shares of Afro-Caribbean and IndoCaribbean immigrants living in minority neighborhoods. Of the estimated 138,000 Afro-Caribbean immigrants in Queens, 110,000, or 80 percent, lived in minority neighborhoods; 13,000 in integrated neighborhoods with blacks; and 15,000 in integrated neighborhoods without blacks. Among the estimated 53,000 Indo-Caribbean ­immigrants, the corresponding figures were 31,000, or 60 percent, in minority neighbor-

46  /  Joseph J. Salvo and Arun Peter Lobo

hoods; 4,000 in integrated neighborhoods with blacks; and 18,000 in integrated neighborhoods without blacks. References Flores, R. O., and A. P. Lobo. 2013. “The Reassertion of a Black/Non-black Color Line: The Rise in Integrated Neighborhoods without Blacks in New York City, 1970–2010.” Journal of Urban Affairs 35 (3): 255–282. Gregory, S. 1999. Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History: Black Corona; Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jackson, K. T., L. Keller, and N. Flood. 2010. The Encyclopedia of New York City. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Park, R., E. W. Burgess, and R. D. McKenzie. 1925. The City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shreeve, J. 2009. “From Africa to Astoria by Way of Everywhere.” National Geographic 216 (3): 24. Tonnelat, S., and W. Kornblum. 2017. International Express: New Yorkers on the 7 Train. New York: Columbia University Press.

2 The Queens Economy Where Global Meets Local David Dyssegaard Kallick

I

n Queens, the local economy is stunningly international. Walk the streets of Flushing, Jackson Heights, or Corona Park today, and it is hard to avoid the overwhelming sense that Queens must be one of the most vibrant, globally connected, and crowded places in the world. The first stop in Queens on the number 7 subway line is affectionately dubbed an underground United Nations (Onishi 1997). Each subsequent stop takes you to a small diaspora from a different part of the world: Greece, Colombia, India, and China, to name just a few. The borough did not always look this way. In the first decades after World War II, there were far fewer immigrants in New York City, and Queens had a below-average share. In 1950 the immigrant proportion of the Queens population was 5 percentage points below the New York City average. In 1960 it was about the same. Today, Queens has the highest concentration of immigrants of any borough, with an immigrant share that is 12 percentage points above the citywide average.1 Not unrelated, in the course of three and a half decades, from 1980 to today (2013), Queens was transformed from a place where twothirds of the population were white to one now where two-thirds are people of color and where the immigrant share of the population increased from 29 percent to 48 percent (Figure 2.1). What does the extraordinary concentration of such a diverse range of immigrants do for the economy of Queens?

48  /  David Dyssegaard Kallick

U.S. born

Foreign born

1,000,000

1,000,000

900,000

900,000

800,000

800,000

700,000

700,000

600,000

600,000

500,000

500,000

400,000

400,000

300,000

300,000

200,000

200,000

100,000

100,000

-

White

Black Hispanic Asian 1980

2013

-

White

Black Hispanic Asian 1980

2013

Figure 2.1  Changing racial composition of Queens. (Source: Author’s analysis of 2000 census and 2011–2013 American Community Survey data, available at https://​ data​.census​.gov/​cedsci.)  ote: White is non-Hispanic white, black is non-Hispanic black, and Asian is N non-Hispanic Asian.

In recent decades, immigrants stemmed and then powerfully reversed the population decline of the 1970s, in Queens as in the rest of New York City. Immigrants also played an important role in reshaping and reinvigorating the borough’s economy. Most of the change is due to immigrants choosing to move to Queens to begin with: economic rebound parallels the population rebound. But there are also some ways that the economic changes have to do with the specific characteristics and status of immigrants, from their higher levels of entrepreneurship to many being vulnerable to exploitation by employers.

The Queens Economy  /  49

In addition, immigrants came into Queens in large numbers at a time when the American economy was undergoing a tremendous amount of income polarization, and they came into an economy that was already sharply divided by race. Immigrants did not cause these problems and did not solve them; they were simply part of them. Fitting in meant becoming divided in much the same ways as the people who were already here.

Immigrants Drive Population Rebound The 1970s was a pivotal decade for the Queens economy, as it was for New York City overall. Citywide, the population of eight million declined by a million people in the course of that decade. In Queens, the borough population of two million declined by a hundred thousand. These huge population declines, only moderately less dramatic in Queens, were fueled by ongoing suburbanization and accelerating white flight. That resulted in neighborhoods that were pockmarked with abandoned buildings and a concomitant decline in business for local shop owners. Shrinking economic activity meant a downward spiral of smaller city tax revenues and limited public services. Crime went up amid a toxic mixture of neighborhood disinvestment, high unemployment, and reduced staffing for social service agencies, police, libraries, parks, and more. The city ran into a fiscal crisis and neared bankruptcy.2 Population decline poses a series of fiscal and economic problems for any jurisdiction. When an area that was built to accommodate two million people winds up serving a hundred thousand less than that, as was the case for Queens, schools, sewers, subway lines, housing, and office and industrial buildings are being used far less efficiently than they could be. If the population grows back, as happened in New York City and in Queens in subsequent decades, residents can be accommodated and receive public services at a far lower per capita cost to both government and the private sector: after all, there is underused capacity. Around the country, immigrants played an important part in helping or even driving the rebound of population in cities that experienced popu­ lation loss in the 1970s. But while the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was game changing for places like New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, Saint Paul, and the District of Columbia, among others, this ­immigration-fueled population rebound was far from inevitable. It did not happen in Saint Louis, Cleveland, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and two dozen other big cities that saw population decline over this period and have still not seen a rebound.3 And while not every city saw a population rebound because of immigration, no big city experienced a population rebound without immigrants playing a major role (Kallick 2015a).

50  /  David Dyssegaard Kallick

2.5

Millions

2.0 1.5 1.0 0.5 0.0

1950

1960

1970 U.S. born

1980

1990

2000

2013

Foreign born

Figure 2.2  Immigrant population growth in Queens since 1980. (Source: Author’s analysis of 2013 American Community Survey data, available at https://​w ww​.census​ .gov/​programs​-surveys/​acs/​data/​summary​-file​.2013​.html, and Chapter 1 data.)

In Queens, the immigrant role in population rebound was particularly striking. The U.S.-born population today is lower than it was in 1980, even though the total population is considerably higher. In Queens, as in New York City, effectively all the very considerable population rebound and growth was driven by immigrants.4 (See Figure 2.2.)

Main Street Businesses and Neighborhood Revitalization While in many respects immigrants are like everyone else, immigrants are different from their U.S.-born neighbors in some ways. For one thing, immigrants have a tendency to be entrepreneurial in ways that can play an important role in neighborhood growth. Overall, immigrants are 10 to 15 percent more likely to own a business than their U.S.born counterparts, a difference that is noteworthy, though not as extreme as is sometimes claimed (Kallick 2015b). Even more striking is the role immigrants play among Main Street businesses—restaurants, grocery stores, beauty salons, clothing shops, and other types of stores commonly found in commercial corridors. Nationally, immigrants make up 16 percent of the labor force, 18 percent of business owners, and 28 percent of Main Street business owners.5 In Queens, immigrants make up 58 percent of the labor force, 68 percent of business owners, and fully 76 percent of Main Street business owners. The economic development role of Main Street businesses is not limited to their revenue streams or employment numbers. Often, the biggest economic impact is on the neighborhood, in the form of what economists call

The Queens Economy  /  51

positive externalities. This role is particularly stark in areas that had seen neighborhood decline. The story goes like this: A restaurant opens in an area that had previously seen boarded-up storefronts. A retail shop opens nearby and then a grocery store. Before long, the neighborhood begins to feel like an attractive place to live and work, and infrastructure that had been lying fallow is put to productive use. Though the biggest impact of Main Street businesses may be on neighborhood revitalization, the jobs directly provided by Main Street businesses are significant as well, in ways both good and bad. Even relatively small restaurant and retail shops, for instance, often have dozens of employees. At their best, these may be entry-level jobs that might allow workers a first opportunity to work. Too often, though, the jobs are dead-end positions with tough hours and low wages. Immigrant-owned businesses, in particular, have a tendency to rely on unpaid family members to pitch in to help keep a business running. The double-edged sword of this type of economic development in Queens has been a tremendous gain to neighborhood revitalization but with job quality and economic opportunity for residents absorbing a very real blow. Because jobs at Main Street businesses are very rarely unionized, enforcement of labor law is often lax, and immigrant employers can be all too adept at exploiting immigrant employees. Queens neighborhoods often wind up with a rich array of shopping, dining, and service opportunities that rely on workers who are poorly treated and paid substandard wages. In some instances, the same people who suffer from low wages are gaining from inexpensive goods and services. More often it is a different class of shoppers and diners who benefit, swelling the city’s relentless tide of gentrification. For the business owners, entrepreneurship can have both positive and negative aspects. On the positive side, immigrants have demonstrated a certain entrepreneurial spirit simply by virtue of having picked up and moved to another country. Being able to express that spirit and leverage it into business success is undoubtedly gratifying to the immigrant entrepreneurs and brings real value to the neighborhood. On the other side, plenty of immigrants turn to entrepreneurship out of frustration with not being able to get a regular job. Korean greengrocers and food cart operators may have been engineers or professors before coming to the United States to give their children a chance at a better life. Every New Yorker seems to have had the experience of having taken a taxi with a driver-owner who turns out to be a trained accountant or an expert in physics. Whether because of language barriers, lack of credentials recognized in the United States, or discrimination in the labor market, significant numbers of immigrants become business owners more by necessity than by choice.

52  /  David Dyssegaard Kallick

40,000 30,000 25,100

20,000 9,800 10,000 -

11,700

11,600

1980

2013 U.S. born

Foreign born

Figure 2.3  Growth in number of business owners since 1980. (Source: Author’s analysis of 1980 census and 2013 American Community Survey data, available at https://​data​.census​.gov/​cedsci.)

In Queens, immigrant-owned businesses squeeze into the nooks and crannies of virtually every commercial strip, bringing a vibrancy, also sometimes a sense of free-for-all, to the streets of Queens. As shown in Figure 2.3, the number of businesses with U.S.-born owners is about the same as it was in 1980, but the number of immigrant-owned businesses has expanded dramatically. Chinese, Korean, Indian, Ecuadorian, and Colombian immigrants make up the five biggest groups of business owners, but there are also substantial numbers of Guyanese, Dominican, Greek, Bangladeshi, Russian, and Jamaican immigrant business owners in Queens. Greek, Korean, and Indian immigrants stand out as having a propensity for business ownership, with very high shares of people in the labor force owning their own businesses (see Table 2.1). Chinese immigrants are especially likely to own restaurants—perhaps no surprise there—but also businesses in construction, taxi, real estate, and retail clothing sales. Korean immigrants are also likely to own construction businesses, retail shops, and restaurants. Top businesses for immigrants from India also include construction, childcare, truck transport, and taxi services. And Greek immigrants specialize in dry cleaning, nail salons, specialty foods, and groceries. It is not impossible to imagine this kind of economic growth being good for workers as well as businesses and residents, but that has not been the case in the last few decades, either in Queens or in other parts of the country. Instead, Queens has become an extraordinarily vibrant place to live, shop, dine, or start a business, but it has also become a far more difficult place to earn a decent living.

The Queens Economy  /  53

Table 2.1 Immigrant business owners by place of birth Number of business owners

Number in civilian labor force

Propensity to business ownership (%)

China

3,124

70,015

4

Korea

2,833

29,108

10

Place of birth

India

1,954

29,586

7

Ecuador

1,408

53,123

3

Colombia

1,131

34,975

3

Guyana/British Guiana

956

54,001

2

Dominican Republic

835

34,615

2

Greece

818

7,226

11

Bangladesh

696

23,744

3

Russia/former Soviet Union

657

8,830

7

Jamaica

629

32,966

2

Poland

616

14,065

4

Trinidad and Tobago

588

20,244

3

Peru

492

13,514

4

Mexico

486

41,307

1

Italy

439

6,133

7

Taiwan

415

9,998

4

7,068

210,500

3

25,144

693,952

4

All others Total

Source: Author’s analysis of 2013 American Community Survey data from IPUMS, available at https://​usa ​.ipums​.org/​usa. Note: Business owners are those who own an incorporated business and whose main job is to run that business.

Structural Changes: Decline in Manufacturing and Administrative Support The growth in jobs in immigrant-owned Main Street businesses is just a small part of the overall picture of job change in Queens over the last several decades. For the most part, the economic changes are not directly related to immigration but do structure the job opportunities for U.S.-born and immigrant workers alike. Most striking is the dramatic decline in the importance of manufacturing. Only a third as many people living in Queens work in manufacturing today as did in 1980—a drop from 150,000 to 50,000—despite significant

54  /  David Dyssegaard Kallick

Manufacturing

Total

160,000

1,200,000

140,000

1,000,000

120,000 800,000

100,000 80,000

600,000

60,000

400,000

40,000 200,000

20,000 -

1980 U.S. born

2013 Foreign born

-

1980 U.S. born

2013 Foreign born

Figure 2.4  Change in job composition since 1980. (Source: Author’s analysis of 1980 census and 2011–2013 American Community Survey data, available at https://​ data​.census​.gov/​cedsci.)

population growth and 240,000 more jobs held by Queens residents today than three and a half decades ago. To be sure, the United States everywhere is going through a period of deindustrialization and a shift away from manufacturing. But the trend was far more extreme in Queens. In the United States as a whole, manufacturing employment dropped over the same period to about two-thirds (64 percent) of its 1980 level, as shown in Figure 2.4.6 If the decline in Queens had matched the U.S. trend, there would be 50,000 more people with manufacturing jobs in Queens today. Because manufacturing jobs were and are frequently unionized, they generally have been reasonably well-paying jobs for people without much formal education and for people who might not speak English very well— like many immigrants but also many Puerto Rican migrants. In 1980, 18 percent of all jobs held by Queens residents were in the manufacturing sector. Fifteen percent of all the jobs held by U.S.-born whites, 12 percent held by U.S.-born blacks, and 22 percent held by U.S.-born Hispanics were in manufacturing. Among immigrants, the shares were even higher. Today, just 5 percent of jobs in Queens are in manufacturing, without a great deal of difference among race and nativity groups: 7 percent of Hispanic immigrants work in manufacturing, the highest concentration, as do 3 percent of both U.S.-born whites and U.S.-born blacks, who have the lowest concentration. While manufacturing jobs are generally well paid and held by men, this is not uniformly the case. In particular, garment industry jobs, which also

The Queens Economy  /  55

saw a big decline over this period, are generally held by women and are today among the lowest-paid jobs in the city. Nearly as dramatic as the decline in manufacturing is a drop in administrative support jobs, which were predominantly held by women: there are 70,000 fewer jobs in administrative support in 2013 than there were in 1980. (See Table 2.2; note that this refers to occupations, not to industries.) Over this period, some back-office functions that were handled in Queens moved to other areas of the country or overseas, and in today’s businesses nearly every employee does his or her own typing and filing, so there are far fewer office clerks and typists working in any office. In 1980, there were nearly a thousand stenographers working in Queens, a number that outside of courtrooms is very near zero today. As the number of jobs expanded, a kind of shifting and sorting took place. The structure of the economy changed, with the number of immigrant workers increasing (by 363,000) and the number of U.S.-born workers decreasing (by 126,000). In occupations related to manufacturing—machine operators, precision production, and fabricators—the number of jobs for both immigrants and U.S.-born workers declined significantly. (The one exception is among mechanics and repairers, where the overall number of jobs declined but the immigrants working in those jobs increased.) But the trends diverged in other areas. There were big declines in U.S.born residents employed in the generally well-paid construction trades and declines among the far less well paid jobs of construction laborers, drivers, and sales clerks. Intriguingly, significantly fewer U.S.-born people today hold executive and managerial jobs than in 1980. By far the biggest job gain for U.S.-born workers is in an occupational category that includes teachers, professors, librarians, social scientists, social workers, and artists—nearly half the job gains in this category went to U.S.born workers. There were also big gains in U.S.-born workers in the professional specialties (doctors, lawyers, engineers) and in people working in FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) industries and as sales supervisors. The immigrant labor force grew so fast that there were gains in all major occupational categories except the production-related categories. Among the biggest increases are immigrants holding jobs with low and sometimes very low wages: jobs in private households (primarily as housekeepers) or personal services (for example, in hair salons, which saw an increase of 43,000 over 1980); jobs in food preparation, such as in restaurants (38,000); jobs in dental, health, and nursing (36,000); jobs as drivers (33,000); and jobs in sales (27,000). Intriguingly, the only two clearly well-paid occupations with a substantial decrease in U.S.-born workers and an increase in immigrants are in the

Table 2.2 Change in labor force from 1980 to 2013 by occupation Occupation Administrative support, including clerical

Queens labor force

U.S. born

Foreign born

−73,193

−95,198

22,004

Machine operators

−32,533

−17,315

−15,218

Precision production

−13,206

−11,496

−1,711

Fabricators

−5,762

−4,558

−1,204

Mechanics and repairers

−1,160

−7,705

6,545

Farming, forestry, and agricultural, including gardeners

2,486

−62

2,548

Firefighters, police, and supervisors of protective services

6,320

3,111

3,209

Technicians, including health, engineering, and science

9,405

373

9,033

14,455

2,028

12,426

Health assessment, treatment, and technicians Laborers and other material handlers

14,841

−7,585

22,426

Construction trades

16,098

−1,859

17,958

Professional specialty, including doctors, lawyers, and engineers

16,102

4,430

11,672

Sales, clerks and cashiers

19,310

−7,583

26,893

Sales supervisors and real estate, financial, and insurance sales

20,830

4,686

16,143

Guards, cleaning, and building services

21,110

269

20,842

Drivers, including heavy equipment operators

24,620

−8,168

32,788

Executive, administrative, managerial, and management related

29,116

−7,304

36,420

Dental assistants, health aides, and nursing aides

32,270

1,633

30,636

Food preparation services

40,467

2,026

38,441

Private household and personal service

47,270

4,678

42,591

Teachers, professors, librarians, social ­scientists, social workers, and artists

48,532

20,051

28,481

237,376

−125,549

362,925

Total

Source: Author’s analysis of 1980 census and 2013 American Community Survey data from IPUMS, available at https://​usa​.ipums​.org/​usa. Note: Italics denote divergent trends for immigrants and U.S. born.

The Queens Economy  /  57

1980

2013

39%

28%

28% 24%

23%

24% 19%

14%

Managerial and professional specialty

Technical, sales, and administrative support

Service

Blue collar

Figure 2.5  Shifts in occupation from 1980 to 2013. (Source: Author’s analysis of 2000 census and 2011–2013 American Community Survey data, available at https://​ data​.census​.gov/​cedsci.)

construction trades (−1,900 U.S. born, +18,000 foreign born) and among executive and managerial jobs (−7,000 U.S. born, +36,000 foreign born). Looking at the broad occupational categories these detailed categories fit into, we see overall growth in the share of jobs in services and managerial and professional specialties; a decline in technical, sales, and administrative support; and a more modest decline in blue-collar occupations (see Figure 2.5).7

Income Polarization and Wage Trends The period from 1980 to today has seen an extreme and at this point welldocumented degree of wage polarization, but the picture in Queens is considerably different from New York City overall. Today, in Manhattan, the top 1 percent of tax filers had on average $8.1 million in income in 2013, while the average for the remaining 99 percent was $70,000 a ratio of 116 to 1, the fourth-most-polarized county in the country. In Queens, however, the top 1 percent had on average $470,000 in income and the bottom 99 percent $38,000, a ratio of 12 to 1. That puts Queens in the middle range of all counties in the country in terms of income polarization: Queens ranks 1,784th out of 3,064 counties (Sommeiller, Price, and Wazeter 2016). However, polarization even in the middle range of this country’s experience with income polarization is quite extreme. The lion’s share of wage growth in Queens has gone to those in the top echelons of the economy, and even more has gone to those sitting at the top of the New York City economy in Manhattan, with just scraps from the feast going to those in Queens in the bottom tiers. Polarization explains why each of the charts in Figure 2.6

58  /  David Dyssegaard Kallick Men U.S. born

Women 46%

Foreign born

9%

8%

91%

Foreign born 73%

24%

24% 14%

U.S. born

47%

8% 37%

0%

–3% –14%

–21%

20th

13% 4%

40th Median

60th

80th

95th

20th

40th Median

Percentile

57% 51%

Foreign born 41% 30%

26% 20% 13%

12%

U.S. born

40th Median

60th

28% 18%

8% 7%

80th

95th

–4%

6% 8%

22%

9%

0%

20th

40th Median

Percentile

60th

80th

95th

Percentile

Hispanic Men U.S. born

95th

36%37%

Foreign born

28%

5%

20th

80th

Black Men

19%

18%

60th

Percentile

White Men U.S. born

31%

24%

20%

–10%

71%

55%

54%

Asian Men U.S. born

Foreign born

Foreign born 87%

47% 33% 12%

20%

18%

18%

20th

13%

1%

5%

60th

80th

0%

–2% –18%

28%

21%

10%

–18%

–14%

40th Median

–10%

60th

Percentile

–10% –16%

80th

95th

20th

–4%

14%

–4%

40th Median

95th

Percentile

Figure 2.6  Change in earnings for men and women by percentile, 1980–2013. (Source: Author’s analysis of 1980 census and 2011–2013 American Community Survey data, available at https://​data​.census​.gov/​cedsci.)

slants strongly upward as it gets to the higher end of the wage distribution. If a rising tide really did lift all boats, the charts would be flat, showing the same rate of growth for workers at the 20th, 40th, median, 60th, 80th, and 95th percentile, which would indicate, not equality, but an equal preservation of the existing inequalities of the 1980 wage distribution. Instead, Figure 2.6 shows a much larger share of growth in every group going to the 95th percentile worker—that is, the worker who earns more than 95 percent of what his or her peers do. A question that frequently arises is whether immigrants are bringing down wages for other workers. Economic research has shown a surprising amount of consistency on the question, considering the political tenacity of

The Queens Economy  /  59

the question. Studies repeatedly show that immigration pushes wages for U.S.-born workers overall up by a small amount from what they would have been otherwise. This is true for men and women overall and for African Americans and whites overall. Yet this body of research has found that two groups see declines in wages due to immigration.8 Most significant is other recently arrived immigrants. This is a group that does not get much attention, since immigrants are generally politically supportive of other immigrants, or at least whatever complaints they have are not generally directed at U.S. politicians. Yet other immigrants are the group that bears nearly all the brunt of wage competition from new immigrants. It is not hard to see why: a key question in looking at the impact of immigrants on wages is how similar to the existing workers the new arrivals are. In the terminology of economics, how much are new arrivals complements to the existing labor force, filling in positions different from those of current workers, and how much are they potential substitutes for the existing labor force or able to do the same type of work? U.S.-born and foreign-born workers often complement each other. U.S.born workers find that their greater English-language skills, social networks, and longevity in the U.S. labor market make them more readily able to take supervisory jobs, customer-facing jobs, and jobs requiring local social or business networks or familiarity with local customs. New immigrants, in contrast, are fairly readily substitutable for other recently arrived immigrants. They may have about the same set of skills and face the same barriers and thus find themselves in very much the same corner of the labor market. National research also finds small to moderate losses reported for men who did not graduate from high school. These men, especially African American men, face a wide array of challenges in the labor market. Inequities in school funding, aggressive criminalization and incarceration, and racial discrimination in the labor market are particularly severe for African American men, and all men have been challenged by the decline in unionized manufacturing jobs and the opioid epidemic of the 2010s. While immigration is by comparison a minor issue for U.S.-born men who did not finish high school, and the number of U.S.-born men without a high school degree is shrinking, the challenges facing these men are very real. In Queens, from 1980 to today we see what looks like general confirmations of those trends. Figure 2.6 shows wage growth for U.S.-born and ­foreign-born women at all earning levels, though the growth is strongest at the top of the ladder. Note that women start from a much lower base than men; even after this faster growth women still make less than men. Among men, the bars are steeply unequal, but they are in all cases positive except in the case of men at the 20th percentile, with black men standing out as

60  /  David Dyssegaard Kallick

­ aving a 4 percent decline. Asian men stand out even more, perhaps not h surprising in Queens given the very steep rise in immigration from Asia, since workers tend to be in most competition with those who are their nearest substitutes, and low-wage Asian foreign-born workers might well be in closest competition with low-wage U.S.-born Asian workers. And while wage losses are on the order of 0 to 10 percent for U.S.-born men of color at the lowest level of earnings, considerably larger losses occur for foreign-born Asian men at the lowest earnings tier and for foreign-born Hispanic men not only at the lowest tier but also up through the middle ranges of earnings. These losses should be understood as a decline in the wages paid in lower- and middle-level jobs, not necessarily a decline in the wages of particular individuals, since in many cases it is newcomers who come in at a lower wage level. Many factors affect wage trends in Queens. The preceding figures are by no means proof of the effect of immigrants on wages of other workers. But they are notably consistent with research that does look at this question and finds overall gains for U.S.-born workers but losses for men at the lowest earnings tier. As a matter of policy, this is not conceptually a hard circle to square. Federal and state governments could invest heavily in labor law enforcement that would prevent abuses that erode standards in the low-wage labor market. Immigrants are far from the only ones being taken advantage of, so are people who have been incarcerated, people who have been aggressively pushed out of welfare programs, people who face racial discrimination, and young people, to name a few (see Bernhardt et al. 2009; Bernhardt, Polson, and DeFilippis 2010). And the country could easily take advantage of the benefits of immigration while also investing in reducing inequities for African American men, a straightforward win-win. As a matter of politics, however, none of this is quite so simple.

Queens Economy Today: Race and Gender Matter— Maybe More than Nativity? Frequent comparisons have been made between the wages of immigrants and the wages of U.S.-born workers. Yet Figure 2.7 shows that, in Queens, race and gender are at least as important as nativity in explaining a wage gap, a finding that echoes studies of the country as a whole. U.S.-born white men earn more than any other group when disaggregating by race, gender, and nativity. Taking the wages of white U.S.-born men as a benchmark, all other groups earn between 43 and 87 percent of that benchmark: U.S.-born white women earn the highest, and foreign-born

The Queens Economy  /  61

White U.S.b orn men 100

100% 87%

86%

83%

79%

73% 71%

70% 70% 68% 65%

65%

63% 62% 46% 43%

White

Black

Hispanic

Asian

White

U.S. born

Black Hispanic

43% Foreignborn Hispanic women Asian

Foreign born Men

Women

Figure 2.7  Wage gap by race and gender. (Source: Author’s analysis of 2011–2013 American Community Survey data, available at https://​w ww​.census​.gov/​programs​ -surveys/​acs/​data/​summary​-file​.2013​.html.)

Hispanic women earn the lowest. U.S.-born blacks, U.S.-born Hispanics, and foreign-born blacks—whether men or women—all earn between 66 and 71 percent of the benchmark. Foreign-born Hispanics earn by far the least of any group, with men and women at similarly low levels, 46 and 43 percent, respectively, of the benchmark. By contrast, U.S.-born Asians do relatively well compared with all groups except U.S.-born men, with U.S.-born Asian men and women at 86 and 79 percent, respectively, of the benchmark. While education is an important factor in wages, national studies have found that significant wage gaps persist even after taking level of educational attainment into consideration (see, e.g., Patten 2016; Kallick and Mathema 2016). Occupations matter as well. Here, too, there seems to be as much variation in the occupational distribution by race as there is by nativity. For this analysis, the additional category of gender is dropped to keep the sample sizes big enough. Whites are more concentrated in generally high-wage managerial and professional jobs, whether U.S. born (44 percent of whites work in these occupations) or foreign born (33 percent of whites are in the occupations). By contrast, just 26 percent of U.S.-born blacks work in managerial and professional jobs, 24 percent of U.S.-born Hispanics, 24 percent of foreign-born blacks, 11 percent of foreign-born Hispanics, and 28 percent of foreign-born Asians. The only nonwhite group with a comparable concentration in managerial and professional jobs is U.S.-born Asians (45 percent). (See Figure 2.8.)

62  /  David Dyssegaard Kallick

28%

Foreign b orn

Asian

Hispanic

19%

11%

24%

Black

37%

36%

Black

26%

34%

Managerial and professional

23%

20%

11%

22%

31%

14%

13%

41% Technical, sales, and admin support

8%

17%

26%

44%

17%

19%

36%

24%

10%

32%

24%

Hispanic

White

18%

32%

45%

Asian

Unauthorized immigrants

24%

24%

33%

White

U.S. born

30%

12%

30% Service

Blue collar

Figure 2.8  Job mix of foreign- and U.S.-born workers by race, 2013, and of unauthorized immigrants, 2014. (Source: Data from Center for Migration Studies 2014 estimates, available at http://​data​.cmsny​.org, and 2000 census and 2011–2013 American Community Survey, available at https://​data​.census​.gov/​cedsci.)

 ote: White is non-Hispanic white, black is non-Hispanic black, and Asian is N non-Hispanic Asian.

Among the 1 million immigrants living in Queens today are about 225,000 unauthorized immigrants, with 164,000 adults in the labor force.9 In Queens, even unauthorized immigration is strikingly diverse. The top countries of birth for unauthorized immigrants are Mexico (22 percent), China (15 percent), Ecuador (13 percent), South Korea, Dominican Republic, Colombia, Jamaica, India, and Poland (all 3 to 5 percent). Some unauthorized immigrants come illegally across the border, but many come on legitimate visas as tourists or students, for example, and become unauthorized when they overstay their visas. Although there is a ceiling on how far up a career ladder unauthorized immigrants can go, in Queens unauthorized immigrants work in a wide

The Queens Economy  /  63

range of low-wage jobs in restaurants, construction work, nail salons, and retail shops and are home health care workers, housekeepers, and caretakers for children. Most work in service jobs (41 percent) and blue-collar jobs (30 percent), with a smaller number in technical, sales, and administrative support (17 percent). A small share of unauthorized immigrants (10 percent) work in managerial and professional jobs.

Queens Transformed Population growth has been a central factor in the revitalization of the Queens economy in recent decades, and immigration has been the central factor in Queens population rebound. Together with this revitalization have come problems. As the Queens economy rebounded, it also grew more polarized. As immigrants came in, women’s lives improved (perhaps in part because of low-wage immigrant women taking care of children and older people so U.S.-born women could take better jobs) and so did wages for most men, but for men of color in the bottom tier of the labor market conditions got worse. The challenge once was putting abandoned properties to productive use; the challenge today is finding a way to house the many people who want to live there. Whereas population decline and hemorrhaging of jobs were the challenges of the 1970s, the challenges today revolve around job quality and affordable housing. In some ways, immigrants in Queens are distinct, as a group, from U.S.born residents. Immigrants are more likely to be business owners, and much more likely to own Main Street businesses. They are more likely to be people of color and thus to face the workplace discrimination that U.S.-born people of color also experience. They make contributions up and down the economic ladder, but it is also clear that they are particularly concentrated in the bottom rungs. For the most part, though, immigrants are a major factor in this economic story not so much because of anything special about immigrants themselves but just because they have become such a big part of the borough’s population and labor force. If for some reason Queens had not seen the tremendous level of immigration of recent decades, it would be a far less vital, less diverse, less global, and smaller version of what it is today. Notes 1.  Except where otherwise noted, all data in this report are my calculations, based on an analysis of the Census Bureau’s decennial data (https://​w ww​.census​.gov/​programs​ -surveys/​decennial​-census/​data​.html) or the American Community Survey microdata

64  /  David Dyssegaard Kallick

from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS; https://​usa​.ipums​.org/​usa), and data referring to “today” are from the 2013 American Community Survey five-year sample from IPUMS. See Chapter 1 for details on Queens population trends. Immigrants refers to all residents of the United States who were born in another country. It includes immigrants who have become naturalized citizens, those who have become permanent residents or have temporary visas, and unauthorized immigrants and those whose status is being adjudicated. It does not include the children of immigrants unless those children were born abroad. I thank Xiao Cheng, who was the research assistant at the Fiscal Policy Institute while this research was conducted, for the extensive data work that underlies this analysis. 2.  For the story of the city’s population and fiscal crisis, see Shefter 1985. For the role of immigrants in that crisis and rebound, see Kallick 2015c. 3.  For an interactive population chart showing the city population histories, see Gordon 2014. 4.  Demographers will note that a full consideration of population change should take into account births and deaths. In fact, the extent to which population change is driven by immigrants is understated in this analysis, since the U.S.-born children of immigrants are not counted as immigrants in these data. 5.  Business owners here are defined as people who own their own incorporated business and whose main job is to run that business. See Kallick 2012. For detail on Main Street businesses, see Kallick 2015a. 6.  These calculations are based on data from Scott 2015. 7.  The leftmost two bars of Figure 2.5 are together often called white-collar jobs. One occupational category is omitted: farming, fishing, and forestry, which is very nearly 0 percent in New York. Bars do not sum to 100 percent because of independent rounding and because of the exclusion of farming, fishing, and forestry jobs. 8.  For a good summary of and contribution to this research, see Shierholz 2010. 9.  These estimates come from the Center for Migration Studies and are based on 2014 American Community Survey data. Because the Census Bureau does not ask about immigration status, the Center for Migration Studies uses a widely accepted methodology to impute immigration and then publishes those estimates independently. The methodology and statewide estimates are available at http://​data​.cmsny​.org. Estimates for Queens were provided to me by Robert Warren of the Center for Migration Studies. Note that the number of unauthorized immigrants is estimated in part by adjusting for an undercount in the census data. References Bernhardt, Annette, Heather Boushey, Laura Dresser, and Chris Tilly. 2009. Confronting the Gloves-Off Economy: Workplace Standards at the Bottom of America’s Labor Market. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bernhardt, Annette, Diana Polson, and James DeFilippis. 2010. Working without Laws: A Survey of Employment and Labor Law Violations in New York City. New York: National Employment Law Project. Gordon, Colin. 2014. “Immigrant Population in American Cities, 1950–2013.” December 12. https://​public​.tableau​.com/​profile/​chuntlyg​#​!/​v izhome/​immigbargraph/​ Dashboard1.

The Queens Economy  /  65

Kallick, David Dyssegaard. 2012. “Immigrant Small Business Owners: A Significant and Growing Part of the Economy.” Fiscal Policy Institute, June. http://​fiscalpolicy​.org/​ wp​-content/​uploads/​2012/​06/​immigrant​-small​-business​-owners​-FPI​-20120614​.pdf. ———. 2015a. “Bringing Vitality to Main Street: How Immigrant Small Businesses Help Local Economies Grow.” Fiscal Policy Institute and Americas Society/Council of the Americas. https://​w ww​.as​-coa​.org/​sites/​default/​fi les/​ImmigrantBusinessReport​.pdf. ———. 2015b. “Immigrants Are More Likely to Be Business Owners . . . but They’re Not ‘Super-Entrepreneurs.’” Fiscal Policy Institute, January 14. http://​fiscalpolicy​.org/​ immigrantentrepreneurs. ———. 2015c. “Immigration and Economic Growth in New York City.” In One Out of Three: Immigrant New York in the 21st Century, edited by Nancy Foner, 64–89. New York: Columbia University Press. Kallick, David Dyssegaard, with Silva Mathema. 2016. “Refugee Integration in the United States.” Center for American Progress, June 16. https://​w ww​.americanprogress​ .org/​i ssues/​i mmigration/​reports/​2 016/​0 6/​16/​139551/​refugee​-integration​-in​-the​ -united​-states/. Onishi, Norimitsu. 1997. “On the No. 7 Subway Line in Queens, It’s an Underground United Nations.” New York Times, February 16. https://​w ww​.nytimes​.com/​1997/​02/​ 16/​nyregion/​on​-the​-no​-7​- subway​-line​-in​- queens​-it​- s​- an​-underground​-united​ -nations​.html. Patten, Eileen. 2016. “Racial, Gender Wage Gaps Persist in U.S. despite Some Progress.” Pew Research Center, July 1. https://​w ww​.pewresearch​.org/​fact​-tank/​2016/​07/​01/​ racial​-gender​-wage​-gaps​-persist​-in​-u​-s​-despite​-some​-progress/. Scott, Robert E. 2015. “Manufacturing Job Loss: Trade, Not Productivity, Is the Cul­ prit.”  Economic Policy Institute, August 11. https://​ w ww​ .epi​ .org/​ publication/​ manufacturing​-job​-loss​-trade​-not​-productivity​-is​-the​-culprit/. Shefter, Martin. 1985. Political Crisis/Fiscal Crisis. New York: Columbia University Press. Shierholz, Heidi. 2010. “Immigration and Wages: Methodological Advancements Confirm Modest Gains for Native Workers.” Economic Policy Institute, February 4. https://​w ww​.epi​.org/​publication/​bp255/. Sommeiller, Estelle, Mark Price, and Ellis Wazeter. 2016. “Income Inequality in the U.S. by State, Metropolitan Area, and County.” Economic Policy Institute, June 16. https://​w ww​.epi​.org/​publication/​income​-inequality​-in​-the​-us/.

3 The Restructuring of Manufacturing in Queens and Its Impact on Immigrant Workers Lynn McCormick

I

mmigrants have long provided a source of labor for New York City’s manufacturing companies. Offering lower-skilled entry jobs to immigrants with less education, manufacturers provided new immigrants a place to increase their skills on the job while also becoming accustomed to U.S. society. Immigrants lacking English-language skills could often find manufacturing jobs in places where the owner or shop supervisor spoke their native tongue. This also facilitated their gradual accommodation to American ways. In this way, manufacturing jobs have historically offered lowerskilled immigrants with language barriers a career ladder and an eventual higher standard of living. Manufacturing jobs, however, have become a decreasing commodity in New York City because manufacturers have moved offshore to lower-cost locations or closed because of increasing global competition. Rising real estate prices and rents are also displacing manufacturers from the city. Restructuring in this sector prompts questions about immigrants’ job prospects. To what extent are immigrants still concentrated in manufacturing? Do manufacturing jobs still offer good pay and opportunities for upward mobility for those with less education and limited English skills? I explore these questions by, first, looking at manufacturing trends in Queens and the city as a whole and then focusing on the specific experiences of manufacturers and their workers in Queens, a top manufacturing hub in New York City.

The Restructuring of Manufacturing in Queens  /  67

Methodology To answer these job prospect questions, I have relied on published data sources and interviews with key stakeholders. The data sources include the Department of Labor’s Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) and the Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) of the Census of Population (and later the American Community Survey, ACS). The QCEW data are the most accurate count of jobs by industry because any employer with employees is mandated to pay unemployment insurance and to report job information to the government. When there are disclosure problems, I substitute 2000 and 2012 County Business Patterns data, published by the Department of the Census, as a proxy.1 Interviews were conducted in 2011–2012. The PUMS and ACS data are collected from individuals by census workers.2 The data include information about the industries in which people work, their occupations, wages, and other work-related information. I use the 2000 census data, but because the PUMS was discontinued after 2000, researchers must use ACS data for detailed demographic information about residents in later years. The ACS is a smaller sample of the country’s population and is performed annually. I use the five-year pooled data (from 2008 to 2012) to represent population data for 2012. These data offer the greatest number of cases and, hence, representativeness. Data are reported for those who work in Queens (versus residing there). Interviews were held with key personnel in manufacturing companies, nonprofit development corporations and community organizations, local government agencies, and business associations in Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan.

Manufacturing Trends in New York City and Queens In decades past, manufacturing accounted for a large part in the job base of New York City. For example, in the 1950s it was the largest manufacturing center in the country, employing more than a million workers (Liff 1997). The city experienced significant manufacturing job losses in the following decades, along with other Rustbelt regions, but at a faster pace (Bram and Anderson 2001). Today, the sector has been reduced to a fraction of its former size (down to 68,150 jobs in 2012) but still plays a significant role in the economy, composed of specialty manufacturers that supply unique goods to other more sizable and important industries locally. In this section, I explore key trends experienced by the sector, including changes in location, export orientation, and causes of job loss.

68 / Lynn McCormick

The Location of Manufacturing While most manufacturing jobs in the city are still located in Manhattan, the share of such jobs grew most in Queens from 2000 to 2012 (see Table 3.1). Manufacturing has long been centered in Manhattan (where 35 percent of all manufacturing jobs were located in 2012—down from 41 percent in 2000). Queens houses almost a third of such jobs today (29 percent in 2012, up from almost 27 percent in 2000) and Brooklyn one-quarter (26 percent today, compared with 25 percent in 2000). This indicates that the share of manufacturing jobs grew in Queens and other boroughs because manufacturing jobs in Manhattan were fleeing more rapidly. Of the eight largest job-producing subsectors in manufacturing, three are still mostly located in Manhattan, one in Brooklyn, and four in Queens. As seen in Table 3.2, the largest job-producing manufacturing sectors in 2012 include the following: • Apparel production (22 percent of all manufacturing jobs; 59 percent of these are located in Manhattan) • Food manufacturing (20 percent of all manufacturing jobs; most of these, 35 percent, are in Queens) • Miscellaneous manufacturing (including jewelry and toys, at 12 percent of all manufacturing jobs; 54 percent are in Manhattan) • Printing (9 percent of all manufacturing jobs; 54 percent are in Manhattan) • Fabricated metal (8 percent of all manufacturing; the most, 39 percent, are in Brooklyn) Thus, although Manhattan was where manufacturing concentrated historically, today most of its largest sectors have moved to the outer boroughs, like Queens.

Export Orientation Exports bring outside dollars and wealth back into a region. Policy makers look at location quotients to infer which industries are likely exporting their goods or services to consumers who live outside the region. A location quotient is a ratio of the share of jobs in a sector’s local economy to the sector’s share of jobs in the national economy.3 A higher local share suggests that manufacturers are producing too many goods to be consumed locally, so some of these goods must be exported elsewhere. That is, if a location quotient is greater than one, the sector is overly concentrated locally and exporting some of its products or services. A highly concentrated industry does not

141,184

275,883

77,352

NAICS 53 Real estate and rental and leasing

16,516

NAICS 48-49 Transportation and warehousing

NAICS 52 Finance and insurance

17,637

157,232

NAICS 44-45 Retail trade

NAICS 51 Information

64,722

73,348

NAICS 42 Wholesale trade

15,039

14,272

6,877

24,441

19,883

26,375

NAICS 31-33 Manufacturing

23,258

31,685

4,326

7,499

NAICS 22 Utilities

NAICS 23 Construction

59

59

21

NAICS 21 Mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction

13,923

16,800

8,514

59,341

58,705

22,183

21,892

41,483

2,603

10

2

121

NAICS 11 Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting

Queens 486,637

485,425

1,947,749

Brooklyn

Manhattan

Industry

Total private sector

Total employment, 2012 NYC*

106,314

306,955

156,575

93,494

280,659

119,972

68,150

96,426

14,428

138

133

2,919,811

66.1

88.1

87.4

15.6

48.6

56.0

34.9

28.4

44.3

14.2

85.2

60.5

Manhattan

12.9

4.6

4.3

16.7

20.0

18.6

26.3

20.8

25.6

39.7

1.4

15.1

Brooklyn

11.9

5.4

5.3

56.2

18.2

16.9

28.9

37.2

15.4

39.7

6.7

15.1

Queens

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

NYC*

Share of total employment, 2012 (%)

Table 3.1 Employment in industries by borough in New York City (NYC), 2012

2.5

−16.0

−13.2

−48.3

17.9

−19.4

−62.5

−10.7

35.8

−59.6

16.3

0.9

Manhattan

10.9

0.2

−20.2

26.1

21.1

2.8

−53.9

−4.3

−5.5

485.0

−94.4

18.7

Brooklyn

−8.2

−14.7

−17.3

−21.4

2.3

−20.6

−45.9

−17.6

−2.2

68.3

−36.8

−4.6

NYC

(continued)

−6.3

38.9

−20.1

−7.5

16.1

−9.7

−52.0

4.2

16.2

485.0

−84.0

8.4

Queens

Change in employment, 2000–2012 (%)

17,249

2,610

21,874

160,671

5,515

31,425

24,547

301,424

56,263

128,323

94,825

212,786

56,324

195,887

92,065

NAICS 54 Professional and technical services

NAICS 55 Management of companies and enterprises

NAICS 56 Administrative and waste services

NAICS 61 Educational services

NAICS 62 Health care and social assistance

NAICS 71 Arts, entertainment, and recreation

NAICS 72 Accommodations and food services

NAICS 81 Other ­services, except public administration

23,455

39,593

6,075

108,000

15,266

29,769

2,012

13,131

Queens

140,067

266,905

67,914

481,457

135,808

179,966

60,885

331,804

NYC*

60.3

68.0

78.1

36.0

61.8

67.1

89.3

88.9

16.1

10.9

7.6

27.2

16.8

11.4

4.1

5.1

Brooklyn

15.4

13.7

8.4

18.3

10.0

15.6

3.2

3.9

Queens

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

NYC*

Share of total employment, 2012 (%) Manhattan

11.4

41.7

28.6

18.1

43.2

−17.6

22.7

5.9

23.2

86.7

75.5

32.5

68.7

18.7

177.1

50.7

Brooklyn

11.5

49.4

44.9

29.5

31.3

29.8

18.2

25.4

Queens

3.8

35.8

23.6

0.9

26.3

−13.5

20.8

6.1

NYC

Change in employment, 2000–2012 (%) Manhattan

Source: QCEW 2012. Note: NAICS = North American Industrial Classification System. Italics indicate nondisclosure by QCEW, so data come from County Business Patterns or subsectors of QCEW. * Also includes employment in Staten Island and the Bronx

25,717

Brooklyn

Total employment, 2012

Manhattan

Industry

Table 3.1 (continued)

2.8 1.5

NAICS 325 Chemical manufacturing

NAICS 337 Furniture and related product manufacturing

0.0

NAICS 331 Primary metal manufacturing

NAICS 324 Petroleum and coal products manufacturing

Source: QCEW 2012. Note: NAICS = North American Industrial Classification System.

1.2 0.5

NAICS 316 Leather and allied product manufacturing

0.3

NAICS 335 Electrical equipment and appliance manufacturing

1.5

NAICS 314 Textile product mills 1.5

0.4

NAICS 322 Paper manufacturing

0.2

3.6

NAICS 313 Textile mills

NAICS 321 Wood product manufacturing

0.3

NAICS 327 Nonmetallic mineral product manufacturing

NAICS 312 Beverage and tobacco product manufacturing

1.4 0.7

NAICS 336 Transportation equipment manufacturing

NAICS 333 Machinery manufacturing

1.3

1.2

NAICS 332 Fabricated metal product manufacturing

0.3

14.0

NAICS 323 Printing and related support activities

NAICS 334 Computer and electronic product manufacturing

5.6

19.2

NAICS 339 Miscellaneous manufacturing

NAICS 326 Plastics and rubber products manufacturing

12.4

13.5

NAICS 311 Food manufacturing

0.0

0.3

0.3

2.2

0.8

1.5

1.3

2.0

1.0

4.0

2.4

4.0

1.3

7.5

6.5

9.2

11.2

22.8

14.1

36.8

100.0

100.0

NAICS 315 Apparel manufacturing

Brooklyn

0.2

0.5

0.7

0.7

1.7

1.0

1.2

2.7

0.8

2.1

1.2

3.9

2.5

3.7

4.7

3.5

10.4

5.2

6.8

24.7

16.4

100.0

Queens

Percentage of all jobs in area Manhattan

NAICS 31-33 Manufacturing

Industry

0.1

0.4

0.7

1.0

1.0

1.3

1.5

1.7

1.8

2.0

2.5

2.8

3.0

3.7

4.0

5.2

8.3

9.0

12.4

20.3

21.9

100.0

NYC

11.9

42.0

58.3

8.7

5.2

41.5

34.7

7.5

68.6

5.2

9.1

17.4

3.9

11.8

12.6

18.7

5.0

54.3

54.0

23.1

58.5

34.9

Manhattan

0.0

17.0

9.9

57.1

19.5

30.5

22.6

30.1

14.3

51.7

25.5

37.4

11.6

53.2

41.9

28.2

39.4

26.9

23.8

29.4

16.9

26.3

Brooklyn

64.2

34.9

30.0

19.8

48.7

23.9

23.7

44.8

12.8

29.4

14.0

39.5

23.4

29.2

33.9

19.7

36.3

16.7

15.8

35.1

21.6

28.9

Queens

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

NYC

Percentage of all jobs in industry

Table 3.2 Percentage in manufacturing employment in four Boroughs of New York City (NYC), 2012

72 / Lynn McCormick

necessarily mean it is large and producing many jobs but just that there is more of it locally versus nationally—it is something the locality specializes in. Manufacturing in general is not overly concentrated in New York City, but some manufacturing subsectors are in specific boroughs. Overly concentrated manufacturing subsectors in at least one borough in 2012 include the following: • Apparel (with location quotients of 5.5 in Brooklyn, 4.3 in Queens, and 3.7 in Manhattan) • Apparel accessories (2.4 in Brooklyn and 6.6 in Queens) • Jewelry and silverware (4.5 in Queens and 8.2 in Manhattan) • Specialty food manufacturing (e.g., bakery products at 2.3 in Brooklyn and 2.0 in Queens) • Support activities for printing (1.5 in Brooklyn and 2.5 in Queens) • Architectural metalwork (2.8 in Brooklyn and 2.6 in Queens) • Lighting fixtures (1.9 in Queens) • Wood furniture production (1.2 in Brooklyn and 1.5 in Queens)4 Each of these was overconcentrated in Queens. These activities are ones in which the city and Queens specialize, attracting consumers from outside the region. Manufacturing firms also act as suppliers to more sizable, export-­ oriented, and design- and entertainment-related industries in New York City (Bernheimer et al. 2012; Craytor et al. 2013; McCormick 2015). Downstream industries for which the prominent apparel, food, furniture, printing, and other manufacturing sectors are suppliers include the following: • Interior design services (highly concentrated in Manhattan with a location quotient of 4.3), using lighting, metalwork, and furniture producers • Architectural services (4.2 in Manhattan) • Performing arts companies (7.1 in Manhattan and 2.4 in Brooklyn), buying, for example, set and costume designs • Advertising and related services (7.7 in Manhattan), using printing services • Other specialized design services, including fashion and jewelry design (13.4 in Manhattan and 3.2 in Brooklyn), using manufacturers to construct products5 These intersectoral relationships suggest that should manufacturers be displaced from the city, it would weaken the downstream sectors to which they sell. Therefore, from a policy perspective it is more helpful to think of

The Restructuring of Manufacturing in Queens  /  73

these industries as linked in a common cluster across sectoral designations, such as the fashion cluster, architecture and interior design cluster, and so forth. For example, the fashion industry estimates its total employment in the region as 173,000 and annual contribution of $10 billion in wages to the local economy, which the much smaller apparel manufacturing industry (about 16,590 jobs in 2012) directly feeds into (Bernheimer et al. 2012). Therefore, some manufacturing subsectors not only export their goods outside the region but also act as key suppliers to downstream industries that are also heavily export oriented. All this activity grows the economy. In Queens, for example, prominent manufacturing sectors support the fashion industry (e.g., jewelry makers), advertising (e.g., printing), and architectural and interior design (e.g., furniture production).

The Causes of Manufacturing Job Losses From 2000 to 2012, the manufacturing sector in New York City shed a significant number of jobs, although this slide was slower in Queens. Manufacturing jobs in New York City declined from about 172,000 jobs in 2000 to 68,150 in 2012—a decline of almost 46 percent. This occurred at the same time as the city’s overall economy in the private sector declined by less than 5 percent (see Table 3.1). Thus, manufacturing moved from providing 5 percent of all jobs in the city to 2 percent. A similar pattern occurred in Queens, although the base of manufacturing jobs in the Queens economy was larger in 2000 (10 percent of all jobs in Queens), which became 4 percent by 2012. This decline was large (a loss of 52 percent) but less precipitous than in Manhattan (63 percent decline). At the same time, the entire Queens job base grew by more than 8 percent. Manufacturing jobs may be disappearing from New York City for the same reasons they are decreasing in the country as a whole. These reasons are the outsourcing of such jobs to lower-wage and lower-cost locations, the rise of manufacturing competition in countries that subsidize it, and a restructuring of the U.S. economy away from manufacturing to service sector jobs (e.g., see Brauer 2004; McCormack 2009; and Scott 2015). However, other reasons have stimulated manufacturing job losses here that are unique to New York City. Especially important is that the rising value of real estate and rents in Manhattan has caused manufacturers to move out. Subsequent gentrification pressures in Queens are pushing manufacturers out of Queens now. In addition, city government support for manufacturing as an important sector has been weakening over the 2000–2012 period. At the same time, there has been a concurrent push to support design-oriented or ­technology-focused jobs by the city government and economic development organizations, perhaps instead of manufacturing.

74 / Lynn McCormick

Relocation of Manufacturers from Manhattan to Queens

At the same time that manufacturing jobs declined overall, jobs also shifted from Manhattan to the outer boroughs because of Manhattan’s overheated real estate industry. Since 2000, manufacturing companies and jobs have declined most in Manhattan. During this time the garment industry—long centered in the borough’s Chinatown—all but disappeared there. The garment industry has shrunk to its original concentration in Midtown. However, even though a significant cluster of garment manufacturing and supply companies still produce in Midtown and support budding fashion designers, property owners led by the business improvement district are pressuring the city’s administration to take away protective zoning that was established to support this cluster. Apparel companies have increasingly been forced to move elsewhere, even though the rest of the fashion industry wants them to stay (McCormick 2015; Bernheimer et al. 2012). Other manufacturers have also left Manhattan because of escalating real estate prices and rents there. For instance, manufacturers I interviewed who make products for the interior design and architecture industries commented that they could no longer afford to stay close to the interior design center and showrooms in Midtown Manhattan. One company owner said he moved out of Manhattan to Queens eight years ago, even though his suppliers remained there. Eventually, he encouraged other manufacturers and suppliers in his network to also relocate to Queens. As he noted: [Before,] in a decorator’s mind, going to Long Island City was a death sentence. But in 2005, the writing was on the wall. Commercial real estate in Manhattan became so high that vendors were forced to move out . . . and the decorators accepted it. Going over the bridge is not so big a deal now. . . . In 2007, I was the only one in my field in this building. But I said to the owner that, whenever space becomes available, he should contact me first. So I recruited an artisan. . . . The more artisans here, the more attractive it is to getting the decorators here. . . . They can do one-stop shopping. (Personal communication, June 12, 2012) Other design-oriented manufacturers have followed suit, such that a subsidiary design center, or cluster, has emerged in Queens near Long Island City. Gentrification in Queens

Long Island City and the western edge of Queens have long been bastions for manufacturing. Manufacturing has also heavily located along the southwestern edge of the borough in communities such as Sunnyside, Maspeth,

The Restructuring of Manufacturing in Queens  /  75

Ridgewood, and Glendale. In addition, there are sizable numbers of manufacturing jobs in Flushing. However, not only has real estate development pushed manufacturers out of Manhattan; it is increasingly pressuring manufacturers in Queens to relocate. In the late 1990s, as the city’s economy rebounded from a recession, the city government actively helped develop satellite central business districts outside Manhattan. This was due to an earlier report that office space was becoming increasingly unavailable in Manhattan. In 2001, New York City rezoned thirty-six blocks in Long Island City to accommodate these new trends since it did not want back offices that served Manhattan businesses to move to New Jersey. The rezoning created a Special Mixed Use Long Island City Zone that allows residential uses in manufacturing zones along with commercial. Since financial returns have been higher on residential developments, most new development in the area has been residential, in what some see as out-of-context large-bulk towers. The relocation of JetBlue’s headquarters to Long Island City in 2012 foreshadowed much new commercial development as well (Wolf-Powers 2005; City of New York 2012; Trapasso 2014). Although the rezoning plan for Long Island City mentions efforts to accommodate manufacturers, these new developments threaten manufacturers by bringing in uses that can afford higher real estate prices and rents. These other uses also bring in new occupants who desire upscale neighborhoods and amenities and may complain of manufacturers as neighbors. As stated in the New York City Economic Development Corporation’s description of plans for Long Island City: Long Island City (LIC) is buzzing due to the 2001 rezoning of 37 blocks in the central business district (CBD). The neighborhood is notable for its rapid residential development, waterfront parks, and thriving arts community. Opportunities to develop office space at rents significantly lower than those of nearby Midtown Manhattan make LIC an affordable and competitive location for many businesses. . . . The 2001 rezoning allowed for substantial mixed-use development, creating new opportunities for growth. What was once a collection of large industrial buildings and parking lots is fast becoming an edgy office market bordered by galleries, art museums, and a burgeoning residential community. (NYCEDC 2015, 1) New commercial and residential developments in Queens—in Long Island City especially—have been encouraged by New York City planning. However, these new tenants desire and are helping produce an environment that

76 / Lynn McCormick

is not supportive of manufacturing. This induces manufacturers’ displacement from Queens as well. Insufficient City Support for Manufacturing

Early in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s tenure in office, the city put forth an industrial policy to lessen the displacement of manufacturers that was occurring in all boroughs (City of New York 2005). The city surveyed industrial companies throughout the city, who mentioned the concerns of high real estate and utility costs, the uncertainty of the real estate market, and unfriendly city regulations inhibiting industrial activities. Property speculation of industrial properties in the booming real estate market of the time kept industrial properties vacant and made it difficult for manufacturers to negotiate long-term leases that would encourage their continued business investment.6 Designed in part after Chicago’s Planned Manufacturing Districts, which have provided zoning protections and other industrial incentives to centrally located manufacturers (Rast 2005), New York City iden­ tified sixteen areas7 where industrial uses were concentrated to become industrial business zones (IBZs). In western Queens, IBZs were created for parts of Long Island City and the nearby neighborhoods of Steinway and Maspeth. Bloomberg promised that, as long as he was mayor, residential uses would not be allowed in the IBZs.8 Yet despite the IBZs, much industrial land has been converted to other uses. A Pratt Center study estimated that almost 20 percent of New York’s manufacturing-zoned land was converted to other uses from 2002 to 2009, during Mayor Bloomberg’s tenure (Pratt Center for Community Devel­ opment 2009). Staff at the New York Industrial Retention Network found illegal conversions to residential uses inside the IBZs, along with legal commercial developments like big-box stores that were further limiting manu­ facturing space (NYIRN 2004, 2009). The IBZ program was intended to reduce displacement pressures on manufacturing by safeguarding designated industrial property and districts to increase security in tenancy among these businesses. However, the IBZ incentives have been insufficient to attract or retain manufacturers in these districts, which are being transformed into other uses, legally or illegally, by developers. Mayor Bill de Blasio has been criticized for being slow to deal with industrial issues. In 2015, the mayor and city council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito announced an action plan for industrial areas that would protect the IBZs from incursion of hotels, storage units, and residential developments (Savitch-Lew 2016). This was based on a council report showing that the Bloomberg-era industrial policies were insufficient to protect manufacturing (New York City Council 2014). At the same time, manufacturers and others worry that de Blasio’s chief focus on building new affordable

The Restructuring of Manufacturing in Queens  /  77

housing will further heat up real estate price escalation. One such effort is a current plan to rezone Long Island City to encourage more housing and commercial development. These rezoning plans are expected to displace more manufacturing jobs from Queens and the city (Crain’s New York Business 2015; Engquist and Elstein 2015; Hum 2015). City and Institutional Focus on Design and Technology

At the same time that traditional manufacturers face rising rents and gentrification from new commercial and residential tenants, the city administration has been encouraging technology and design companies to locate in Long Island City. In addition, with the advent of 3D printing, some believe that manufacturing is being reinvented such that technology can replace all manufacturing production activities. The maker is the new manufacturer. Makers are weekend tinkerers and full-time designers who come up with prototypes on their computer and send production instructions to 3D printers that make the product out of plastic or other materials. Makers require little space and so can afford the higher rents in the area. This is an added pressure on traditional manufacturers that use production workers and require shop floor space. Long Island City is now touted as becoming the “center for tech” in New York City (Cotner 2012a). Several organizations have been pushing for this vision in their own work, to complement New York City’s focus on the design, or maker, end of manufacturing. For example, in 2003, the City University of New York (CUNY) launched an incubator space for designers, New York Designs, within LaGuardia Community College. It houses studio space with access to a prototype laboratory for around twenty fledgling design entrepreneurs, along with other business support services. Another organization, the Coalition for Queens (C4Q, now renamed Pursuit), has also been promoting “techies” and makers for the area. It describes its mission as fostering “the Queens tech ecosystem to increase economic opportunity and transform the world’s most diverse community into a leading hub for innovation and entrepreneurship” (Parry 2015). C4Q started the Queens Tech Meetup in 2012 that is held several times a year to bring together tech enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, and companies from throughout the city to talk about their new technology products. It also hosts technical education programs (Cotner 2012a). In recognition of this burgeoning new tech and maker community, Shapeways opened the “biggest consumer-focused 3D printing factory in the world” in Long Island City in 2012 (Greenberg 2012; see also Cotner 2012b). It will make any design from an innovator, using 3D printing technology, and offers online “shop” space for these makers to sell their products. At the same time, the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) has started several initiatives to support the designers of

78 / Lynn McCormick

new products. After studying the city’s “digital fabrication ecosystem” (NYCEDC 2013a), NYCEDC under Mayor Bloomberg, who was convinced that “3D printing will revolutionize manufacturing” (Lysiak and Siemaszko 2012), developed a new program in 2012, New York’s Next Top Makers, to stimulate rapid prototyping. The city selects a half dozen maker entrepreneurs each year to receive studio space, business services, and support from Shapeways (Lysiak and Siemaszko 2012; NYCEDC 2013a). NYCxDESIGN is a collaboration of city agencies (e.g., the NYCEDC) and key design-related organizations in the city (e.g., Parsons School of Design, the Fashion Institute of Technology). NYCxDESIGN was inaugurated to host events that promote local designers (NYCxDESIGN 2020; NYCEDC 2013b). To summarize, while manufacturing activity and jobs have been steadily declining in New York City over the last several decades, critical manufacturing specialties remain that show an export orientation (e.g., apparel, woodworking) and have links to other large job-producing and export-­ important industries (e.g., fashion, interior design) in the city. Even though the city, through the NYCEDC, recognizes the importance of this new phase of niche manufacturing, it is also focusing heavily on the design end of manufacturing through new programming. At the same time, its IBZ program, which supports traditional manufacturers, was weakened and somewhat revived by Mayor de Blasio’s administration. All these forces have encouraged new development that has made land costs increasingly out of the reach of traditional manufacturers and caused their displacement. These and other pressures have resulted in high rates of manufacturing job losses in the portions of Queens housing the most manufacturing jobs. The western and southwestern edge not only houses much of the manufacturing’s jobs but also shows some of the highest rates of job decline in this sector. How have these forces affected the job choices of immigrant workers in Queens especially?

Immigrant Employment in Queens Immigrants have long played an important role in operating or working in manufacturing companies in New York City. Lower-skilled immigrants have been able to establish ethnic niches in manufacturing jobs throughout the last several decades (Waldinger 1996; New York City Council 2014). To what extent does this sector still provide an avenue for upward mobility for immigrants and offer them entry-level jobs and career paths? This section answers this question by comparing the sectors and occupations in which the native born and immigrants work in Queens. I use the term immigrants to refer to those who were born in other countries and have not yet become U.S. citizens. The census data also identify those who are

The Restructuring of Manufacturing in Queens  /  79

foreign born and who have become naturalized citizens.9 Data are compared over the time period of 2000–2012.

To What Extent Are Immigrants Still Concentrated in Manufacturing? Immigrants were more concentrated in manufacturing than native-born citizens from 2000 to 2012. However, this concentration is weakening as immigrants enter other industries and manufacturing sheds jobs. This can be seen by constructing what I call an employment concentration index. This index is a ratio, much like a location quotient, that reflects the extent to which a group is overrepresented in a sector or occupation compared with their presence in the workforce at large. Any number greater than one implies an overconcentration of that group in a sector or occupation. If the share of immigrants, for example, employed in manufacturing is larger than their share in all jobs, there are relatively more of them in that sector—an overconcentration. Immigrants’ employment concentration index in manufacturing was 1.6 in 2000. This declined to 1.5 by 2012 (Table 3.3).10 By contrast, the native born totaled 33.8 percent of all manufacturing workers in 2000 but 51.8 percent of all workers in Queens. This shows that they are underconcentrated in manufacturing compared with other sectors, with an employment index of 0.7. That immigrants’ concentration in manufacturing jobs weakened in the period from 2000 to 2012 can also be seen by looking at the absolute change they experienced in this sector. Immigrant job holders in manufacturing declined by more than 35 percent over the period, whereas the native born experienced only a 25 percent decline. In other words, immigrants took more than their relative share of the manufacturing job losses over the period compared with the native born.

In What Occupations Do Immigrants in Manufacturing Work? Immigrants and the native born are concentrated in different occupations within manufacturing. From the census data, the occupations in manufacturing with the largest number of jobs (Table 3.4) include production jobs (51.0 percent of all sector jobs in 2000), office and administrative support jobs (12.1 percent), management occupations (8.1 percent), sales (6.4 percent), and transportation and material-moving occupations (6.2 percent). Of these occupational groupings, in both 2005 and 2012 immigrants were primarily overrepresented in production occupations in manufacturing in the city and in Queens.11 For example, 47 percent of all production workers

Table 3.3 Employment in Queens by citizenship status, 2000 and 2012 Employment concentration index

Percentage Industry

Native born

Not a citizen

Total

Native born

Not a citizen

Total

2000 Manufacturing

33.8

39.7

100.0

0.7

1.6

1.0

Construction

47.9

32.8

100.0

0.9

1.3

1.0

Arts, entertainment, recreation, accommodations and food services

37.2

40.2

100.0

0.7

1.6

1.0

Other services

35.6

39.1

100.0

0.7

1.6

1.0

Total

51.8

25.0

100.0

1.0

1.0

1.0

2012 Manufacturing

35.5

34.3

100.0

0.8

1.5

1.0

Construction

36.2

42.3

100.0

0.8

1.8

1.0

Arts, entertainment, recreation, accommodations and food services

34.6

41.6

100.0

0.8

1.8

1.0

Other services

30.0

40.7

100.0

0.7

1.7

1.0

Total

46.3

23.7

100.0

1.0

1.0

1.0

Change in employment, 2000–2012

Percent change in employment, 2000–2012

Native born

Not a citizen

Total

Native born

Not a citizen

Total

Manufacturing

−3,951

−6,549

−12,902

−25.2

−35.7

−27.9

Construction

−1,664

8,426

9,708

−8.1

59.9

22.6

Arts, entertainment, recreation, accommodations and food services

5,466

8,337

18,732

39.7

56.1

50.6

Other services

−824

2,374

4,170

−6.5

17.2

11.8

Industry

Source: Data from 2000 and 2012 census and American Community Survey, available at https://​usa​.ipums .​ org/​usa. Note: Italic numbers indicate a location quotient greater than 1.

Table 3.4 Workers in the Queens manufacturing industry by occupation, 2000 and 2012 Employment concentration index

Percentage Occupational categories

Native born

Not a citizen

Total

Native born

Not a citizen

Total

2000 Production occupations

20.1

50.9

100.0

0.6

1.3

1.0

Office and admin support occupations

53.4

23.5

100.0

1.6

0.6

1.0

Management, business, science, and arts occupations

64.6

11.5

100.0

1.9

0.3

1.0

Sales and related occupations

57.7

21.8

100.0

1.7

0.6

1.0

­ aterialTransportation and m moving occupations

37.4

42.6

100.0

1.1

1.1

1.0

Total

33.8

39.7

100.0

1.0

1.0

1.0

2012 Production occupations

21.7

47.1

100.0

0.6

1.4

1.0

Office and admin support occupations

42.0

19.7

100.0

1.2

0.6

1.0

Management, business, science, and arts occupations

56.9

15.4

100.0

1.6

0.5

1.0

Sales and related occupations

53.6

23.8

100.0

1.5

0.7

1.0

Transportation and ­material-moving occupations

42.1

34.3

100.0

1.2

1.0

1.0

Total

35.5

34.3

100.0

1.0

1.0

1.0

Change in employment, 2000–2012

Percent change in employment, 2000–2012

Occupational categories

Native born

Not a citizen

Total

Native born

Not a citizen

Total

Production occupations

−1,220

−4,350

−7,324

−25.7

−36.2

−31.0

−180

71

682

−10.5

11.0

23.0

−1,324

−135

−1,818

−54.8

−31.3

−48.6

−209

20

−165

−12.2

3.1

−5.6

162

−221

58

15.0

−17.9

2.0

−3,951

−6,549

−12,902

−25.2

−35.7

−27.9

Office and admin support occupations Management, business, science, and arts occupations Sales and related occupations Transportation and ­ aterial-moving occupations m Total

Source: Data from 2000 and 2012 census and American Community Survey, available at https://​usa​.ipums .​ org/​usa. Note: Italic numbers indicate a location quotient greater than 1.

82 / Lynn McCormick

in manufacturing were immigrants in 2012, whereas only about 22 percent were native born. Immigrants working in manufacturing worked in production in Queens in 2012, whereas about 30 percent of the native born did. Immigrants’ employment concentration index in production jobs grew from 1.3 to 1.4 over the period. Immigrants were also overrepresented in transportation and material-moving occupations in the sector in Queens in 2000, but by 2012 they became underrepresented there, suggesting they largely left this occupation. As might be expected, the native born who work in manufacturing are concentrated in management (with an employment concentration index of 1.6 in 2012 in Queens), sales (1.5), and office occupations (1.2). However, these concentrations have declined since 2000, suggesting that immigrants and naturalized citizens have increasingly moved into such jobs even though they are still very underrepresented in them today. At the same time that immigrants have become more concentrated in production jobs in manufacturing, these jobs became more scarce within the sector as a whole. Manufacturing production jobs in Queens declined by 31.0 percent from 2000 to 2012, whereas manufacturing as a whole declined by only 28.0 percent in all employment. Other manufacturing occupations grew or declined less than production jobs. For example, sales jobs declined by only 5.6 percent, while office jobs grew by 23.0 percent and transportation and material-moving jobs by 2.0 percent. Only management jobs fared worse than production jobs, declining by more than 48.0 percent over the period (Table 3.4). This suggests that, from 2000 to 2012, manufacturers in Queens dealt with the Great Recession of 2008 and declining sales by drastically cutting production jobs—in which immigrants are concentrated—while retaining (or decreasing by less than average for the sector) sales and office positions that have been key positions held by the native born. Only in management jobs did the native born do poorly. Here they fled the occupation faster than did immigrants, although management jobs as a whole fared quite poorly. So immigrants have experienced declining opportunities in manufacturing in general and especially in its entry-level (production) occupations. Where, then, are immigrant workers moving?

Into What Sectors and Occupations Did Immigrants Move? If immigrants are leaving manufacturing faster than other groups of workers, where are they going? In Queens (as in the city at large), they are moving

The Restructuring of Manufacturing in Queens  /  83

into construction; the arts, entertainment, recreation, accommodations, and food services sector (which I call the larger food and related services sector in that immigrants are especially concentrated in these types of jobs in this sector); and other service jobs. More specifically, although immigrants are still concentrated in the manufacturing sector, this concentration is falling.12 But whereas they are also concentrated in construction, the larger food services sector, and other services, these concentrations are growing. The employment concentration index for immigrants in construction was 1.3 in 2000; it grew to 1.8 by 2012 as the group’s employment grew by about 60 percent. The index in the larger food sector was 1.6 in 2000 and 1.8 by 2012 (immigrant employment grew here by 56.1 percent). In other services, immigrants’ concentration index rose from 1.6 to 1.7 over the period; their employment increased by 17.2 percent (Table 3.3).13 Into what occupations did immigrants move? What does the pattern in each sector show?

Construction In what occupations in the construction industry are immigrants and the native born concentrated? First, we look at the largest occupations in the sector, in terms of number of jobs, which include jobs in construction and extraction (66.7 percent of all sector jobs in 2000), management (10.5 percent), office and administrative support (7.0 percent), and installation and repair (4.1 percent). Among these occupations, as might be expected, immigrants are overconcentrated in construction and extraction jobs in the industry (with an employment concentration index of 1.2 in 2012) and the native born are overconcentrated in management (an index of 1.3), office (1.5), and installation, maintenance, and repair occupations (1.1). Immigrants, for example, filled almost half (49.5 percent) of all construction and extraction jobs in the construction sector in Queens in 2012 (whereas the native born filled 32.3 percent) (Table 3.5). By contrast, the native born filled almost half (45.8 percent) the management jobs in the sector in 2012, and immigrants took up only 21.6 percent of management positions. Furthermore, immigrant employment in construction and extraction jobs in the sector increased over the period by 71.3 percent. Management; office; and installation, maintenance, and repair jobs in construction companies increasingly went to naturalized citizens over this period—at the expense of the native born. (For example, the number of management jobs in the sector held by native-born workers dropped by 9.2 percent over the period, while such jobs held by naturalized citizens increased by 45.8 percent and other immigrants by 10.5 percent.) In fact, the native-born presence in the construction industry in Queens declined overall by 8.1 percent. Naturalized citizens increased their employment in the industry by about

Table 3.5 Workers in the Queens construction industry by occupation, 2000 and 2012 Employment concentration index

Percentage Native born

Not a citizen

Total

Native born

Not a citizen

Total

Construction and extraction occupations

44.4

37.9

100.0

0.9

1.2

1.0

Management, business, science, and arts occupations

55.1

21.4

100.0

1.2

0.7

1.0

Office and admin support occupations

65.0

14.8

100.0

1.4

0.5

1.0

Installation, maintenance and repair workers

47.4

39.9

100.0

1.0

1.2

1.0

Total

47.9

32.8

100.0

1.0

1.0

1.0

Construction and extraction occupations

32.3

49.5

100.0

0.9

1.2

1.0

Management, business, science, and arts occupations

45.8

21.6

100.0

1.3

0.5

1.0

Office and admin support occupations

54.2

17.0

100.0

1.5

0.4

1.0

Installation, maintenance and repair workers

39.0

40.9

100.0

1.1

1.0

1.0

Total

36.2

42.3

100.0

1.0

1.0

1.0

Construction occupations 2000

2012

Change in employment, 2000–2012

Percent change in employment, 2000–2012

Native born

Not a citizen

Total

Native born

Not a citizen

Construction and extraction occupations

−229

101

412

−9.2

10.5

9.2

Management, business, science, and arts occupations

−644

−33

−587

−32.8

−7.4

−19.4

Office and admin support occupations

−582

7,728

8,923

−4.6

71.3

31.2

Installation, maintenance and repair workers

212

396

920

25.3

56.2

52.0

−1,664

8,426

9,708

−8.1

59.9

22.6

Construction occupations

Total

Total

Source: Data from 2000 and 2012 census and American Community Survey, available at https://​usa​.ipums ​.org/​usa. Note: Italic numbers indicate a location quotient greater than 1.

The Restructuring of Manufacturing in Queens  /  85

33 percent and other immigrants by 60 percent. Thus, lower-skilled immigrant production workers in manufacturing seem to be moving almost directly into construction and extraction occupations in the construction industry. Where else did such immigrant workers move? What other jobs replaced production jobs in manufacturing?

Arts, Entertainment, Recreation, Accommodations, Food Services Within the arts, entertainment, recreation, accommodations, and food services sector (here called the larger food services sector), immigrants are largely concentrated in food preparation and serving occupations—this holds true in both Queens and the city (Table 3.6). Food preparation and serving jobs also provide the most jobs in the larger food industry (half of all the larger food services jobs in Queens in 2012). This is not surprising in that about 71 percent of all jobs in the larger food services sector in Queens were in restaurants and food service companies in 2012. More than 86 percent of all immigrant workers in the larger food services sector worked in restaurants or food service operations. Immigrant employment in food preparation and serving jobs in Queens grew by 68.4 percent from 2000 to 2012. Their employment concentration index for these jobs similarly grew from 1.2 to 1.3 over the period. Other, important job-producing occupations within the larger food services industry include jobs in management (9.9 percent of all sector jobs in 2000), sales (9.3 percent), design (5.8 percent), and building and grounds work (5.3 percent). The native born—working in jobs in the larger food services sector in Queens in 2012—are overrepresented in all these occupations except in sales, in which naturalized citizens are overconcentrated. The larger food services sector provided jobs to 6.3 percent of all workers in Queens in 2000, but it provided more jobs by 2012 (8.1 percent of all Queens workers), growing almost 51 percent in employment overall (see Table 3.3). The sector provided more jobs for workers in all nativity groups over the period, but the growth is more marked for immigrants, whose employment jumped by 56.1 percent over the period. The native-born presence increased by 39.7 percent. Thus, immigrants moved into the larger food services sector more than other workers over the period—coming from, we might assume, production jobs in manufacturing to food preparation and serving occupations in the larger food sector.

Other Services Immigrants were also overconcentrated in the other services sector, which consists of subsectors such as repair and maintenance of cars and other

Table 3.6 Workers in the arts, accommodations, and food services industry in Queens by occupation, 2000 and 2012 Employment concentration index

Percentage Arts, accommodations, and food services

Native born

Not a citizen

Total

Native born

Not a citizen

Total

2000 Food prep and serving occupations

29.9

48.4

100.0

0.8

1.2

1.0

Management, business, science, and arts occupations

37.9

30.5

100.0

1.0

0.8

1.0

Sales and related occupations

38.0

40.6

100.0

1.0

1.0

1.0

Arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media occupations

60.8

24.3

100.0

1.6

0.6

1.0

Building and grounds cleaning and maintenance occupations

33.4

43.4

100.0

0.9

1.1

1.0

Total

37.2

40.2

100.0

1.0

1.0

1.0

Food prep and serving occupations

24.8

53.8

100.0

0.7

1.3

1.0

Management, business, science, and arts occupations

42.0

27.5

100.0

1.2

0.7

1.0

Sales and related occupations

28.1

37.4

100.0

0.8

0.9

1.0

Arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media occupations

59.7

22.7

100.0

1.7

0.6

1.0

Building and grounds cleaning and maintenance occupations

40.6

32.5

100.0

1.2

0.8

1.0

34.6

41.6

100.0

1.0

1.0

1.0

2012

Total

Change in employment, 2000–2012 Arts, accommodations, and food services

Native born

Not a citizen

Food prep and serving occupations

Percent change in employment, 2000–2012

Total

Native born

Not a citizen

Total

1,397

6,114

9,494

25.3

68.4

51.4

Management, business, science, and arts occupations

689

245

1,282

49.5

21.9

34.9

Sales and related occupations

109

489

1,609

8.3

35.0

46.7

Arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media occupations

628

214

1,091

48.3

41.1

51.0

Building and grounds cleaning and maintenance occupations

751

273

1,498

113.8

31.8

75.8

5,466

8,337

18,732

39.7

56.1

50.6

Total

Source: Data from 2000 and 2012 census and American Community Survey, available at https://​usa​.ipums​.org/​usa. Note: Italic numbers indicate a location quotient greater than 1.

The Restructuring of Manufacturing in Queens  /  87

equipment, personal (hair care and nails) and laundry services, religious or membership organizations, and private households. Auto repair shops employed the largest share of workers (15.4 percent) in the larger other services sector in Queens in 2012, followed by private households (14.9 percent), beauty salons (13 percent), religious organizations (11.4 percent), and dry cleaners and laundries (10.8 percent). Immigrants are overrepresented in all these subsectors, except in religious organizations. Immigrants also increased their concentration in the other services sector overall from 2000 to 2012, in which the concentration index went from 1.6 to 1.7 (see Table 3.3). Personal care workers account for most of the jobs in the subsectors mentioned earlier (20.2 percent of sector jobs in Queens in 2000), followed by installation, maintenance, and repair workers (18.2 percent); production workers (11.0 percent); and building and grounds workers (9.4 percent) (Table 3.7). Immigrants are overrepresented in all these occupations. Their concentration also grew in personal care and building and grounds jobs over the period. Therefore, some immigrants employed previously in manufacturing may have moved into these occupations. These data tell us that immigrants, who have been concentrated in production jobs in manufacturing, are now more likely to be employed in other jobs in the construction, food services, and other services sectors and in jobs offering labor-intensive personal care services to people in places such as private households. How do these new occupations compare with the manufacturing jobs that earlier immigrants held? Do the new occupations offer the higher pay, job security, and career ladders that the manufacturing sector had in the past? The next section answers these questions.

To What Extent Are the New Immigrant Jobs Good Jobs? How do the new occupations into which immigrants have moved over the period compare with the manufacturing jobs they left? We can look at some indicators—such as job security, average wage income, accommodation of non-English speakers, and education required—to answer this question (Table 3.8). We see from these data that production jobs seem superior in many ways. Therefore, the new jobs that immigrants hold today are worse than those held previously (and currently) in manufacturing. Production jobs in manufacturing offer relatively higher wages and more job security (measured here by the extent to which they are considered full-time positions) than other occupations. For example, although manufacturing production jobs offer lower annual wages than do construction jobs, their wages (more than $23,000 in 2012 dollars) are still higher than

Table 3.7 Workers in other services in Queens by occupation, 2000 and 2012 Employment concentration index

Percentage Native born

Not a citizen

Total

Native born

Not a citizen

Total

Personal care and service occupations

21.9

52.1

100.0

0.6

1.3

1.0

Installation, maintenance and repair workers

30.9

38.2

100.0

0.9

1.0

1.0

Production occupations

15.2

57.7

100.0

0.4

1.5

1.0

Building and grounds cleaning and maintenance occupations

18.4

57.7

100.0

0.5

1.5

1.0

Total

35.6

39.1

100.0

1.0

1.0

1.0

Personal care and service occupations

21.8

48.2

100.0

0.7

1.2

1.0

Installation, maintenance and repair workers

27.1

44.3

100.0

0.9

1.1

1.0

Production occupations

13.7

53.3

100.0

0.5

1.3

1.0

Building and grounds cleaning and maintenance occupations

16.2

60.6

100.0

0.5

1.5

1.0

Total

30.0

40.7

100.0

1.0

1.0

1.0

Other services 2000

2012

Change in employment, 2000–2012

Percent change in employment, 2000–2012

Native born

Not a citizen

Total

Native born

Not a citizen

Total

Personal care and service occupations

859

1,628

3,953

54.9

43.7

55.3

Installation, maintenance and repair workers

−505

−29

−956

−25.4

−1.2

−14.9

Production occupations

−68

−198

−48

−11.4

−8.8

−1.2

Building and grounds cleaning and maintenance occupations

195

1,103

1,659

31.8

57.4

49.8

−824

2,374

4,170

−6.5

17.2

11.8

Other services

Total

Source: Data from 2000 and 2012 census and American Community Survey, available at https://​usa​.ipums ​.org/​usa. Note: Italic numbers indicate a location quotient greater than 1.

77 79

20,192

18,551

15,369

7,941

Food preparation and serving jobs in larger arts industry

Transportation and material-­ moving jobs in larger arts industry

Personal care jobs in other services

Building and grounds jobs in other services

30.5

40.1

42.2

42.5

41.5

40.0

Mean usual hours worked per week

Source: Data from 2012 census and American Community Survey, available at https://​usa​.ipums​.org/​usa.

60

79

72

26,905

Construction jobs in construction

82

23,469

Worked 50–52 weeks last year (%)

Production jobs in manufacturing

Immigrant jobs

Mean annual wage or salaried income ($)

18

16

18

22

12

30

41.0

38.1

36.4

35.8

37.1

40.6

Do not speak Mean English (%) age

39

46

26

41

43

36

High school degree (%)

Table 3.8 Characteristics and qualifications in key immigrant jobs in Queens, 2012

23

23

30

19

18

15

Some college (%)

28

23

16

33

22

27

In U.S. less than 6 years (%)

13

13

20

11

13

17

In U.S. for over 20 years (%)

90 / Lynn McCormick

other occupations into which immigrants have been moving (ranging from about $8,000 to $20,000 annually): food preparation, transportation and material moving, personal care, and building and grounds work. Furthermore, a higher share of production workers worked for a full year (82 percent worked a 50- to 52-week year in 2012) than all other occupations. Production jobs also, on average, provided a 40-hour week of work. (Building and grounds workers worked much less, on average, at 30.5 hours per week, which might explain in part their lower annual salary.) Manufacturing production jobs were also more likely to offer a foothold in the economy for those with lower educational skills and higher language barriers. For example, a lower share (36 percent) of production workers in manufacturing had a high school degree than in all other occupations except those in transportation and material moving (26 percent) in the larger food services sector. Fewer production workers also had some college (15 percent vs. up to 30 percent for those in transportation and material-­ moving occupations in the larger food services sector). Plus, almost onethird of production workers today do not speak English, compared with much lower shares for the other occupations. Thus, manufacturing still offers an entry point for immigrants to work while becoming initiated into U.S. society. Manufacturing production jobs offer a relatively higher wage and full-time work to immigrants with lower education and English-­ language skills. In many ways, these are superior jobs for newly immigrating workers compared with the other jobs into which they are moving. .

Conclusion Manufacturing companies still continue to provide jobs to relatively more immigrants than other groups in both Queens and the city at large. These jobs are higher paid and more secure than other jobs that lower-skilled workers with English-language barriers can obtain. However, with the significant loss of companies and jobs in this sector, immigrants are increasingly moving into other occupations that are less capable of helping them improve their standard of living. Serving and preparation jobs in the food sector and personal care jobs in private households and other services are increasingly absorbing immigrant workers and offering lower pay and irregular work schedules compared with manufacturing. As Long Island City and western Queens, the heartland of that borough’s industrial activity, gentrify and replace manufacturers with designers and other office dwellers, relatively good jobs in manufacturing will continue to disappear and be replaced by more inferior restaurant and other service jobs. The implications of these patterns for immigrant workers are that they will remain trapped in lower-income and more stressful jobs compared with

The Restructuring of Manufacturing in Queens  /  91

those who still work in manufacturing. Avenues for upward advancement (often to become a supervisor in a manufacturing plant and eventually a shop owner) in these newer jobs are fewer. For example, domestic workers would not be able to advance to any supervisory position. These new jobs and industries have also never been organized, so that most restaurant workers, for example, today hold low-paid jobs with few benefits or sick days. Opportunities for advancement are also limited. In one effort to change this situation, the Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United was formed in New York in 2007 by activists wanting to create better jobs for the industry’s workers, especially those of color and immigrants who are mostly crowded into the worst jobs in the industry (Jayaraman 2014). ROC has researched the industry and organizes career ladders that offer training for lower-wage workers to help them gain access to the well-paid positions in fine dining restaurants. It also formed an affiliated worker-owned restaurant cooperative. Without such efforts—manufacturing jobs largely became good jobs because of union organizing in the post–World War II period— the new jobs immigrants hold in food service, domestic service, and other service sector jobs will remain dead end and not provide an avenue for moving into the middle class that manufacturing jobs have done for generations of newcomers to our shores. Notes 1.  Disclosure of employment data is not done when there are few employers and the job count for an individual company can be identified. This is to protect confidential information of a specific business. County Business Patterns reports a range of employment for small sectors, from which the average can be calculated to use as a proxy employment number when not reported by the QCEW. County Business Patterns data can be found at https://​w ww​.census​.gov/​programs​-surveys/​cbp​.html. 2.  Both the PUMS and ACS data were accessed from IPUMS, at https://​usa​.ipums​ .org/​usa. 3.  If the share of jobs in manufacturing, for example, is greater locally (e.g., 20 percent of all local jobs) than nationally (e.g., 10 percent of all jobs), then there are relatively more manufacturing jobs locally (per the size of the population), so one can say this activity is concentrated in the locality (at a location quotient of 20 percent ÷ 10 percent, or 2). 4.  These numbers are taken from 2012 QCEW data, available at https://​w ww​.bls​ .gov/​cew. 5.  These numbers are taken from 2012 QCEW data, available at https://​w ww​.bls​ .gov/​cew. 6.  Most manufacturers in New York City are renters (City of New York 2005). 7.  There are now twenty-one (NYCEDC, n.d.). 8.  Even in these zones, certain other commercial uses can be built “as of right,” such as hotels, big-box stores, and office buildings (Pratt Center for Community Development 2009).

92 / Lynn McCormick

9.  Since the experience of naturalized citizens is often in between that for immigrants and the native born, I do not report their experiences in the following analysis unless the patterns are unexpected. In addition, the patterns of where immigrants and the native born work in manufacturing and other sectors in Queens are very similar to those in the city at large. Therefore, the data for the city are not reported unless significant. 10.  The share of immigrants in manufacturing in 2000 (39.7 percent) is divided by their share in the workforce as a whole (25.0 percent) to produce an employment concentration index of 1.6 (39.7 percent ÷ 25.0 percent = 1.6). 11.  They were also overrepresented in other occupations, like health care support occupations (not shown). But these jobs are an insignificant number of the total manufacturing workforce. 12.  Other sectors in which immigrants are overrepresented—that is, with location quotients greater than one—saw these concentrations decline over the period, as did manufacturing. These include wholesale and retail trade. Some occupations such as health care aides, which are informally known as immigrant niches and employ many immigrants, also did not show growth in their location quotients over this period. 13.  Their presence has also risen in other sectors in which the native born predominate (e.g., financial services), but in these they are still very underrepresented. References Bernheimer, A., C. Cathcart, J. Chou, K. Hayashi, and R. Lane. 2012. Making Midtown: A New Vision for a 21st Century Garment District in New York City. New York: Design Trust for Public Space. Bram, J., and M. Anderson. 2001. “Declining Manufacturing Employment in the New York–New Jersey Region: 1969–99.” Federal Reserve Bank of New York Current Issues in Economics and Finance 7 (1): 1–6. Brauer, D. 2004. “What Accounts for the Decline in Manufacturing Employment?” Congressional Budget Office Economic and Budget Brief, February 18. http://​w ww​ .cbo​.gov/​sites/​default/​fi les/​02​-18​-manufacturingemployment​.pdf. City of New York. 2005. “Protecting and Growing New York City’s Industrial Job Base.” January. http://​w ww​.nyc​.gov/​html/​sbs/​downloads/​pdf/​industrial​_policy​.pdf. ———. 2012. “Mayor Bloomberg Opens New Jetblue Headquarters in Long Island City and Marks Completion of $45 Million Queens Plaza Improvement Project.” April 4. https://​w ww1​.nyc​.gov/​office​-of​-the​-mayor/​news/​117​-12/​mayor​-bloomberg​-opens​ -new​-jetblue​-headquarters​-long​-island​-city​-marks​-completion​-45​#/​5. Cotner, M. 2012a. “Four Signs That LIC Is Becoming a Center for Tech in NYC.” Brownstoner, September 18. http://​queens​.brownstoner​.com/​2012/​09/​four​-signs​-that​-lic​-is​ -becoming​-a​-center​-for​-tech​-in​-nyc/. ———. 2012b. “A Visit to Shapeways in LIC.” Brownstoner, December 24. http://​queens​ .brownstoner​.com/​2012/​12/​a​-visit​-to​-shapeways​-in​-lic/. Crain’s New York Business. 2015. “No Housing Is Affordable without a Job.” Febru­ary 26. http://​w ww​.crainsnewyork​.com/​article/​20150227/​OPINION/​150229861/​no​ -housing​-is​-affordable​-without​-a​-job. Craytor, M., A. Hodgson, M. Lopa, and O. Sayvetz. 2013. “State of Local Manufacturing.” NYCEDC, October. http://​w ww​.nycedc​.com/​sites/​default/​fi les/​fi lemanager/​ State​_of​_ Local​_ Manufacturing​_Oct​_ 2013​.pdf.

The Restructuring of Manufacturing in Queens  /  93

Engquist, E., and A. Elstein. 2015. “Mayor Finally Unveils Plan to Protect Industrial Businesses, Which Calls for Freezing Out Hotels and Self-Storage.” Crain’s New York Business, November 3. http://​w ww​.crainsnewyork​.com/​a rticle/​20151103/​R EAL​ _ESTATE/​151109966/​mayor​-finally​-unveils​-plan​-to​-protect​-industrial​-businesses​ -which​-calls​-for​-freezing​-out​-hotels​-and​-self​-storage. Greenberg, A. 2012. “Inside the World’s Biggest Consumer 3D Printing Factory.” Forbes, December 10. https://​w ww​.forbes​.com/​sites/​a ndygreenberg/​2012/​12/​10/​inside​-the​ -worlds​-biggest​-consumer​-focused​-3d​-printing​-factory/​#4d00511162cd. Hum, T. 2015. “City Industrial Manufacturing Plan Still Needed.” Gotham Gazette, July 23. http://​w ww​.gothamgazette​.com/​index​.php/​opinion/​5820​-city​-industrial​-manu facturing​-plan​-still​-needed​-de​-blasio​-hum. Jayaraman, S. 2014. “Restaurant Opportunities Centers United: Serving the Service Sector.” In Connecting People to Work: Workforce Intermediaries and Sector Strategies, edited by M. Conway and R. Giloth, 193–208. New York: Aspen Institute. Liff, B. 1997. “City’s Zoning Out on Manufacturing.” Daily News, December 22, p. 4. Lysiak, M., and C. Siemaszko. 2012. “Mayor Bloomberg Makes Pitch for 3-D Printing and Says It Will ‘Revolutionize’ Manufacturing.” New York Daily News, October 18. http://​w ww​.nydailynews​.com/​new​-york/​mayor​-bloomberg​-plugs​-cutting​-edge​-3​-d​ -printing​-technology​-article​-1​.1186747. McCormack, R. 2009. “The Plight of American Manufacturing.” American Prospect, December 21. http://​prospect​.org/​article/​plight​-american​-manufacturing. McCormick, L. 2015. “The City and Industry: Deurbanizing Manufacturing in New York City?” In The Handbook of Manufacturing Industries in the World Economy, edited by J. Bryson, J. Clark, and V. Vanchan, 425–438. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. New York City Council. 2014. “Engines of Opportunity: Reinvigorating New York City’s Manufacturing Zones for the 21st Century.” November. https://​council​.nyc​.gov/​land​ -use/​w p​-content/​uploads/​sites/​53/​2 017/​05/​Engines​- of​- Opportunity​-Full​-Report​ .pdf. ​ ownload/l​ ong-​ island-​ city-​ cbd​ NYCEDC. 2011. “Long Island City.” https://​ziladoc​.com/d _pdf. ———. 2013a. “NYCEDC Announces Grand Prize Winner of New York’s Next Top Makers Competition.” September 20. https://​w ww​.nyrealestatelawblog​.com/​man hattan​-litigation​-blog/​2013/​september/​powerclip​-eclipses​-all/. ———. 2013b. “NYCxDesign: Makers, Jewelers and Design for Production in NYC.” May 16. https://​nycedc​.tumblr​.com/​post/​50582126248/​nycxdesign​-makers​-jewelers​ -and​-design​-for. ———. n.d. “Industrial and Manufacturing.” http://​w ww​.nycedc​.com/​industry/​indus trial/​nyc​-industrial​-business​-zones (accessed September 4, 2020). NYCxDESIGN. 2020. “About Us.” https://​w ww​.nycxdesign​.com/​faq. NYIRN (New York Industrial Retention Network). 2004. “Illegal Residential Conversions in the East Williamsburg In-Place Industrial Park.” May. Pratt Center for Community Development, Brooklyn, NY. ———. 2009. “Commercial Uses Invading Mayor’s Industrial Business Zones.” October 28. Pratt Center for Community Development, Brooklyn, NY. Parry, B. 2015. “Coalition for Queens Announces New Funding to Teach Tech Skills.” QNS, March 15. https://​qns​.com/​story/​2015/​03/​20/​coalition​-for​-queens​-announces​ -new​-funding​-to​-teach​-tech​-skills/.

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Pratt Center for Community Development. 2009. “Protecting New York’s Threatened Manufacturing Space.” http://​prattcenter​.net/​sites/​default/​fi les/​t hreatened​_ manu facturing​.pdf. Rast, J. 2005. “Curbing Industrial Decline or Thwarting Redevelopment? An Evaluation of Chicago’s Clybourn Corridor, Goose Island, and Elston Corridor Planned Manufacturing Districts.” University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Center for Economic Development, November. https://​w ww​.csu​.edu/​cerc/​researchreports/​documents/​ CurbingIndustrialDeclineOrThwartingRedevelopment2005​.pdf. Savitch-Lew, A. 2016. “Past Rezonings Shape Long Island City’s Feelings about de Blasio Plan.” CityLimits, June 9. https://​citylimits​.org/​2016/​06/​09/​past​-rezonings​-shape​ -long​-island​-citys​-feelings​-about​-de​-blasio​-plan/. Scott, R. E. 2015. “The Manufacturing Footprint and the Importance of U.S. Manufacturing Jobs.” Economic Policy Institute, January 22. http://​w ww​.epi​.org/​publication/​ the​-manufacturing​-footprint​-and​-the​-importance​-of​-u​-s​-manufacturing​-jobs/. Trapasso, C. 2014. “Queens Skyline to Change with Several Megadevelopments on Tap from Willets Point to Hunters Point: Queens Developments to Add Skyscrapers of Thousands of New Housing Units and Retail Spaces.” New York Daily News, January 24. http://​w ww​.nydailynews​.com/​new​-york/​queens/​queens​-skyline​-change​-article​ -1​.1590679. Waldinger, R. 1996. Still the Promised City? African-Americans and New Immigrants in Postindustrial New York. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wolf-Powers, L. 2005. “Up-Zoning New York City’s Mixed-Use Neighborhoods: Property-Led Economic Development and the Anatomy of a Planning Dilemma.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 24:379–393.

4 Employee Ownership as an Immigrant Workforce Strategy Christopher Michael

O

ver the last decade, employee-owned businesses with Latin American workers have received attention from the New York Times (Dewan 2014; Lacey 2014), Al Jazeera (Forde 2014), National Public Radio (Wallace 2014), and the New York Daily News (Salinger 2014) as a potential solution to unemployment in undocumented immigrant communities. Although federal rules for the employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) prohibit the inclusion of undocumented workers, non-ESOP employeeowned businesses may bypass federal laws that generally forbid corporations from employing undocumented workers. Some immigrant advocates, picking up on this loophole, have embraced a strategy that aims to provide stable income to undocumented workers through the creation of employeeowned businesses. Advocates use a traditional form of employee-owned business, commonly called a worker cooperative, in which workers possess equal voting rights over the firm. However, these cooperative employeeowned businesses, which typically do not involve an ESOP, lack a successful track record and include only six thousand workers nationally (DAWI, n.d.). One might suspect that normal barriers to the success of worker cooperatives would also limit their use as an immigrant workforce strategy and that, moreover, the involvement of undocumented workers would heighten any challenges. In 2013, New York City was home to thirty-seven worker cooperatives, of which over half involved an almost exclusively Latin American ownership (Guallpa 2013; Spencer 2013). At Cooperative Home Care Associates,

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the sixty-first-largest employee-owned business by employment in the United States, approximately 70 percent of its 2,500-person workforce was Latin American (NCEO 2020a; Spencer 2013). Thus, although Latinos constitute a quarter of New York City’s population, about two-thirds of its approximately three thousand worker-members were Latin American. This high concentration of Latin American workers is the result of efforts by several nonprofit organizations in the city to develop employee-owned businesses for low-income, minority, and immigrant workers. In 2013, five such organizations were located in the borough of Queens: Worker’s Justice Project, Make the Road New York, City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law’s Community and Economic Development Clinic, Worker-Owned Rockaways Cooperatives, and We See Beauty Foundation. This chapter, first, provides background on the history of employee ownership, which initially was an ideal advanced by public intellectuals and labor evangelists during the industrial revolution and later was a feature of the mainstream economy that emerged during deindustrialization. It also offers some highlights from the academic literature on employee ownership and situates this study within that literature. Second, the chapter describes the origins of an immigrant workforce strategy centered on employee ownership, the legal analysis that undergirds this approach, and its development in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City over the last twenty-five years. Third, it presents case studies of five Queens-based organizations and their efforts to create gainful employment for undocumented workers through start-up employee-owned businesses. Finally, the chapter offers an analysis of these activities, concluding that immigrant advocates might invest more resources in referral services and day labor job centers. This mostly qualitative study draws on news sources, personal interviews and correspondence, participant observation, and government-­ produced statistics. As much as possible, it measures the success of the five Queens-based organizations in terms of the numbers of workers affected and the concrete outcomes achieved for such workers. I have been involved in business development and lobbying efforts focused on employee ownership in the city since 2009. I founded and served as executive director of the NYC Network of Worker Cooperatives, a local business association of ­employee-owned businesses. I attended the CUNY School of Law, participated in its Community and Economic Development Clinic, and held a postdoctoral fellowship with the same clinic, which provides legal services to employee-owned businesses. I was also general counsel and policy director at the ICA Group, the oldest U.S. nonprofit dedicated to employee ownership. Beginning in 2013, the NYC Network of Worker Cooperatives, the clinic, and the ICA Group partnered with other nonprofits, including Make

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the Road New York and Worker’s Justice Project, to obtain funding from the New York City Council for a citywide employee ownership initiative.

Background on Employee Ownership Employee ownership emerged as a meaningful concept during the industrial revolution in Western Europe and the United States. In the Englishspeaking world, John Stuart Mill was the name most associated with employee ownership, although his primary text on the matter was coauthored by an uncredited Harriet Taylor. Mill and Taylor promoted a vision for society in which “the relation of masters and work-people will be gradually superseded by partnership, in one of two forms: in some cases, association of the labourers with the [employer]; in others, and perhaps finally in all, association of labourers among themselves” (Mill [1848] 1909, bk. 4, chap. 7, para. 15). For Mill and Taylor, employee ownership connoted a system of employment relations involving “the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves” (bk. 4, chap. 7, para. 21). In the United States, one of the more prominent supporters of employee ownership was Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University, governor of California, senator from California, and railroad magnate. According to Stanford (1887, 5), “Intelligent, educated labor possesses the capacity for the accomplishment of any undertaking or enterprise, and need not wait for an individual called an employer to associate its effort, and direct and control the industry out of which it earns wages and pays premium to capital.” While in Congress, Stanford introduced a bill to facilitate the creation of employee-owned businesses in the District of Columbia. Although labor leaders, workers, academics, and many employers were inspired by this vision of economic transformation, and some practical experiments were made in this direction, such as enterprises established with the support of the Plumbers’ International Union, the Iron Molders’ International Union, the Knights of Labor, and the wheat baron Charles Pillsbury, this era witnessed few successful employee-owned businesses (Michael 2018). The second major period of experimentation with employee ownership in U.S. history occurred during the Great Depression. In the early 1930s, as unemployment and deprivation affected larger numbers, communities spontaneously clustered into “self-help groups” to achieve a variety of goals: charitable relief from government agencies, businesses, and farms; political and electoral mobilization; and trade of goods and services among group members. In 1933, just as employment through federal work programs

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­ iminished the need for self-help activities and active membership in selfd help groups halved, the federal government attempted to steer the remaining self-help group members into productive activity. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration, in partnership with state agencies, issued “production grants” to self-help groups for the purchase of equipment and raw materials. Initially, these production grants fueled additional self-help activity, with groups producing, for example, more canned goods and clothing articles for group members’ own use. Toward the last two years of the “production phase” of self-help group activity, some groups metamorphosed into employee-owned businesses. By the end of 1938, about 150 such firms existed in twenty states with approximately six thousand total employeeowners and an average firm size of about forty individuals (Kerr 1939, 14– 15, 34). A combination of regulatory limits on the market activities of these organizations, a recovering economy, and defunding of the production program led to the rapid dissolution of these businesses. In the United States, employee-owned businesses have made inroads into the mainstream economy only since 1974. This contemporary phenomenon originated in the work of the attorney Louis Kelso, who invented the ESOP in 1956, when he used a leveraged buyout to facilitate the transfer of Peninsula Newspapers to its workforce (Menke Group, n.d.). Between 1956 and 1974, the ESOP was used only sporadically. In 1974, Kelso succeeded in getting federal legislation passed, after which the ESOP became widely used as a method of compensation and a tool for corporate finance. Kelso and other advocates succeeded in passing progressively stronger employee ownership legislation throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Major victories included (1) allowing deferral of capital gains taxes on the sale of shares to an ESOP, as long as the ESOP owns a minimum of 30 percent of the corporation after the sale, and (2) permitting ESOPs to hold S corporation stock, which allows S corporations that are 100 percent owned by an ESOP to function as tax-exempt entities. These changes correlate with spikes in the number of businesses that are more than 30 percent employee-owned and 100 percent employee-owned. Although tax incentives clearly drove the creation of employee-owned businesses, the primary achievement of this era is arguably Kelso’s original invention of the leveraged buyout as a tool for the transfer of business ownership without investment from employees. In 2016, approximately 14 million individuals had some level of employee stock ownership at more than six thousand companies through an ESOP (NCEO 2019). Of these, roughly 1.5 million individuals (or 1 percent of the privatesector workforce) worked at four thousand majority employee-owned businesses that use an ESOP (Wiefek 2016; NCEO 2020b). Over the last four decades, a small cluster of non-ESOP and cooperative employee-owned businesses also developed, often through use of the

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leveraged buyout mechanism invented by Kelso. In some cases, however, nonprofits took leadership in establishing worker cooperatives, such as Community Service Society and its Cooperative Home Care Associates (discussed later), Philadelphia Area Cooperative Enterprises and its O&O Supermarkets, and the Arizmendi Association and its Arizmendi bakeries. Additionally, since the late 1960s, dozens of micro-businesses have launched as start-up worker cooperatives, many of which might be described as lifestyle businesses (Jackall and Crain 1984). In 2013, approximately 3,500 individuals worked at roughly 250 worker cooperatives with a median workforce of 10 employees (DAWI, n.d.). This figure does not include Cooperative Home Care Associates, which was an outlier with roughly 2,500 employees. The figure also does not include worker cooperatives that are structured with an ESOP. During the 1980s, approximately eighty municipalities in the United Kingdom funded local nonprofits to support low-income women and immigrants in the creation of employee-owned businesses (Cornforth et al. 1988). These nonprofit cooperative development agencies, which typically consisted of three staff members with little background in business development, assisted clients with business formation and with bookkeeping, marketing, and general business advice. Over a ten-year period, approximately a thousand employee-owned businesses were launched. It is unclear how many of these organizations were shell companies and how many achieved any notable level of operating activity. That said, after funding ended, the nonprofits disbanded and the businesses folded. Three decades later, I am unaware of any existing employee-owned businesses established under the U.K. programs (Michael 2015). Scholars from the fields of economics, history, sociology, political science, philosophy, and law have produced works on employee ownership. Robert Dahl (1985), Carole Pateman (1988), and David Ellerman (1992) advanced normative claims in support of employee ownership. Works by Herbert Adams (1888), Clark Kerr (1939), and Joseph Blasi (1988) provide extensive details on employee-owned businesses as they operated during the Gilded Age, during the Great Depression, and since the passage of ESOP legislation. Benjamin Ward (1958), Jaroslav Vanek (1970), J. E. Meade (1972), Eirik Furubotn and Svetozar Pejovich (1970), and Michael Jensen and William Meckling (1979) have offered touchstone theoretical analyses of ­employee-owned businesses and employee-owned market economies. A second generation of economists, including Avner Ben-Ner (1988), Hajime Miyazaki (1984), and Henry Hansmann (1996), as well as John Pencavel and Ben Craig (1994), have also made important theoretical and empirical contributions to the literature on employee ownership. This chapter is informed by these authors and addresses their work as it intersects with the

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fields of community economic development, immigration law, and immigrant ­studies.

A Contemporary History of Immigrant EmployeeOwned Businesses Employee ownership as a tool to combat poverty within immigrant communities arose because of a particular legal opening. Normally, federal immigration law prohibits the employment of undocumented workers. However, undocumented immigrants are not prosecuted for operating a business. This is an established legal loophole that allows undocumented immigrants to engage in stable income-producing activity. A few immigrant advocates seized on this strategy and broadened it. If a firm can provide work and income to a single undocumented owner, or a handful of undocumented partners, an employee-owned business might permit a larger number of undocumented employee-owners. In 1999, Scott Cummings described the immigrant entrepreneur loophole in the New York University Review of Law and Social Change. According to Cummings, the major caveat to this approach is that each owneroperator must demonstrate a sufficient level of “‘proprietary’ interest” (1999, 208). If an undocumented owner appears to lack the attributes of an employer—ownership, participation in management, and profit sharing—then the firm can be prosecuted for illegal employment of an undocumented person. Although an employee-ownership-based strategy for immigrant employment appeared to bear some risks circa 1999, the ensuing years of experimentation appear not to have met with obstacles in the way of law enforcement, as documented in part later. That said, immigrant employeeowned businesses tend to be small firms of no more than a few dozen ­employee-owners. At a large employee-owned business—that is, of over five hundred employees—ownership and profit interests would be fractions of a percent and participation in management would likely be limited to annual shareholder meetings. It is unclear whether federal law would continue to exempt immigrant employee-owners from treatment as illegally employed undocumented persons in the large-business context. Finally, it should be made clear that immigrant employee-owned businesses are typically launched by nonprofit advocacy organizations. In principle, if undocumented workers have the entrepreneurial resources to launch a business, they would most benefit from a standard form of business, in which they might negotiate different levels of capital investment, profit rights, and control rights and hire documented employees. Such a

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structure would still satisfy the immigrant entrepreneur loophole. However, to create more legal sources of income for undocumented workers, immigrant advocates choose to organize start-ups as worker cooperatives, which are characteristically egalitarian in terms of profit sharing, voting rights, and culture. For the undocumented individuals who opt into such an arrangement, a job opportunity at a worker cooperative might be a better alternative to day labor and unemployment or launching their own business. In turn, undocumented workers may be willing to invest unpaid work hours into such an enterprise if it might mean gaining the advantages of regular employment. What results is a minor opening for immigrant advocates to leverage a certain amount of sweat equity from undocumented workers to establish small employee-owned businesses.

Prospera, the Workplace Project, and Center for Family Life Although New York efforts are often highlighted in news publications, a San Francisco Bay Area nonprofit might be credited with the immigrant ­employee-owned business innovation. Prospera (formerly WAGES, or Women’s Action to Gain Economic Security) launched in 1995 with the mission of supporting low-income women through cooperative business ownership (Prospera, n.d.). In the San Francisco Bay Area, Latino families were hardest hit by rising poverty levels, experiencing increases in poverty of over 25 percent between 2000 and 2009 (Soursourian 2012). By 2009, 33 percent of poor families in the region were of Latin American descent. In the midst of these conditions, and over the course of twenty years, Prospera developed five employee-owned businesses, and in 2012, these firms employed over ninety-five women—almost all immigrant and Latina (“WAGES” 2012). Before employment with a Prospera business, 90 percent of the women lived below the poverty line. In 2012, the five employee-owned businesses drew $3.2 million in revenue and offered wages of between $10 and $15 per hour, as well as medical insurance and paid vacation time. ­Employee-owners experienced increases in family income of 70–86 percent (WAGES, n.d.; “WAGES” 2012). Worker health was also promoted through the use of nontoxic products (“Seventh Generation” 2009). In the late 1990s, as Prospera began to develop immigrant employeeowned businesses in the Bay Area, the Workplace Project started a Latina employee-owned cleaning business, UNITY House Cleaners, in Long Island, New York. The Workplace Project, founded in 1992, was among the first wave of worker centers in the United States focusing on the immigrant

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Latino community. Over the course of seventeen years, UNITY provided a stable income for 187 individuals (Krishna 2013). In 2013, UNITY consisted of 36 employee-owners. A decade after Prospera and the Workplace Project, the Center for Family Life (CFL), a social service agency in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, came to promote the concept of the immigrant employee-owned business in New York City. In 2006, CFL launched an employee-owned cleaning business to address the lack of employment among its Latina program participants (Krishna 2013). Following the examples of Prospera and the Workplace Project, CFL created Sí Se Puede Women’s Cooperative. Notwithstanding a few false starts, including a men’s construction business and a women’s home painting company, CFL went on to establish several more immigrant employee-owned businesses between 2006 and 2013, including Beyond Care in childcare; Golden Steps in elder care; Kickin’ It in sports education; Trusty Amigos in dog walking and pet care; and Émigré Gourmet in catering (NYC NOWC, n.d.). Almost all employee-owners at these businesses were of Latin American origin, and almost all were women. In 2013, Sí Se Puede employed about sixty women and was the second-largest worker cooperative in New York. Beyond Care, CFL’s second project, employed forty-five women and was the third-largest worker cooperative in New York. Other New York City–based nonprofits began to take inspiration from CFL and Prospera. Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation launched Ecomundo Cleaning, which had approximately twenty-five ­employee-owners in 2013. And the Queens-based Worker’s Justice Project started Apple Eco-Friendly Cleaning (discussed later). Both of these ­employee-owned businesses provide employment to immigrant and lowincome Latinas. And in 2011, New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn announced a Worker Cooperative Development initiative that would fund CFL to instruct other nonprofits in business development (New York City Council 2013). Quinn felt that “by teaching more organizations how to train New Yorkers to develop worker-owned cooperative businesses, we’re helping create more stable, better paying jobs in the communities that need them most” (Samuels 2013). This initial round of funding involved Westchester Square Partnership, a Bronx-based nonprofit that supports South Asian immigrants, and Make the Road New York, a Latino and workingclass membership organization with headquarters in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and Jackson Heights, Queens (discussed later). Although a handful of other nonprofits participated in this first round of training, only Westchester Square Partnership and Make the Road New York launched employeeowned businesses: a short-lived South Asian food manufacturer and Pa’lante Green Cleaning, respectively.

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CFL’s employee ownership program targets personal development, income generation, and community and family support. Business meetings are viewed by CFL as a means to develop employee-owners’ speaking and conflict resolution skills, as well as opportunities to identify and remedy personal problems that might arise for the women, such as domestic violence or financial difficulties. Sí Se Puede employees are owners, but they are also still program participants. And so, although it is a residential cleaning business, with no need for all-staff meetings, regular all-staff meetings and unanimous voting procedures are core elements of Sí Se Puede’s governance practices. Combining an opportunity to earn regular income and receive social services, Sí Se Puede became a very popular employer with a waiting list of hundreds of job seekers. However, the logistics of all-staff meetings made it difficult for Sí Se Puede to accommodate many new applicants. CFL lacked the physical space to host meetings with more than a few dozen employeeowners. And the existing CFL program staff would likely have been unable to manage the involvement of a larger workforce. Also, larger meetings would not have afforded the same kind of direct learning opportunities for employee-owners, which was core to CFL’s mission. CFL and Sí Se Puede could have abandoned or modified some of their personal development goals in response to the high demand for jobs with Sí Se Puede. The business might have limited all-staff meetings to a single annual meeting for the purpose of electing a board of directors and making high-level policy decisions about the business. In this, CFL might have turned back to the example of Prospera. The more-mature Prospera ­employee-owned businesses relied on employee-elected boards of directors to carry out company business in lieu of all-staff meetings (Dubb 2010). As early as 2003, “[Prospera] focused on addressing the challenges we had previously experienced by improving the management model and our approach to governance. We developed a more streamlined board, which is a hybrid board that has [Prospera] representatives who bring their expertise in business development and help guide the businesses. We also embraced professional management and operational efficiency as ways to build bigger cooperatives” (Dubb 2010). Following the approach of Prospera, Sí Se Puede could have hired as many employee-owners as opportunity allowed. At the same time, CFL and Sí Se Puede might have identified other mechanisms for participation and personal development, such as group counseling and other social services for employee-owners outside the business context. Arguably, one limit to this scenario might be federal immigration laws that require a threshold level of involvement in management to exempt immigrant employee-owners from treatment as illegal employees. Yet in the case of Sí Se Puede, federal law requirements might be less of an issue (or a

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nonissue), because the organization is structured as a referral service that is co-owned by sole proprietor cleaners. Clients are referred to the cleaners, and clients directly pay the cleaners. Sí Se Puede does not issue any compensation to the cleaners. As a result, it would be difficult to argue that an employment relationship exists between Sí Se Puede and its owners. Thus, Sí Se Puede’s capacity to attract and retain cleaning clients should be the only external factor limiting its growth.

Community Service Society and Cooperative Home Care Associates This brief history would not be complete without a discussion of Community Service Society (CSS) and Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA). CHCA was founded with a focus on low-income women of color and not on undocumented workers and thus does not use the immigrant entrepreneur loophole (Bollier 1992). However, as the largest worker cooperative in the United States, with over 2,500 employees (circa 2013), CHCA likely involves more immigrant employee-owners than all other U.S. worker cooperatives combined. As mentioned earlier, approximately 70 percent of CHCA’s workforce is Latina. The total percentage of immigrant workers at CHCA may be still higher. The 165-year-old CSS launched CHCA in 1985 with the goal of creating quality jobs for poor people. CSS selected the home health care industry, which was already a significant employer of low-income wage earners. After a few years, some of the key nonprofit staffers involved in the project left their jobs for CHCA. Rick Surpin, who was head of the CSS Center for Community Economic Development, became chief executive officer at CHCA. Peggy Powell, another staff member at CSS, became director of education at CHCA. In the course of establishing CHCA, CSS had hired the ICA Group to assist with business analysis (Bollier 1992). ICA’s executive director, Steven Dawson, would also leave his position to launch Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute, a nonprofit affiliate of CHCA that is dedicated to home health care policy and education. CSS launched CHCA with a workforce of approximately 100 home health care aides and office staff after obtaining a contract from Montefiore Medical Center, the largest health system in the Bronx. Over the course of its first few years, CHCA grew to a 500-person operation, where it plateaued for many years. In 2000, Rick Surpin resigned as president to launch another affiliated nonprofit, Independence Care System, which offers managed care plans to disabled and chronically ill individuals with long-term care needs (Independence Care System, n.d.). As a kind of broker between the

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federal and state governments and front-line health service providers, Independence Care System is able to connect CHCA with new clients. Succeeding Surpin at CHCA was Michael Elsas (2013), a midcareer health care management professional, who would go on to lead the organization’s expansion from 500 to 2,500 employees in less than ten years. Over the last twenty-five years, CHCA has worked with Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute to replicate CHCA. Although the newer firms have yet to achieve the size of CHCA, they are considerably larger than the average worker cooperative of 10 employees. In 2020, Home Care Associates (n.d.) in Philadelphia employed approximately 250 people, Cooperative Care of Wisconsin (n.d.) in central Wisconsin employed 40 people, and Circle of Life Caregiver Cooperative (n.d.) in Bellingham, Washington, employed over 50 people.

Queens Today: Jackson Heights, Long Island City, and the Rockaways Inspired by earlier experiments with immigrant employee ownership, a new crop of nonprofits has begun to dedicate resources to the development of immigrant employee-owned businesses. Many of these nonprofits are located in New York City and, particularly, in Brooklyn and Queens, where a small community has coalesced in support of worker cooperatives. The CFL in Brooklyn, Green Worker Cooperatives in the Bronx, the Urban Justice Center in Manhattan, and CUNY School of Law in Queens, among others, have established programs targeting the development of such businesses. One marker of this activity was the creation of the New York City Network of Worker Cooperatives, in December 2009, as a trade association for local worker cooperatives and affiliated nonprofits. At its inception, this new community of advocates did not have substantial relationships with other New York City–based organizations involved in employee ownership. For example, the metropolitan area is home to dozens of ESOP employee-owned businesses and several professional services firms catering to ESOPs. The new cohort was also disconnected from past local efforts to build employeeowned businesses, which included passage of New York State legislation in 1983. Nevertheless, this new set of nonprofits and worker cooperatives became an increasingly integrated group and, with some outside assistance, lobbied city government for their common interests. Highly focused on the development of immigrant employee-owned businesses, their work has targeted immigrant and Latino communities throughout the city, with a plurality of the groups concentrated in the borough with the city’s largest foreign-born population, Queens. From Jackson Heights to Long Island City

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and the Rockaways, Queens-based nonprofits have tried to improve the lives of immigrant workers through the development of employee-owned businesses.

Worker’s Justice Project In 2002, a state senator and a pastor combined efforts to found a job center for day laborers (Katinas 2014). Located at the Caesar’s Bay Mall in Bensonhurst, the Bay Parkway Community Job Center mediates contracts between construction companies and freelance workers, mostly immigrants from Guatemala, Mexico, Ecuador, and El Salvador (Katinas 2013). In addition to negotiating higher day rates, the job center monitors payment, because day laborers are routinely victims of wage theft. The center protects workers from the dangerous traffic conditions resulting from curbside pickup and checks that workers return safely from job sites. The center also offers a warm place for day laborers to enjoy a cup of coffee and some camaraderie while waiting for a job. As the nonprofit manager of the job center facility, Worker’s Justice Project (WJP) has assisted with the employment of thousands of day laborers. During just May through October 2013, the center facilitated 678 jobs with total wages of $270,000 (Guallpa and Acee 2013). Already by 2005, WJP’s efforts had spurred the New York City Council to create a temporary commission on day laborer job centers.1 In turn, the commission released a report to Mayor Michael Bloomberg recommending city funding for a network of job centers across the city (Semple 2009). Although the city supported the WJP center by declining to charge rent for the Caesar’s Bay Mall site, the city council recommendation stalled (Guallpa 2014). Still, at a 2014 city council ceremony honoring WJP, council Speaker Melissa Mark-­ Viverito praised WJP as “a model that we need to replicate across the city” (Katinas 2014). In 2013, only twelve job centers operated in the New York City area (Turkewitz 2013). WJP and similar organizations in the National Day Laborer Organizing Network were especially prominent in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, because day laborers were recognized nationally for their volunteerism in devastated regions across New York City’s shores. The U.S. Senate introduced a resolution to offer citizenship to day laborers in recognition of outstanding volunteer service. And U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis personally met with WJP laborers (Guallpa and Mercado 2013). WJP also participated in a report by Baruch College that emphasized the important role of day laborers in Hurricane Sandy recovery and the increased health risks associated with disaster response (Cordero-Guzman, Pantaleon, and Chavez 2013). Yet WJP grappled with a major setback during Sandy, because

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hurricane winds had destroyed the center (Llorente 2013). After the storm, the center, actually an old wooden shack, was found a hundred yards from its original location. However, with several months of fundraising, and thanks to $20,000 in foundation grants from Citizens Committee for New York City, the North Star Fund, and the Robin Hood Foundation, the shack was replaced with a forty-foot trailer (five times the center’s original size) and outfitted with space heaters and air conditioning (Myerson 2013; Simpson 2013). WJP was able to resume management of the Bay Parkway Community Job Center, alongside its responsibilities as an organizer, educator, and friend to day laborers at curbside pickup locations throughout the city. In the midst of these struggles and achievements, WJP also began working to establish an employee-owned business. In 2010, WJP organized Queens- and Brooklyn-based Latina workers who frequented the la parada Williamsburg day laborer pickup at the corner of Marcy and Division Avenues, overlooking the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (Murphy 2011). Under the existing arrangement, these workers faced many of the same problems as their male counterparts: low wages, uncertain payment, physical injury, and unpaid hours waiting for a pickup. However, they also faced the additional dangers associated with domestic work: verbal and physical abuse, as well as regular exposure to toxic chemicals (Walter 2011). WJP set about to improve these conditions by developing a women’s employee-owned cleaning business that would remove women from the day labor market. WJP incorporated Apple Eco-Friendly Cleaning and recruited the initial group of employee-owners. To grow the business, WJP provided training in workplace safety, English-language skills, and client communications (Perrone 2011). By marketing themselves as a professional firm, negotiating rates and services with clients, and memorializing those negotiations in a written contract, Apple’s employee-owners were able to raise their wages and substantially improve their working conditions (Torrens 2011). For example, when Yesenia Bucio first arrived in the United States, she worked eighty-hour weeks in a factory for $300 per week (Bartlett 2012). At Apple, she was able to earn approximately $200 per day. Moreover, she no longer had to suffer long unpaid hours and exposure to the elements at the curbside pickup. Apple’s story also demonstrates some of the pitfalls of founding an ­employee-owned business. With the assistance of WJP, the founders met twice weekly over a six-month period for five-hour planning sessions at the Jackson Heights home of Luz María Arias (Murphy 2011). Over that period, founding partners diminished from twenty to just five. For example, Elvira Mendoza, a fifty-nine-year-old Ecuadorian immigrant with three children, was unable to risk her time on a start-up. “It’s a great idea, but I need to make maximum use of my working hours. The cooperative requires a lot of

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time, and I just couldn’t give the girls what they needed” (Torrens 2011). Even if Elvira had stayed with the business through the start-up phase, she would have no guarantee of a job. Although unlikely, as part of a worker cooperative, the other owners could have chosen to fire her. A much more likely problem is that the start-up would fail and Elvira’s time would be lost. And even if Apple was a success, she would have taken many risks during the start-up period, such as spending less time with her children and earning less money, without receiving the standard reward of business ownership—that is, a claim on the future profits of the business. Indeed, the remaining founders, including sisters Yesenia and Teresa Bucio and Luz María Arias, took on similar risks in launching Apple EcoFriendly Cleaning (Torrens 2011). And as founders of a worker cooperative, they sacrificed their claim to the business’s future profits. Yet not all the founders were as charitable as the Bucio sisters and Arias. After the firm launched as an employee-owned business, two of the founders changed their minds (Sanchez 2014). The dissenting owners managed to gain legal control of the corporate entity, the name, and the branding and began operating as a traditional firm. The remaining founders, still intent on working as an employee-owned business, had to organize a new legal entity and restore the firm’s brand.

Make the Road New York A church basement in Bushwick provided space for Make the Road by Walking’s first organizational meeting in 1997 (Langdon 2008). Founded to assist immigrant New Yorkers, the group rapidly expanded to advocate for all low-income Bushwick residents. Five years earlier, and a borough away, the Latin American Integration Center began to organize immigrants in Queens. The Latin American Integration Center later opened a center in Port Richmond on Staten Island, which was home to one of the fastestgrowing Mexican communities in New York City, and a second center in Queens. Make the Road New York (MRNY) resulted from a merger of the two organizations in 2007. Leveraging resources across three boroughs, Long Island, and Westchester County, MRNY would grow into a twentythree-thousand-member nonprofit that provides services to a constituency hailing from twenty-five countries (MRNY, n.d.). Over the years, MRNY achieved several major policy victories, particularly in health, housing, and language access. One MRNY victory, the New York City Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Act, requires landlords to make all apartment units lead safe upon turnover. MRNY also supported requirements that all hospitals in New York provide free translation and interpretation assistance to patients. They advocated for the Safe Housing Act, which imposes financial

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obligations on landlords guilty of the worst housing code violations (MRNY 2007). And the Tenant Protection Act created a new cause of action for tenants against landlords who repeatedly fail to provide essential services or otherwise threaten or disturb tenants’ lawful occupation of their residences (City Council of New York 2009). MRNY’s other regulatory victories include that pharmacies must provide translation and interpretation services (see the detailed case study by Alice Sardell in Chapter 6), employers must issue written notice of pay rates in employees’ primary languages, landlords are required to remove asthma-triggering building conditions, and employers of five or more individuals must provide paid sick leave (New York State Department of Labor, n.d.; Make the Road New York, Fifth Avenue Committee, and Urban Justice Center 2011; City of New York 2014). MRNY has also experimented with employee ownership. With fund­ ing from the 2011 city council initiative, CFL trained MRNY on how to de­ velop employee-owned businesses. Over a two-year period, MRNY’s Jackson Heights office created Pa’lante Green Cleaning. It became the fifth home cleaning worker cooperative in the New York City metropolitan area and comprised fifteen Latina immigrant employee-owners at its founding (Sal­ inger 2014). Before launch, thirty-six-year-old Claudia Leon, an immigrant from Mexico, earned just twenty dollars per day at a taqueria in Jackson Heights (Salinger 2014). Blanca Palomeque, Pa’lante’s president, often made fifty dollars for a twelve-hour cleaning shift in the early 2000s. The other founding owners earned an average eight to twelve dollars per hour at other cleaning jobs. By sharing all the firm’s profits, Pa’lante expected to match their peers at Sí Se Puede with wages of approximately twenty dollars per hour. While preparing Pa’lante for launch, MRNY also joined a new effort to lobby New York City Council for support of worker cooperatives. In 2011, Speaker Quinn and the city council provided funding to CFL in the absence of any targeted advocacy efforts. Two years later, in 2013, senior policy analyst Noah Franklin of the ninety-year-old Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies (FPWA) recognized some political potential in the local community of nonprofits focused on employee ownership. Franklin took leadership in contacting and assembling the various nonprofits, including MRNY. These events developed at the time of New York City’s 2013 mayoral campaign and the election of Mayor Bill de Blasio and in the aftermath of Occupy Wall Street. In a turn of good fortune, the FPWA’s executive director, Jennifer Jones Austin, had a close relationship with the incoming administration, serving as cochair of Mayor de Blasio’s transition team. Months of meetings with city officials, agency heads, and council members, as well as the release of an FPWA (2014) policy report titled “Worker Cooperatives for New York City: A Vision for Addressing Income Inequality,” resulted in the

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inclusion of a $1.2 million line item in the city’s 2014–2015 budget for the Worker Cooperative Business Development Initiative. This figure was approximately ten times the size of the previous 2011 initiative and provided funding for eight organizations, including a $70,000 grant to MRNY for the development of two new employee-owned businesses (New York City Council 2014). CFL received $147,000 of the $1.2 million grant and a separate allocation of $148,000 for its training program. Although the city council was highly supportive of the Worker Cooperative Business Development Initiative program, it was notable that council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito’s office contacted MRNY in the run-up to the final budget decision. In particular, the Speaker’s office sought data on the demographics of the city’s worker cooperatives. (As noted earlier, this demographic is substantially female, immigrant, and Latina.) The Speaker had close ties with MRNY, representing the same Latino and working class constituency as MRNY from her East Harlem home district, and had sponsored a number of MRNY bills in the past. Of all the coalition partners, the city council Speaker’s office appeared to trust MRNY as its main community partner in assessing the initiative. As of 2017, the Worker Cooperative Business Development Initiative has received annual renewals from the city council for a total of approximately $9 million.

Community and Economic Development Clinic Another key member of the Worker Cooperative Business Development Initiative lobbying coalition was CUNY School of Law’s Community and Economic Development (CED) Clinic. CUNY School of Law (n.d.) was founded in 1983, running its first classes out of an old elementary school in Bayside, Queens. Later, and for most of its history, it was located in a former junior high school building adjacent to the CUNY Queens College campus in Flushing. In 2012, CUNY School of Law relocated to the Citibank complex in Long Island City. Carmen Huertas-Noble founded CUNY School of Law’s CED Clinic in 2000. Huertas-Noble and her students provide free legal services to worker cooperatives, offering assistance with the incorporation process and ongoing corporate governance needs. The CED Clinic typically partners with nonprofits in New York City on start-up employeeowned businesses involving immigrant workers.

Worker-Owned Rockaways Cooperatives The Worker-Owned Rockaways Cooperatives (WORCs) project grew out of Occupy Sandy, an initiative to bring aid to victims of Hurricane Sandy in the Rockaways peninsula of southeastern Queens. Many residents in this

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area were left without basic services or public transit lines for months after the disaster. Channeling much of the energy from the original Occupy Wall Street campaign in Zuccotti Park, volunteers provided food, water, and clothing to Rockaways residents (Hall 2014). Occupy Sandy activists established the WORCs program to assist Rockaways residents with the launch of employee-owned businesses. WORCs provided training on corporate governance, accounting, financing, and management; coached businesses through the start-up process; helped groups with crowdfunding campaigns; and offered seed loans. The first cohort of approximately forty participants began training in spring 2013 at the Pentecostal Iglesia de Dios de la Profecía and included mostly Central American immigrants (Loboguerrero 2013). Over the course of a twelve-week program, meeting once a week, the enrollees decided to launch employee-owned businesses in food retail, baking, construction, dining, and entertainment (Flanders 2013). As of 2013, two WORCs businesses had launched. Roca Mia construction employed five and La Mies bakery, which leased space in a commercial facility, employed four (Rumsey 2014).

We See Beauty Foundation In 2013 Nikos Mouyiaris, founder and CEO of cosmetics manufacturer Mana Products, established the We See Beauty Foundation (WSBF) and associated cosmetics line MAKE in Long Island City, Queens (Volpe 2013). The purpose of WSBF was to build and accelerate women-led employeeowned businesses “to drive large scale change” (Beautyfinder​.com, n.d.). The MAKE line of business was intended to serve as a dedicated funding source for WSBF, and 10 percent of every MAKE sale is donated to the foundation (MAKE, n.d.). Mouyiaris drew inspiration from the agricultural and credit cooperatives in his hometown of Athienou on Cyprus. Organized under the leadership of his great-uncle, these century-old institutions still exist today. In 2014, WSBF donated funds to Opportunity Threads, a garment factory in Morganton, North Carolina, a city that has the largest Guatemalan refugee community in North Carolina. Most of the nine Opportunity Threads employee-owners were Guatemalan immigrants. WSBF also provided them assistance on product development.

Conclusion Immigrant employee-owned businesses can provide undocumented workers with legal, safe, and stable employment. Nonprofits like Prospera and CFL have demonstrated how such firms can lead to personal empowerment, healthier working conditions, and a better work-life balance, in addition to

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improved earnings. At the same time, only a handful of such firms exist, and none have exceeded a hundred undocumented workers. The Queens cases demonstrate the difficulty of achieving a sizable impact on communities of undocumented workers through employee ownership. For example, it may be helpful to contrast the benefits achieved for a few dozen undocumented employee-owners in Queens with the legislative victories of MRNY, which have helped secure the health and well-being of millions of New Yorkers. Among the preceding cases, CSS-CHCA is an outlier for a number of reasons. For one, CHCA, with over two thousand workers, functions at a different order of magnitude than other immigrant employee-owned businesses. It also operates in a highly regulated industry in which government is often the end payer. In addition, although CSS did not originally intend for CHCA to serve as a vehicle for employing immigrants (as opposed to native-born, low-income women of color), because of CHCA’s location in the South Bronx and demographics in the home health care industry, Latinas and immigrants now constitute a majority of CHCA’s employee-owners. Finally, perhaps the most important difference between CSS-CHCA and other immigrant employee ownership initiatives is CHCA’s focus on job creation. The firm was launched with one hundred employees and, within a decade, grew to approximately five hundred employees. It later scaled to twenty-five hundred employees. This growth was possible, in part, because CHCA was not subject to the constraints of the immigrant entrepreneur loophole, which encumbers organizations with burdensome requirements for employee-owner participation in management. Indeed, very few employeeowners at CHCA are managers or regularly involved in management-level decisions. Yet CHCA’s growth and success of as a worker cooperative can be attributed in great part to the efficacy of its management. In light of the foregoing, advocates for undocumented workers might focus job creation efforts on the model of a standard referral service. A nonprofit can market the availability of a referral service, direct inquiries to sole proprietor undocumented workers, and assist workers with tax preparation and other basic business services, as well as offer English-language and personal development skills training to workers. All these measures can be achieved without the burdens and constraints of employee ownership. In industries, such as construction, for which referral services are not suitable, advocates might borrow from WJP in acting as an intermediary for undocumented workers, in addition to providing them with physical shelter. To the extent that immigrant advocates are interested in employee ownership as a strategy to improve jobs for documented workers, they might explore the possibility of converting healthy businesses to employee ­ownership using an ESOP, which is the standard approach to creating

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e­ mployee-owned businesses in the United States. Advocates could target businesses that already employ sizable numbers of immigrants. In addition to managing the transactional aspects of acquiring and converting firms to employee ownership, advocacy groups might then focus their efforts on improving job quality and, if possible, growing them to create more jobs. In support of such a program, immigrant studies researchers might measure and assess the impact of existing ESOP employee-owned businesses on immigrant workers. Note 1.  See New York City Administrative Code §21-801: “Temporary Commission on Day Laborer Job Centers,” available at https://​law​.justia​.com/​codes/​new​-york/​2006/​new​ -york​-city​-administrative​-code​-new/​adc021​-801​_ 21​-801​.html. References Adams, Herbert B., ed. 1888. History of Cooperation in the United States. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University. Bartlett, Josey. 2012. “Immigrant Workers Share Their Art.” Queens Chronicle, July 5. http://​w ww​.qchron​.com/​e ditions/​western/​i mmigrant​-workers​-share​-their​-art/​ article ​_f1003a35​-2b76​-5b9e​-bd3a​-78d32f59213d​.html. Beautyfinder​.com. n.d. “We See Beauty Foundation.” https://​w ww​.beautifinder​.com/​ index​.php/​foundations/​item/​we​-see​-beauty​-com (accessed September 7, 2020). Ben-Ner, Avner. 1988. “The Life Cycle of Worker-Owned Firms in Market Economies: A Theoretical Analysis.” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 10:297–313. Blasi, Joseph R. 1988. Employee Ownership: Revolution or Ripoff? Cambridge, MA: Ballinger. Bollier, David. 1992. Rick Surpin. Boston: Harvard Business School. Circle of Life Caregiver Cooperative. n.d. “About Circle of Life.” http://​w ww​.circleoflife​ .coop/​about​-circle​-of​-life/ (accessed September 7, 2020). City Council of New York. 2009. “The Tenant Protection Act: 1 Year Later.” March 30. https://​council​.nyc​.gov/​press/​2009/​03/​30/​1205/. City of New York. 2014. “Mayor de Blasio Signs Paid Sick Leave Bill into Law in New York City.” March 20. http://​w ww1​.nyc​.gov/​office​-of​-the​-mayor/​news/​097​-14/​mayor​ -de​-blasio​-signs​-paid​-sick​-leave​-bill​-law​-new​-york​-city. Cooperative Care of Wisconsin. n.d. “Who We Are.” http://​w ww​.cooperativecare​.us/​ about​.html (accessed September 7, 2020). Cordero-Guzman, Hector, Elizabeth Pantaleon, and Martha Chavez. 2013. “Day Labor, Worker Centers and Disaster Relief Work in the Aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.” http://​reconstructionworks​.org/​research​-reports/​day​-labor​-worker​-centers​-disaster​ -relief​-work​-in​-the​-aftermath​-of​-hurricane​-sandy/. Cornforth, Chris, Alan Thomas, Jenny Lewis, and Roger Spear. 1988. Developing Successful Worker Co-operatives. London: Sage. Cummings, Scott L. 1999. “Developing Cooperatives as a Job Creation Strategy for LowIncome Job Creation.” New York University Review of Law and Social Change 25:181–211.

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Jackall, Robert, and Joyce Crain. 1988. “The Shape of the Small Worker Cooperative Movement.” In Worker Cooperatives in America, edited by Robert Jackall and Henry M. Levin, 88–108. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jensen, Michael C., and William H. Meckling. 1979. “Rights and Production Functions: An Application to Labor-Managed Firms and Codetermination.” Journal of Business 52 (4): 469–506. Katinas, Paul. 2013. “Immigrant Workers Rebuild Storm Ravaged Waterfront Job Center.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 4. http://​w ww​.brooklyneagle​.com/​articles/​immi grant​-workers​-rebuild​-storm​-ravaged​-waterfront​-job​-center. ———. 2014. “Bay Parkway Community Job Center Marks 12 Years of Service.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 11. http://​w ww​.brooklyneagle​.com/​articles/​2014/​4/​11/​bay​-park way​-community​-job​-center​-marks​-12​-years​-service. Kerr, Charles. 1939. “Productive Enterprises of the Unemployed, 1931–1938.” Ph.D. diss., University of California. Krishna, Gowri J. 2013. “Worker Cooperative Creation as Progressive Lawyering? Moving Beyond the One-Person, One-Vote Floor.” Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law 34:65–107. Lacey, Catherine. 2014. “A Way for Artists to Live.” New York Times, April 19. http://​ www​.nytimes​.com/​2014/​04/​20/​opinion/​sunday/​a-​ way​-for​-artists​-to​-live​.html?​_r​= 0​ . Langdon, Emily. 2008. “Two Dynamic Organizations Unite to Fight Inequality and Economic Injustice—Make the Road New York.” Brooklyn Legal Services Corporation A, December 31. http://​w ww​.maketheroad​.org/​article​.php​?ID​=​753. Llorente, Elizabeth. 2013. “Immigrant Laborers Rebuild Work Center, Restore Their Sense of Mission.” Fox News Latino, April 1. http://​latino​.foxnews​.com/​latino/​ politics/​2013/​03/​29/​i mmigrant​-laborers​-rebuild​-work​-center​-restore​-their​-sense​ -mission/. Loboguerrero, Cristina. 2013. “Occupy Sandy Launches Job Co-ops.” Voices of NY, May 17. http://​w ww​.voicesofny​.org/​2013/​05/​occupy​-sandy​-launches​-job​-co​-ops/. MAKE. n.d. “About the Foundation.” https://​w ww​.makebeauty​.com/​pages/​foundation (accessed September 7, 2020). Make the Road New York, Fifth Avenue Committee, and Urban Justice Center. 2011. “Immigrant Tenants, Advocates Praise City Council for Passing Bill That Will Crackdown on Unsafe Housing and Asthma Triggers.” January 5. http://​myemail​ .constantcontact​.com/​News​-Release​-​-Immigrant​-Tenants​-​-Advocates​-Praise​-City​ -Council​-for​-Passing​-Bill​-That​-Will​-Crackdown​-on​-Unsafe​-Housing​-and​-Asthma​ .html​?soid​=​1101614109830​&​aid​=​A17gj8Ox9Uc. Meade, J. E. 1972. “The Theory of Labour-Managed Firms and of Profit Sharing.” Economic Journal 82 (325): 402–428. Menke Group. n.d. “The Origin and History of the ESOP and Its Future Role as a Business Succession Tool.” https://​w ww​.menke​.com/​esop​-archives/​t he​-origin​-and​-his tory​-of​-the​-esop​-and​-its​-future​-role​-as​-a​-business​-succession​-tool/ (accessed September 7, 2020). Michael, Christopher. 2015. “What Is Worker Cooperative Development?” Grassroots Economic Organizing, July 13. https://​geo​.coop/​story/​what​-worker​-cooperative​ -development. ———. 2018. “A History of Employee Ownership in the United States.” Ph.D. diss., City University of New York.

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Mill, John Stuart. (1848) 1909. Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy. Edited by William J. Ashley. London: Longmans, Green. Miyazaki, Hajime. 1984. “On Success and Dissolution of the Labor-Managed Firm in the Capitalist Economy.” Journal of Political Economy 92 (5): 909–931. MRNY (Make the Road New York). 2007. “Local Law 29—the Safe Housing Act to Take Effect.” November 9. http://​w ww​.maketheroad​.org/​article​.php​?ID​= ​466. ———. n.d. “Our Members.” https://​maketheroadny​.org/​our​-members/ (accessed September 7, 2020). Murphy, Carla. 2011. “More Low-Wage Workers Become Their Own Bosses.” Gotham Gazette, November 17. http://​w ww​.gothamgazette​.com/​index​.php/​economy/​866​ -more​-low​-wage​-workers​-become​-their​-own​-bosses. Myerson, J. A. 2013. “The Skills to Pay the Bills.” GC Advocate, March 19. http://​ opencuny​.org/​gcadvocate/​2013/​03/​19/​t he​-skills​-to​-pay​-the​-bills/. NCEO (National Center for Employee Ownership). 2019. “Employee Ownership by the Numbers.” September. https://​w ww​.nceo​.org/​articles/​esops​-by​-the​-numbers. ———. 2020a. “The Employee Ownership 100: America’s Largest Majority EmployeeOwned Companies.” July. https://​w ww​.nceo​.org/​articles/​employee​-ownership​-100. ———. 2020b. “ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan) Facts.” https://​w ww​.esop​.org/. New York City Council. 2013. “Speaker Quinn Announces Selection of Participants for Worker Cooperative Development Training Program.” January 3. https://​council​ .nyc​.gov/​press/​2013/​01/​03/​600/. ———. 2014. “Fiscal Year 2015 Adopted Expense Budget: Adjustment Summary/Schedule C.” June 25. https://​council​.nyc​.gov/​budget/​w p​-content/​uploads/​sites/​54/​2014/​ 07/​f y2015​-FY15​-Schedule​-C​-Template​-Final​.pdf. New York State Department of Labor. n.d. “Notice of Pay Rate.” http://​labor​.ny​.gov/​ workerprotection/​laborstandards/​employer/​wage​-theft​-prevention​-act​.shtm (accessed November 1, 2014). NYC NOWC (New York City Network of Worker Cooperatives). n.d. “Cooperative Business Directory.” http://​w ww​.nycworker​.coop/​business​-directory (accessed August 25, 2014). Pateman, Carole. 1988. The Sexual Contract. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pencavel, John, and Ben Craig. 1994. “The Empirical Performance of Orthodox Models of the Firm: Conventional Firms and Worker Cooperatives.” Journal of Political Economy 102 (4): 718–744. Perrone, Marta. 2011. “Domestic Workers Become Professional Housekeepers.” WiredPRNews.com, September 30. http://​w ww​.wiredprnews​.com/​2011/​09/​30/​domestic​ -workers​-become​-professional​-housekeepers​_ 2011093022747​.html. Prospera. n.d. “Why We Exist.” https://​prosperacoops​.org/​about/​mission​-vision​-and​ -values/ (accessed June 10, 2020). Rumsey, Spencer. 2014. “Worker Co-ops on the Rise in New York.” Long Island Press, September 1. http://​w ww​.longislandpress​.com/​2014/​09/​01/​worker​-co​-ops​-on​-the​-rise​ -in​-new​-york. Salinger, Tobias. 2014. “Queens Cleaning Ladies Form Workers Cooperative.” New York Daily News, April 9. http://​w ww​.nydailynews​.com/​new​-york/​queens/​queens​-clean ing​-ladies​-form​-cooperative​-article​-1​.1751140. Samuels, Tanyanika. 2013. “Bronx Group That Serves South Asian Immigrants to Create Worker Coops with Aid of City Training Program.” New York Daily News, Jan­

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uary 7. http://​w ww​.nydailynews​.com/​new​-york/ ​bronx/​council​-speaker​-christine​ -quinn​-announced​-new​-program​-article​-1​.1233254. Sanchez, Yadira. 2014. Personal correspondence. Semple, Kirk. 2009. “Panel Urges Creation of Day Laborer Centers.” New York Times, April 16. http://​cityroom​.blogs​.nytimes​.com/​2009/​04/​16/​panel​-urges​-creation​-of​ -day​-laborer​-centers/. “Seventh Generation Cleans House with Non-profit Women’s Action to Gain Economic Security.” 2009. CSR Wire, April 28. https://​w ww​.csrwire​.com/​press​_releases/​20636​ -Seventh​- Generation​- Cleans​-House​-With​-Non​-Profit​-Women​-s​-Action​-to​- Gain​ -Economic​-Security. Simpson, Willie. 2013. “Bay Parkway Community Job Center Labors On.” Bklyner, February 20. https://​bklyner​.com/​bay​-parkway​-community​-job​-center​-labors​-on​ -bensonhurst/. Soursourian, Matthew. 2012. “Suburbanization of Poverty in the Bay Area.” Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, January. https://​w ww​.frbsf​.org/​community​-devel opment/​fi les/​Suburbanization​-of​-Poverty​-in​-the​-Bay​-Area2​.pdf. Spencer, Kisha. 2013. Personal correspondence. Stanford, Leland. 1887. “Co-operation of Labor: Views of Senator Leland Stanford of California.” New York Tribune, May 4. http://​dynamics​.org/​A ltenberg/​ARCHIVES/​ STANFORD/​LELAND​_ STANFORD/​Stanford​_Cooperation​_of​_ labor​.1887​.pdf. Torrens, Claudia. 2011. “NY: Jornaleras mexicanas se organizan por mejores condiciones.” Yahoo! España Noticias, July 22. https://​es​.noticias​.yahoo​.com/​ny​-jornaleras​ -mexicanas​-organizan​-mejores​-condiciones​-151516219​.html. Turkewitz, Julie. 2013. “Little Red Beacon for Immigrant Laborers Shines On.” New York Times, February 18. http://​w ww​.nytimes​.com/​2013/​02/​19/​nyregion/​a​-little​ -red​-beacon​-for​-immigrant​-laborers​-shines​-on​-in​-bensonhurst​.html. Vanek, Jaroslav. 1970. The General Theory of Labor-Managed Market Economies. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Volpe, Lynden. 2013. “We See Beauty: Paving the Way for a More Beautiful World.” Vanity Fair, February 6. http://​w ww​.vanityfair​.com/​online/​beauty/​2013/​01/​We​-See​ -Beauty​-Paving​-the​-Way​-for​-a​-More​-Beautiful​-World. WAGES. n.d. “Women’s Action to Gain Economic Security.” https://​na​.eventscloud​ .com/​f ile​_uploads/​f 6cbed7b654e3788ab333faab400a5f b​_CS1​_ InnovationsEship​ _Armenta​.pdf (accessed September 7, 2020). “WAGES.” 2012. Find.coop, February 13. http://​find​.coop/​organizations/​5947​-women​-s​ -action​-to​-gain​-economic​-security. Wallace, Bruce. 2014. “Latina-Run Co-op Empowers Its Members.” National Public Radio, February 23. http://​w ww​.npr​.org/​2014/​02/​28/​280773943/​latina​-run​-co​-op​ -empowers​-its​-members. Walter, Laura. 2011. “Domestic Service Workers Vulnerable to Occupational Hazards.”  EHS Today, March 22. http://​ehstoday​.com/​standards/​osha/​domestic​-ser vice​-workers​-vulnerable​-occupational​-hazards​-8847. Ward, Benjamin. 1958. “The Firm in Illyria: Market Syndicalism.” American Economic Review 48 (4): 566–589. Wiefek, Nancy. 2016. Personal correspondence.

II Incorporation

5 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) On Reaching Queens’ Diverse and Eligible Immigrant Populations Arianna Martinez

P

resident Barack Obama launched Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in June 2012 in response to pressure from immigrant rights groups to end deportations and public criticism over Congress’s failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform. DACA is the single largest immigration policy ever created by the executive branch. Before DACA was established, the last time the federal government had the task of regularizing the immigration status of hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants was following the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) enacted by President Ronald Reagan and Congress in 1986. The legislation created a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants, but it also increased border security and penalized employers for hiring unauthorized immigrants (Chishti and Kamasaki 2014). IRCA affected the nation and immigrant communities in numerous ways. One enduring, positive impact was the growth of civil society focused on immigrant rights and immigrant integration. Nonprofit agencies, ­religious-based institutions, and community-based organizations were created or expanded their capacity to facilitate the IRCA application process (Chishti and Kamasaki 2014). IRCA revealed the importance of migrant civil society and local community-based organizations to the success of implementing federal immigration policy changes. Despite President Donald Trump ending access to DACA for new applicants in September 2017, the ongoing legal battles surrounding it, and the uncertainty in the lives of DACA recipients, a detailed examination of the

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history of DACA is important. Studying DACA, similar to studying IRCA’s effects, tells us a good deal about the dynamics of new immigrant communities with respect to regularization of status and the importance of migrant civil society and community-based organizations to the success of DACA during the five years it was in existence. This chapter reviews the history and policy details of DACA at the national level and then examines more closely its implementation in New York City and Queens, because DACA has had the widest impact in cities where the majority of “DACAmented” immigrants reside. Research for the chapter draws on interviews with immigrant rights advocates and civil society service providers, a review of data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and the Migration Policy Institute, and documents from the New York City Council and New York Immigration Coalition. This chapter explores how DACA has improved recipients’ everyday lives and asks why many eligible immigrants never applied and what New York City’s migrant civil society did to change that.

DACA History DACA is an immigrant benefit program modeled after the proposed, but never ratified, DREAM Act. Unlike the DREAM Act, DACA did not provide a path to citizenship. It originally provided a two-year deferral from deportation, as well as a Social Security card and work authorization. Once approved, an individual also became eligible to travel outside the United States legally and, in most states, to obtain a driver’s license. To apply, undocumented immigrants had to have been under thirty-one years old as of June 2012, have been brought to the United States before the age of sixteen, have continuously lived in the United States since June 2007, and meet educational requirements. Applicants had to have graduated or obtained a certificate of completion from high school, have obtained a high school equivalency certificate, be an honorably discharged member of the military, or be in school. “In school” was defined as including participation in adult education programs or in general equivalency diploma (GED) programs, certified literacy and English as a second language (ESL) programs, and training programs that led to placement in postsecondary education or job training designed to lead to employment. Additionally, applicants had to pay a $465 application fee and undergo a background check. Restrictions on eligibility included having been convicted of a felony, a significant misdemeanor, or three or more misdemeanors or posing a threat to national security. The Pew Research Center noted that DACA had more in common with Temporary Protected Status or other types of quasi-legal authorizations, which also do not provide legal perma-

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nent residence, and if the programs were not renewed, individuals could revert to unauthorized status. This regularization of an individual’s immigration status, though provisional, decriminalized everyday activities like working, driving a car, renting an apartment, having a bank account or credit card, and traveling. For these reasons it served to increase recipients’ sense of “safety, security, and stability” (Max 2013). Becoming DACAmented changed an individual’s lived experience. For the most educated individuals it resulted in immediate economic improvement through professional employment and higher income. For the youngest individuals it meant not having to “worry about what happens after high school” (Max 2013). For “dreamers” (undocumented youth activists) becoming DACAmented, becoming unbound from the threat of deportation, allowed them to expand their political tactics, afforded them more freedom to travel and protest throughout the United States, and enabled them to improve their economic conditions. For these reasons DACA was a step toward expanding the rights of undocumented youth and improving immigrant integration. In a preliminary study from the National UnDACAmented Research Project, Roberto G. Gonzales and Veronica Terriquez found that, while DACA increased economic integration, obstacles remained for being fully integrated into economic and social life. Because DACA was a temporary status, there was still much to worry about—namely, a precarious future exacerbated by DACA’s age criterion and the continued barriers to higher education. For the DACAmented the future remained uncertain, but their most serious concern was for their ineligible parents and other family members who remained fearful of deportation and unable to work outside the informal economy. Their next concern was how to pay for college. Lack of access to federal financial aid and unqualified in most states for in-state tuition or state financial aid kept higher education out of reach (Gonzales and Terriquez 2013). A long-term and inclusive regularization of immigration status would be an improvement over DACA for economic and social integration and is the ultimate policy goal, but for five years DACA was the only option for those who were undocumented and eligible.

DACA Data When the program began, the Migration Policy Institute estimated 1.76 million DACA-eligible individuals were in the United States. Approximately 85 percent were Latino. Of the total, 65 percent (1.17 million) were from Mexico. Another 9 percent were from Central American countries, like El Salvador (60,000) and Guatemala (50,000), and another 11 percent (180,000) from the rest of Latin America. By comparison, about 9 percent (170,000)

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Table 5.1 DACA eligibility and DACA application rates, 2012–2016

United States

Total eligible

Immediately eligible (as of June 2012)

Applications accepted as of March 2014

Applications accepted as of March 2016

1,760,000

1,000,000

642,685

819,512

California

460,000

350,000

183,497

230,946

Texas

210,000

150,000

105,262

134,393

Florida

140,000

100,000

27,056

34,515

New York

110,000

80,000

33,548

42,524

n/a

35,515

43,787

Illinois

90,000

Source: Batalova and Mittelstadt 2012; USCIS 2014, 2016.

were from Asia, with national-origin groups represented in significant numbers by India (30,000) and Korea (30,000). Only 6 percent (110,000) were estimated to be from other parts of the world. Of the projected 1.76 million eligible, 1 million were designated “immediately eligible” (see Table 5.1).1 The rest had not yet met the educational requirements or the age threshold. More than half the country’s eligible youth (57 percent) live in the five traditional immigrant gateway states: California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Illinois (Batalova and Mittelstadt 2012). As of March 2014 there had been 673,417 application requests received nationwide (Gonzales and Bautista-Chavez 2014). At the two-year anniversary of DACA, approximately 64 percent of the estimated 1 million eligible immigrants had applied. At the four-year anniversary, less than 50 percent of the estimated 1.76 million total eligible individuals had applied (see Table 5.1). More research is needed at the local scale to better understand why 100 percent of eligible individuals did not apply. This chapter contributes to filling this gap in understanding by comparing national data trends with original city-scale qualitative research. Mixed methods, including quantitative data from USCIS and national reports from the Migration Policy Institute and the Immigration Policy Center, were employed to compare nationaland city-level DACA trends (see Migration Policy Institute, n.d.; Batalova and Mittelstadt 2012). In addition, qualitative research—primarily key informant interviews with immigrant rights organizations, grassroots community groups, and educational institutions and direct observation at DACA-related public meetings and workshops conducted in the borough of Queens between May 2013 and May 2014—was employed to bring new insights to DACA, the lag in applicants, and what was being done in New York City to try to improve the number of applicants.

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DACA in New York City New York City is a striking example of how the majority of DACA-eligible immigrants cluster in urban areas. New York State has been ranked fourth in the nation for its DACA-eligible population, with the vast majority of the state’s DACA eligible (79,000) residing in New York City (Fermino 2013). According to the Migration Policy Institute, when DACA began, Queens County had the largest and most diverse DACA-eligible population in New York City. Queens had 22,000 immediately eligible youth, 15 percent from Mexico, 10 percent from Guyana, 9 percent from Ecuador, 10 percent from China, and 11 percent from Korea. By contrast, Kings County (Brooklyn) had 16,000, and Bronx County had 8,000. In Brooklyn, an estimated 21 percent hailed from Mexico and 12 percent from China; in the Bronx, 36 percent came from Mexico. Queens, in addition to having the largest eligible population and greatest diversity by country of origin, has the largest diversity by region (Mexico and Central America account for 20 percent, the Caribbean for 8 percent, South America for 31 percent, and Asia for 24 percent) and the greatest diversity of languages spoken by eligible youth (Spanish, English, Korean, Chinese, and Hindi).2 To date, no study has focused on DACA at the city level. New York City in general and Queens in particular is an important case study because • It is home to the most diverse DACA-eligible population in the country. • It exemplifies many national data trends about who is and is not applying for DACA. • It is the first municipality in the country to enhance the federal program with a local policy initiative to increase application rates and include the hardest-to-reach populations. • It provides insights into what role migrant civil society can have on DACA’s success as a program and how immigrant-serving organizations facilitate DACA applications.

Diversity and Application Trends The overarching DACA application trends are that some localities have lower than anticipated applications and that who is eligible does not always reflect who has applied. Of the five states with the largest DACA eligible populations, New York State best illustrates this trend because it lags on the number of DACA applicants and it has a cross section of eligible groups that

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have not applied. Only Florida has lower application rates, but it does not have as diverse an eligible population as New York (Singer and Svajlenka 2013; Wong et al. 2013). Some country-of-origin groups applied in large numbers and others did not regardless of rates of eligibility (Singer and Svajlenka 2013; Wong et al. 2013). Not surprisingly, Mexicans are the leading national-origin group eligible for DACA and made up the largest number of applicants, 75 percent (Singer and Svajlenka 2013). But interestingly, even controlling for percentage of total population, they have also applied for DACA in higher numbers than other groups. It follows, then, that states with a large Mexican-origin population generally had higher application rates, while states with a smaller percentage of Mexican natives tended to have lower application rates. According to the Immigration Policy Center, New York ranks fourth on the list of ten states with the most potential beneficiaries but does not make the list of the ten states with the most potential Mexican beneficiaries (Immigration Policy Center 2012, 4, 7). The comparatively small Mexican population in New York, compared with California, Texas, and Illinois, likely contributed to the state’s low application numbers (Lobo and Salvo 2013). By contrast, other country-of-origin groups apply in low numbers relative to eligibility. This also affects New York’s application rates. Regional groups like Caribbean and Asian immigrants are eligible in greater numbers in New York than nationally but did not account for sizable numbers of applicants. For example, New York comes in third for most potential beneficiaries from other countries in North and Central America, which includes the Caribbean (Immigration Policy Center 2012), but Dominicans, the largest foreign-born group in New York City, have underapplied for DACA (Lobo and Salvo 2013). In addition, New York comes in second on one report’s list of the ten states with the most potential beneficiaries from Asia, but Chinese immigrants, the second-largest immigrant group in New York City, are underapplying as well (Immigration Policy Center 2012; Lobo and Salvo 2013). Furthermore, applicants have skewed on the younger side nationally. More than a third of applicants were between fifteen and eighteen years old and over half (54 percent) were under twenty-one, while states with longestablished immigrant populations like New York, with a larger share of DACA applicants twenty-one and older, generally have lower application rates (Singer and Svajlenka 2013; Wong et al. 2013). The archetypal dreamer youth (young, in school, and identified with or at least aware of the dream political movement) applied and received DACA early on, while the older, out of school, harder-to-reach populations had not yet applied. In general, the hardest-to-reach DACA-eligible immigrants tended to be over twentyone, have less education, have less English-language skill, were working

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poor or low income, and often had young children (Singer and Svajlenka 2013; Wong et al. 2013). This group accounted for the thousands who applied late or never applied, and special resources were allocated to reach out to these individuals. According to Tom K. Wong, the majority who applied to DACA typically did so early on (Wong 2014). In August 2012 DACA opened to applicants. In the first three months of DACA, from August 15, 2012, to November 15, 2012, USCIS received 19,320 applications from New York (USCIS 2012). As of July 2014, USCIS had received 33,548 applications from New York (Make the Road New York 2014). In other words, 57 percent of all New York applicants applied in the first three months.

Migrant Civil Society and Facilitating Applications During DACA’s first year, New York City’s most prominent immigrant rights and service organizations devoted extensive time and resources to educate and screen undocumented youth. Three leading organizations, the New York Immigration Coalition, Make the Road New York, and Citizenship Now, accounted for approximately three thousand applicants alone. The New York Immigration Coalition, the umbrella policy and advocacy organization for two hundred immigrant-serving organizations in New York, was founded in 1987 in response to the IRCA and the urgent need to assist immigrants in applying for that amnesty program. Because of its network and history, the New York Immigration Coalition was uniquely prepared to establish a legal services network for dreamers in New York State. The New York Immigration Coalition organized workshops where pro bono lawyers conducted preliminary application screenings for up to two hundred youth a month in the first months of DACA. The New York Immigration Coalition designed packets of information in multiple languages and distributed them at schools across the city for parents and youth. It planned collaborations between public schools and country consulates so that students could receive their country-of-origin documents necessary to apply the same day they received assistance with their DACA application. Make the Road New York, the largest membership-based community organization in New York City, has over fourteen thousand members and has offices in Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Long Island. Make the Road New York is both a service provider and a grassroots political action group. It fights for improved housing, labor, and education for immigrant and low-income New Yorkers. The Make the Road New York Youth Power Project has been advocating for the national and state DREAM Acts since the early 2000s. Many of these Youth Power Project activists were eligible

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for DACA and excited to promote the program to the larger community. As soon as DACA was announced, Make the Road New York began holding community education workshops for parents and youth. From the beginning, the DACA services were open to the public and staffed by Youth Power Project volunteers, legal staff, and legal volunteers. Community education workshops distributed self-screening sheets, and eligible attendees would then be offered preliminary services of a legal clinic. DACA volunteers and staff conducted outreach at high schools, churches, libraries, consulates, day laborer sites, and soccer fields and through social media. Legal clinics were held every two weeks in Jackson Heights, Queens, and monthly clinics were held in Brooklyn and Staten Island, where applications were completed and reviewed. In the first year of DACA, Make the Road New York held sixtyseven DACA clinics, and close to a thousand youth received one-on-one assistance. The City University of New York (CUNY) created CUNY Citizenship Now in 1997 to provide immigration services to CUNY’s students, faculty, and staff. The largest citizenship and immigration legal services provider in the nation, in 2012–2013 alone CUNY Citizenship Now assisted close to eleven thousand New Yorkers. Throughout the first year of DACA, CUNY Citizenship Now organized legal clinics on CUNY campuses across the city. For example, in September 2012 CUNY Citizenship Now held a DACA event at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, Queens, where lawyers and volunteers assisted eighty-eight participants, and sixty-seven participants completed and submitted applications (CUNY Citizenship Now organizer 2014). In addition, CUNY Citizenship Now makes DACA services available at their six full-time centers and at thirty part-time services locations in New York City Council members’ district offices. The two full-time centers in Queens are the Flushing Immigration Center and the York College Immigration Center in Jamaica. The part-time locations are in Glendale, East Elmhurst, Flushing, Jackson Heights, Forest Hills, Ozone Park, Hollis, and Jamaica. From July 1, 2012, to June 30, 2012, CUNY Citizenship Now assisted 996 applicants with DACA cases (CUNY Citizenship Now organizer 2014). After the initial rush, despite CUNY Citizenship Now’s efforts and outreach, applications declined even though thousands of eligible city residents had not applied. This mirrored a national drop-off in applications. In response, several states and municipalities were studying how to support DACA applications. The University of California Center for Collaborative Research for an Equitable California put out a policy brief in March 2013, “Increasing DACA Participation.” The policy brief noted that key institutions in California “had not yet acted in a coordinated and strategic manner” and that local providers of immigration legal services needed increased

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capacity to be able to serve a larger percentage of the eligible population (Johnston and Foster 2013). New York City became the first municipality in the country to create a local policy initiative to promote and implement DACA, coordinate services providers, and lift the barriers to applying for the city’s hardest-to-reach populations. A 2016 national study found that the New York City metro area and San Francisco Bay Area are unique countrywide because “local government actors and institutions have allocated significant funding towards DACA” implementation (de Graauw and Gleeson 2016).

The City Council DACA Initiative It’s exciting to be the first city in America to make this investment in our young immigrants who, in turn, have so much to offer our city. . . . We’re thankful that President Obama has taken steps around undocumented immigrants. But we can’t let the opportunity of these federal actions fall short . . . because we didn’t do what we needed to do. —City council speaker Christine Quinn (2013)

In July 2013 the New York City Council earmarked $18 million for a new citywide DACA initiative. The Department of Youth and Community Development and the New York Immigration Coalition oversaw $13.7 million distributed to community-based organizations, and the other $4.3 million went to continuing education programs at CUNY. The city council initiative sought to resolve major barriers to applying to DACA. The goal was to bolster outreach, to support additional ESL and high school equivalency classes, and to provide legal assistance, thereby increasing applications from all national-origin groups, applicants with high poverty rates, and those who did not yet meet the minimum educational requirements. According to the press release from the city council Speaker’s office (Quinn 2013), the city council created this program in response to the estimated sixteen thousand potentially DACA-eligible city residents yet to apply. At the time, Migration Policy Institute data estimated that approximately fourteen thousand immigrants across New York City were eligible for DACA but for the education requirement: five thousand immigrants in Queens (of those, 67 percent had limited English proficiency), five thousand in Brooklyn (79 percent with limited English proficiency), and four thousand in the Bronx (80 percent with limited English proficiency).3 The New York Immigration Coalition oversees outreach citywide and coordinates immigrant-serving organizations. Some of the reasons eligible people do not apply for DACA, like fear of revealing themselves to the government, are difficult to address with mu-

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nicipal policy. However, many of the material reasons for not applying were being addressed by the council initiative. The funding program had three parts: outreach, adult education, and legal services. Of those, Queens was home to seven outreach providers, eight adult education providers, and six legal providers. These organizations were selected on the basis of their previous track record serving New York City’s immigrant communities. Most of these organizations provided services to help enroll eligible individuals during the first year of DACA, before the city council initiative. After the first three months of DACA, the numbers of individuals seeking assistance trailed off, and the organizations did not have the resources to reach populations that had not come forward quickly. The city council initiative provided these organizations with renewed capacity and allowed them to expand their services directly to DACA-eligible individuals.

The Role of Immigrant-Serving Organizations in Queens Within New York City the borough of Queens is known as the borough of immigrants. It has over a million foreign-born residents and is believed to be the most diverse county in the nation (see the Preface, the Introduction, and Chapter 1). Queens is home to Chinese, Guyanese, Ecuadorians, Mexicans, Dominicans, Colombians, Koreans, Bangladeshis, Indians, Jamaicans, and Filipinos, to name the largest groups. Of the New York City neighborhoods with the largest foreign-born populations, nine out of twenty are in Queens. Four of those neighborhoods, Elmhurst, Corona, Jackson Heights, and Flushing, have over 60,000 foreign-born residents each (Lobo and Salvo 2013). In 2012 the Migration Policy Institute estimated that 31,000 residents of Queens were DACA eligible or could be eligible in the future. In the first six weeks of the program, 11,570 DACA applications were received from New York, which included 3,763 from Queens County, or 32 percent of the entire state application pool.4 Queens is home to thousands of DACAeligible and DACAmented immigrants and has been arguably the borough with the most to gain from DACA, as well as the city council initiative.

Outreach Outreach was needed to directly target the immigrant population that had not yet applied. Some lived under the radar, and others did not know that DACA applied to them. As the data discussed earlier make clear, one group that could have benefited from more DACA outreach and information are non-Spanish-speaking immigrants, in particular Asian communities.

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Twenty-six community-based organizations were funded as outreach providers. One immigrant-serving organization that received outreach funding is Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM). Founded in 2000, DRUM is a youth power and empowerment organization that serves the South Asian community in Queens and has about a thousand members. It is located in Jackson Heights, a neighborhood with a large concentration of South Asian immigrants. It has been involved in many youth-related projects and policies in New York City, such as advocating against stop and frisk. It had been holding DACA workshops and free legal clinics for a year before the council initiative was created. In that time DRUM assisted approximately a hundred youth to apply for DACA. The young people assisted were mostly college students, although it attempted to expand its applicant profile. The largest country-of-origin group it served was Bangladeshi, the second Pakistani, and the third Guyanese. Using the city council initiative funding for DACA, DRUM hired an organization alumnus to be the new DACA coordinator. This person facilitated outreach and oversaw follow-up with DACA applicants. DRUM conducted street outreach and placed advertisements for its DACA services in Bengali newspapers (DRUM memberleader 2014). Like DRUM, the other organizations doing outreach speak a wide range of languages and serve the neighborhoods with the highest concentrations of immigrants (see Table 5.2). They are trusted and have deep roots and connections in the community. Most receive walk-ins but also spend time doing street outreach—going to religious institutions, day laborer sites, athletic events, and elementary schools. They promote their services in nonEnglish-language newspapers and community newsletters. Increased resources mean increased capacity. Organizations were able to hire staff dedicated full time to DACA outreach.

Adult Education Outreach was not limited to encouraging people to apply to DACA but also included increasing enrollment in the newly funded adult education courses. The city council estimated that sixteen thousand in New York City were DACA eligible except that they did not yet meet the education requirements. Therefore, the backbone of the initiative was funding for ESL and high school equivalency classes. Recall that DACA’s eligibility criteria interprets “in school” widely to include adult education and job training programs. The city funded thirty-five community-based literacy providers and CUNY continuing education departments to increase the number of ESL courses around the city.

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Table 5.2 City council–funded Queens outreach providers Outreach providers

Zip code

Neighborhood

Languages spoken

Adhikaar for Human Rights and Social Justice

11377

Woodside

Nepali, Tibetan, Hindi, Sherpa dialects and Newari

Asian Americans for Equality

11354

Flushing

English, Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean

Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM)

11372

Jackson Heights

Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Nepali, Tibetan

Ecuadorian International Center

11372

Jackson Heights

Spanish, English

Korean Community Services of Metropolitan New York

11358

Flushing

Korean, Chinese, English

New Immigrant Community Empowerment (NICE)

11372

Jackson Heights

Spanish, Nahualt, Quechua

South Asian Youth Action (SAYA)

11373

Elmhurst

The importance of education and the educational requirements for DACA cannot be overstated. The DREAM Act would have restricted applicants to high school graduates and those who received a GED or were admitted to an institution of higher education. Under the DREAM Act, these individuals would have transitioned from a six-year temporary status to permanent residency after completion of at least two years of higher education or military service. DACA had a broader definition of who was eligible to apply, which could be met through enrollment in a wider variety of educational programs, including ESL classes, GED classes, and job training. Those youth who attend high school, college, or graduate school or are high school or college graduates had largely applied for DACA. Those who had not completed degrees or had never gone to school had not and may not even have known that they were eligible, because they often do not share the dreamer identity generally associated with being high achieving in school and involved in the immigrant rights movement. In addition, the less educated DACA eligible tend to be less connected to immigrant-serving institutions or education institutions that could help them gain access to education or legal providers. This is one challenge that immigrant-serving institutions must overcome. The dreamers have been so effective in creating the model-minority and deserving-immigrant image around the DREAM Act that organizations now have to locate the harder-to-reach immigrant populations that tend to be less educated, less assimilated, and less politically engaged.

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Challenges that immigrants face, such as having limited English-­ language skills, raising young children, and living with high poverty rates contributed to discouraging applications (Singer and Svajlenka 2013; Wong et al. 2013). In particular, men who have low levels of education, are in the workforce, and are the primary breadwinners for their families underapplied. Across the country deep cuts to public education programs for high school equivalency, ESL classes, and career training made it difficult for these men to benefit from DACA. We have had some of toughest DACA applications. . . . We have had some of the hardest-to-reach people—people who came here at fourteen, never went to school, went to work in a factory, were undocumented, were off the grid, they don’t have electric bills, proof where they lived, they don’t have school records, they don’t have anything to show their date of entry, they have nothing to show continuous presence. Those are the harder cases. (Williams 2014) One agency attempting to reach this group in Queens is Queens Community House. Unlike other programs in New York City that serve a specific population, Queens Community House provides services to a wide variety of immigrants, from young to old, those with little education or high levels of education, “and everything in between” (Williams 2014). It provides ESL and literacy classes to one of the most diverse adult education programs in the city. The largest group is Spanish speaking and made up of Colombians, Ecuadorians, Mexicans, and Peruvians. The second-largest group is South Asian, primarily Bangladeshi, though attendance by Tibetans, Nepalese, and Burmese immigrants has been increasing. Queens Community House is one of the few agencies funded to provide both education and legal services, because they have had the adult literacy and immigration legal services infrastructure for many years. All their services are grant funded and free to the public. Queens Community House had just suffered serious budget cuts when the city council allocated funds to it, and it was happy to have the new funding stream. Over the years Queens Community House classes had shrunk from 108 classes a week to 57 because of budget cuts, despite having a long waiting list and turning away numerous people each semester. The DACA initiative funding meant they could reopen classes. Before the city council initiative, Queens Community House was not specifically focusing on DACA. The organization generally worked with adults and not youth and had processed only approximately twenty applications between 2012 and 2013. Its expectation for that first year was to file thirteen to fifteen DACA application cases; these were completed in the first

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Table 5.3 City council–funded Queens adult education providers Literacy provider in Queens

Zip code

Neighborhood

Languages spoken

Make the Road New York

11372

Jackson Heights

Spanish, English

Catholic Charities Neighborhood Services

11102

Astoria

English, Spanish, Arabic, French

Central Queens Y

11423

Hollis, Jamaica

English, Spanish, Mandarin

HANAC

11106, 11102, 11368

Astoria, Corona

Spanish, Greek

Jacob A. Riis Neighborhood Settlement

11101, 11106

Long Island City, Astoria

Spanish, French, English

Queens Community House

11372

Jackson Heights

English, Spanish, Bengali, French Creole, Polish, Korean, Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, Pashtun

St. John’s University

11439

Jamaica

English, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, German

YWCA of Queens

11355

Flushing

Chinese, Korean, Spanish

month of the program. The organization received the majority of DACA referrals from city council member Danny Dromm’s office. Council member Dromm’s office placed a pro bono lawyer at Queens Community House once a week. In addition, Queens Community House recruited DACA applicants in its literacy classes. All the immigrant-serving organizations that provide these types of courses have long waiting lists, in particular for ESL courses. Table 5.3 lists the city-council-funded adult education providers in Queens. Moreover, most institutions have lost funding for their literacy programs since the middle of the first decade of the 2000s. The need to run more classes cannot be overstated. Every organization interviewed emphasized the importance of this new funding stream to open more seats for students, because New York City has had a shortage of adult education classes. Every organization, agency, and continuing education program said they have had a waiting list and regularly have had to turn people away. Queens Community Houe has to fill its classes by lottery because there is so much demand. The funding is going toward increasing the seats in existing adult education classes and increasing the number of classes.

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Legal After enrolling in an educational course, individuals became DACA eligible and were referred to a pro bono legal service provider to help with their application. The city funded twenty-six legal service providers as well as pro bono lawyers in city council members’ offices. Table 5.4 lists city-councilfunded service providers. The lawyers advise what documents to gather, review documents, determine DACA eligibility (or possibly some other type of immigration status adjustment), and then assist in the application completion. Part of the legal-provider funding budget is allocated to cover either the entire $465 application fee or a portion of it, alleviating the financial burden on individuals and their families. Many organizations had identified the application fee as a major barrier to applying. In the first year of DACA, they helped clients meet application criteria, fill out application materials, and gather sufficient documentation to prove their eligibility—only to have clients not submit their applications because the fee was unaffordable. More than one organization that received the funding contacted youth who had not submitted their applications to alert them to the application fee waiver. These youth were some of the first beneficiaries of the city initiative. An example of a successful legal provider is MinKwon Center for Community Action, founded in 1984. MinKwon began as a social service organization for the Korean community in Flushing but has since expanded its mission to include the entire Asian immigrant community in and around Flushing. In addition to immigration services, MinKwon provides assistance in gaining access to affordable housing and public benefits Table 5.4 City council–funded Queens legal providers Legal providers

Zip code

Neighborhood

Languages spoken

Ansob Center for Refugees

11103

Astoria

English, Arabic, French, Spanish

MinKwon Center

11355

Flushing

English, Korean, Mandarin

Haitian American United for Progress

11411

Cambria Heights, St. Albans

English, French, Creole

Make the Road

11372

Jackson Heights

English, Spanish

New York Asian Women’s Center

11371

East Elmhurst

Bengali, Cantonese, Marathi

Queens Community House

11372

Jackson Heights

Spanish, Bengali, English

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like food stamps, pursues labor and fair housing cases, and does political advocacy. In 2012, when DACA was announced, MinKwon immediately began providing free legal assistance to local Asian American youth. In the first few months of DACA, it held legal clinics that assisted 70–100 people each. In the first year of DACA, MinKwon helped over 380 youth become DACAmented. Its effectiveness was due in part to shepherding individuals through the entire process. The legal clinic would be for intake, where pro bono lawyers and full-time staff would help complete USCIS forms and review initial documents. The second meeting would be a private one-on-one with a free lawyer who would review additional documentation. Lawyers and staff would stay in contact with applicants, including reminding clients about biometric appointments, until their application was fully processed and would communicate directly with USCIS if an application was delayed. MinKwon has also held Life after DACA workshops to assist with résumés and provide information about taxes and public benefits, as well as encouraging youth to get involved with the immigrant rights movement. The city council initiative funding allowed it to continue DACA efforts and other activism for undocumented Asians.

New Educational and Professional Opportunities The DACA program ran smoothly for five years. Though an early USCIS backlog led to slow processing of some applications, in general it has been well managed, serving over half a million formerly undocumented immigrants within the first two years and over eight hundred thousand recipients within four years. Recipients of DACA who applied for the program when it became available after August 2012 have now applied for two-year renewals (according to USCIS, 539,008 renewal applications have been approved as of March 2016). DACA was never intended to become a long-term program, but the renewal process is not unprecedented, since other types of Temporary Protective Status have been renewed in two-year intervals for over a decade. When President Obama first established DACA it was seen as a stopgap measure until agreement could be reached on comprehensive immigration reform. To date there has not been congressional immigration reform. Before DACA, young people who were brought to the United States as children faced a proscribed existence of limited opportunities to study or work and constant fear of deportation. The creation of DACA left immigrant-serving institutions scrambling to help young people take advantage of these new benefits. At the same time that immigrant youth needed assistance to apply and receive DACA and its many benefits, immigrant

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civil society continued to advocate for civil rights and public benefits beyond DACA through education and employment opportunities. Seventeen states allow undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition. Since the early 2000s, dreamer activists and immigrant rights organizations have been organizing at the state level to increase that number. For states that already have this provision, dreamers are advocating for legislation that would make undocumented and DACAmented youth eligible for a state tuition assistance program. Only four states—California, New Mexico, Texas, and Washington—currently allow undocumented students to receive state financial aid. New York does not, although it has had in-state tuition since 2002. When the New York State DREAM Act failed to garner enough votes in the state assembly in 2014, Latino political leaders and the New York State Youth Leadership Council, the largest grassroots organization of undocumented youth in New York and an umbrella organization for the college campus Dream Activist chapters, continued to promote the New York State Tuition Assistance Program as one of their central campaigns. These groups organized and lobbied for it for a decade, until January 2019, when the New York State DREAM Act finally became law. Though improving access to higher education through financial aid has been politically challenging, employment opportunities have expanded. In New York State, DACA recipients with degrees ranging from technical associate’s degrees to advanced higher education have had two significant wins that allow them to pursue careers in their respective fields. The first came in June 2015 when an appellate division of the New York State Supreme Court ruled that DACA recipients were eligible to be admitted to the New York state bar and practice law. Then in May 2016 the New York State Board of Regents permanently adopted new regulations that allow DACAmented residents to apply and obtain licenses for fifty-seven professions, including nursing, teaching, architecture, psychology, medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, accountancy, engineering, and social work.

The City Council’s Continued Support for DACA Between 2014 and 2015 the New York City Council and Mayor Bill de Blasio recommitted to immigrant integration with continued funding for initiatives and some new programs. Most notably the city had plans to increase financial support for implementing federal immigration programs locally. In November 2014 President Obama announced Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA). In response to this announcement and the perceived success of the DACA initiative, the New York City Council and community-based organizations were preparing to expand application assistance and educational programs to DAPA-eligible New Yorkers. Unfortunately,

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Texas, along with twenty-five other states, sued the Obama administration to suspend the program. Because the U.S. Supreme Court blocked DAPA from ever being implemented, the city council reallocated those funds to other programs. The city council’s DACA initiative was revamped and reworked into an adult literacy and workforce services program with approximately $20 million in funds annually. Connected to this, the mayor’s office and the city council funded a citywide media campaign, DACA Health Care Access, to promote DACA applications and inform DACA recipients that they are eligible for Medicaid and other benefits. The campaign included advertising on public transit, in community spaces, and in ethnic newspapers. During this period Mayor de Blasio also publicized and expanded his IDNYC Program. The ID card program enrolled over 650,000 residents in the first year and has been regarded as another successful immigrant-­ integration municipal policy. The New York City Council funded its DACA initiative throughout fiscal years 2014 and 2015 but not during fiscal year 2016. The absence of funding for the program demonstrated the necessity of local policy initiatives to enhance and further the goals of the national program. The New York Immigration Coalition and Make the Road New York successfully advocated for renewed funding for DACA-related adult literacy, job training, and legal service programs to be included in the 2017 budget. In response to calls from immigrant civil society, the city council created ActionNYC, an expansion of the city’s community-based legal services model. Under the umbrella of ActionNYC, the revised city council initiative, DACA Education Initiative, includes outreach, education, and case management. The goal of the program is to provide educational and vocational services to immigrants, helping them meet USCIS educational requirements and then qualifying them to apply for DACA. Some of the Queens-based community partners involved in the first phase of the DACA program, like Make the Road New York and DRUM, will again be on the frontlines. ActionNYC also allocates funding to expand adult literacy programs for immigrants citywide. The New York City Council initiative increased the capacity of ­community-based organizations that serve diverse immigrant populations, helped process thousands of DACA applications, and provided additional access to adult education classes needed for DACA eligibility. The city initiative also encouraged organizations, civic institutions, and city resources to coordinate efforts. The crucial role of community-based organizations in the successful implementation of DACA in Queens is reflected in national research. Tom Wong’s quantitative research demonstrates that the more immigrant-serving organizations there were clustered in a national region, the more DACA applications were submitted. Wong concluded that in addition

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)  /  139

to studies showing that community-based organizations were integral to IRCA, it is reasonable to expect that “DACA-eligible youth who have access to nearby immigrant-serving organizations are more likely to also have access to the information, resources, and support that can help them and their families navigate the DACA process” (Wong et al. 2013, 27). Roberto Gonzales and colleagues, using qualitative research findings from the National UnDACAmented Research Project (NURP) surveys and interviews with DACA recipients, came to similar conclusions. According to their study, “NURP respondents benefited from community organizations and civic institutions by receiving assistance in filling out and compiling the paperwork for DACA applications. . . . In fact, the overwhelming majority of our DACA beneficiaries (93 percent) received some assistance with DACA applications” (Gonzales and Bautista-Chavez 2014, 5). The city council’s renewed funding and commitment to DACA over three years has been crucial, especially in diverse locations like Queens, to immigrant-serving organizations and civil society’s ability to assist immigrants applying for DACA and getting them into the educational or training programs that will help them become eligible. Though the limitations of being DACAmented became clear over time— namely, the lack of access to affordable higher education and the uncertainty and limbo of being ineligible for legal permanent residency—it also became evident to dreamer activists and immigrant rights organizers that access to DACA was successful insofar as it improved and advanced people’s lives. This research can help immigrant-serving organizations and city governments identify best practices for increasing applications to future federal programs that need implementation support at the local level.

Postscript: Life after DACA After President Trump ended DACA in 2017, several federal courts issued decisions that allow renewal applications to continue, but USCIS does not accept new applications. Legal cases pertaining to DACA’s constitutionality reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2020. On June 18, 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration’s rescission of DACA in 2017 was unlawful. At the time of publication, neither the Department of Homeland Security nor USCIS have taken actions to reinstate DACA or receive new applications. In the meantime, dreamer activists have been engaged in direct action, putting pressure on Congress to pass legislation to protect them. If Congress passes a version of the DREAM Act, it will be the first immigration legislation created with a path to citizenship for (some) undocumented immigrants since IRCA. The uncertainty around DACA since President Trump took office has revealed how tenuous and inadequate

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executive orders are for the long-term stability and well-being of immigrant communities. This chapter was drafted in 2013 in response to the low DACA application rates in New York City. At that time DACA was one year old, and it was undetermined whether eligible undocumented New Yorkers would apply, and if they did, what kinds of improvements it would make to their lives. Since then, over eight hundred thousand people have benefited from DACA nationally and over thirty thousand in New York City. This means that thirty thousand New Yorkers stand to lose protection from deportation, work authorization, and the ability to pursue their educational and professional goals. Since the phasing out of DACA began, New York City community-based organizations, civic institutions, the city council, and Mayor de Blasio have shifted their funding and advocacy toward defending the city’s diverse immigrant populations against new federal orders and directives. Though immigrant integration continues to be an important municipal project, immigrant defense is the urgent mission. Notes 1.  The Immigration Policy Center reported similar but more conservative estimates: 1.36 million DACA-eligible youth nationally, including 412,000 in California, 226,000 in Texas, 85,000 in Florida, 70,000 in New York, and 67,000 in Illinois. For immediate beneficiaries, it reported 300,000 in California, 150,000 in Texas, 60,000 in Florida, 55,000 in New York, and 48,000 in Illinois (Immigration Policy Center 2012). 2.  These figures are based on information obtained by Tom Wong through the Freedom of Information Act and shared with me between August 15 and September 30, 2012. 3.  These are 2012 figures, obtained using the Migration Policy Institute’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Data Tools, at https://​w ww​.migrationpolicy​.org/​ programs/​data​-hub/​deferred​-action​-childhood​-arrivals​-daca​-profiles. 4.  See the Migration Policy Institute’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Data Tools, at https://​w ww​.migrationpolicy​.org/​programs/​data​-hub/​deferred​ -action​-childhood​-arrivals​-daca​-profiles. References Batalova, Jeanne, and Michelle Mittelstadt. 2012. “Relief from Deportation: Demographic Profile of the DREAMers Potentially Eligible under the Deferred Action Policy.” Migration Policy Institute, August. http://​w ww​.migrationpolicy​.org/​pubs/​ FS24​_deferredaction​.pdf. Chishti, Muzaffar, and Charles Kamasaki. 2014. “IRCA in Retrospect: Guideposts for Today’s Immigration Reform.” Migration Policy Institute, January. https://​w ww​ .migrationpolicy​.org/​research/​irca​-retrospect​-immigration​-reform. CUNY Citizenship Now organizer. 2014. Interview by the author. Manhattan, New York City. de Graauw, Els, and Shannon Gleeson. 2016. “An Institutional Examination of the Local Implementation of the DACA Program.” Center for Nonprofit Strategy and Manage-

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ment Working Paper Series, April. https://​digitalcommons​.ilr​.cornell​.edu/​cgi/​ viewcontent​.cgi​?article​=​1186​&​context​=​workingpapers. DRUM member-leader. 2014. Interview by the author. Jackson Heights, New York City. Fermino, Jennifer. 2013. “NYC to Shell Out $18M to Help Undocumented Immigrants Get Jobs.” New York Daily News, July 17. https://​w ww​.nydailynews​.com/​new​-york/​ nyc​-shell​-18m​-aid​-immigrant​-youths​-article​-1​.1400673. Foner, Nancy, ed. 2013. One Out of Three: Immigrant New York in the 21st Century. New York: Columbia University Press. Gonzales, Roberto G., and Angie M. Bautista-Chavez. 2014. “Two Years and Counting: Assessing the Growing Power of DACA.” American Immigration Council, June. https://​w ww​.americanimmigrationcouncil​.org/​research/​t wo​-years​-and​-counting​ -assessing​-growing​-power​-daca. Gonzales, Roberto G., Marco A. Murillo, Cristina Lacomba, Kristina Brant, Martha C. Franco, Jaein Lee, and Deepa S. Vasudevan. 2017. “Taking Giant Leaps Forward: Experiences of a Range of DACA Beneficiaries at the 5-Year Mark.” Center for American Progress, June 22. https://​w ww​.americanprogress​.org/​issues/​immigra tion/​reports/​2017/​06/​22/​434822/​taking​-giant​-leaps​-forward/. Gonzales, Roberto G., and Veronica Terriquez. 2013. “How DACA Is Impacting the Lives of Those Who Are Now DACAmented: Preliminary Findings from the National UnDACAmented Research Project.” Immigration Policy Center American Immigration Council, August. https://​w ww​.americanimmigrationcouncil​.org/​sites/​de fault/​fi les/​research/​daca ​_ final​_ipc ​_csii​_1​.pdf. Immigration Policy Center. 2012. “Who and Where the DREAMers Are, Revised Estimates: A Demographic Profile of Immigrants Who Might Benefit from the Obama w ww​ .american Administration’s Deferred Action Initiative.” October. https://​ immigrationcouncil​.org/​sites/​default/​fi les/​research/​who​_ and​_where​_the​_dreamers​ _are​_two​.pdf. Johnston, Paul, and Samara S. Foster. 2013. “Increasing DACA Participation.” University of California Center for Collaborative Research for an Equitable California, March. https://​drive​.google​.com/​fi le/​d/​1yYTdXKZRITkZabhymcg59hhCEJpXrWRm/​v iew. Lobo, Arun Peter, and Joseph J. Salvo. 2013. The Newest New Yorkers: Characteristics of the City’s Foreign-Born Population. New York: Department of City Planning. Make the Road New York. 2014. “Two Years of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.” July. https://​maketheroadny​.org/​pix ​_ reports/​MRNY​_ DACA ​_ Report ​_ July​_ 2014​ .pdf. Massey, Douglas S., ed. 2008. New Faces in New Places: The Changing Geography of American Immigration. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2008. Max. 2013. Telephone interview by the author, October 24. Migration Policy Institute. n.d. “Profile of the Unauthorized Population: United States.” https://​w ww​.migrationpolicy​.org/​data/​u nauthorized​-immigrant​-population/​state/​ US (accessed May 28, 2014). Quinn, Christine. 2013. “Speaker Quinn, New York City Council Members, Bloomberg Administration and Advocates Announce Funding to Provide New Yorkers Immigration Relief.” New York City Council, July 17. https://​council​.nyc​.gov/​press/​ 2013/​07/​17/​475/. Singer, Audrey, and Nicole Prchal Svajlenka. 2013. “Immigration Facts: Deferred Action w ww​ for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).” Brookings Institution, August. https://​ .brookings​.edu/​w p​-content/​uploads/​2016/​06/​DACA​_ singer​_ svajlenka​_FINAL​.pdf.

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USCIS. 2012. “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Process.” https://​w ww​.uscis​.gov/​ sites/​default/​fi les/​document/​data/​daca​-report​-aug​-15​-nov​-15​-2012​.pdf. ———. 2014. “Number of I-821D, Consideration of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals by Fiscal Year, Quarter, Intake, Biometrics and Case Status: 2012–2014.” https://​w ww​.uscis​.gov/​sites/​default/​fi les/​document/​d ata/​I821d ​_ daca ​_ fy2014qtr2​ .pdf. ———. 2016. “Number of I-821D, Consideration of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals by Fiscal Year, Quarter, Intake, Biometrics and Case Status: 2012–2016.” https://​w ww​.uscis​.gov/​sites/​default/​fi les/​document/​d ata/​I821d​_ performancedata​ _fy2016​_qtr2​.pdf. Williams, K. C. 2014. Interview by the author, Queens, NY, January 17. Wong, Tom K. 2014. “Mapping Outreach for DACA Renewals.” February 10. https://​ 8ab12a4d​-9855​- 4e1d​-8096 ​-f2488af25a16​.filesusr​.com/​ugd/ ​bfd9f2 ​_ d0aa3f088413 4896be7fd0f15fc0b128​.pdf. Wong, Tom K., and Angela S. García. 2016. “Does Where I Live Affect Whether I Apply? The Contextual Determinants of Applying for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.” International Migration Review 50 (3): 699–727. Wong, Tom K., Angela S. García, Marisa Abrajano, David FitzGerald, Karthick Rama­ krishnan, and Sally Le. 2013. “Undocumented No More: A Nationwide Analysis of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.” Center for American Progress, September. https://​w ww​.americanprogress​.org/​w p​-content/​uploads/​2013/​09/​ DACAReportCC​-2​-1​.pdf.

6 Advocacy for Immigrant Health Language Access in New York Pharmacies Alice Sardell

T

he health of individuals is related to the social and physical environment in which they live but also to their access to health services. Inequality in access to health care has been one of the major concerns of community-based organizations that work with immigrant populations in Queens (Queens borough-level official 2012). Barriers to health care access for immigrant New Yorkers include lack of insurance coverage and difficulty in establishing a relationship with a primary care provider. For some, this inability is a product of limited proficiency in English. Foreignborn adults who are Spanish speakers are twice as likely to report difficulty in obtaining health care and are much less likely to have an ongoing relationship with a primary care provider than are foreign-born adults who speak English (New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene 2006). According to the 2000 census, a language other than English was the primary language spoken in almost half of all New York City households. This continued to be true in 2010, when 49 percent of New Yorkers spoke a language other than English at home, and almost a quarter (24 percent) of New York City residents were not proficient in English (see Table 6.1). About half the limited-English-proficient (LEP) population spoke Spanish, 16.5 percent spoke Chinese, 6.3 percent were Russian speakers, and the remainder were speakers of seven other languages, as shown in Table 6.2. Queens was the borough with the highest number of residents with limited

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Table 6.1 Persons by English-language ability in New York City, 2010 Number of people

Percentage

Total

7,670,643

100

Speaks only English at home

3,889,483

51

Speaks language other than English at home

3,718,160

49

Not English proficient

1,816,599

24

English proficient

1,964,561

25

Source: New York City Department of City Planning’s database of 2010 American Community Survey data, at https://​w ww1​.nyc​.gov/​site/​planning/​planning​-level/​nyc​-population/​a merican​-community​-survey​.page.

Table 6.2 New York City’s limited-English-proficient (LEP) population (top LEP languages), 2010 Number

Percentage

1,816,599

100.0

Spanish

915,742

50.4

Chinese*

299,560

16.5

Russian

113,943

6.3

48,501

2.7

Korean

47,201

2.6

Italian

39,076

2.2

Bengali

38,714

2.1

Polish

29,928

1.6

Yiddish

29,768

1.6

Arabic

26,607

1.5

Total LEP population

French Creole

Source: New York City Department of City Planning’s database of 2010 American Community Survey data, at https://​w ww1​.nyc​.gov/​site/​planning/​planning​-level/​nyc​-population/​a merican ​-community​-survey​.page. * Includes Chinese, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Formosan

English proficiency and continued to be so in 2018 (Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York 2018). Addressing the language barrier to health care access has been a policy concern of immigrant advocacy organizations at least since the late 1990s. The first such efforts focused on language access in hospitals (see MRNY 2008), but in 2007 members of Make the Road New York, a communitybased immigrant advocacy organization, identified language barriers in pharmacies as a major concern and held a demonstration in front of an Eckerd Pharmacy in Elmhurst, Queens, to bring attention to this issue. A series of subsequent policy efforts on language access in pharmacies was

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successful. In New York City in 2009 and New York State in 2012 legislation was enacted that mandates language access for LEP speakers in chain pharmacies. This legislation requires that such pharmacies provide information and counseling to LEP patients in their own language and that the labels on medications, as well as all other written information, be available in the seven most common languages spoken in New York City and the four most common languages in New York State. This policy outcome was the result of the skillful advocacy of Make the Road New York and New York Lawyers for the Public Interest working together and with other immigrant advocates. Evidence about the need for the legislation was provided by researchers at a much respected academic medical institution, the New York Academy of Medicine. These partners used many strategies: litigation, grassroots community mobilization and protest, coalition building, and outreach to city and state elected officials. They framed lack of language access as both a civil rights issue and a health and safety issue. They enabled LEP New Yorkers to describe the consequences of their inability to get information about their prescriptions in their own languages. They expanded the constituency that would benefit to include senior citizens and others who needed large type and simple instructions on their medication labels. These mandates for language access at pharmacies at both the city and the state levels was a policy victory on behalf of an immigrant constituency in spite of the barriers to political engagement presented by LEP and lack of citizenship (Ramakrishnan and Bloemraad 2008). And this case study, in which I analyze the variables that made this achievement possible, is one of a limited number of empirical studies of influence in the policy process exercised by immigrant advocacy organizations. (See Ramakrishnan and Bloemraad 2008, 8–11; and see de Graauw 2008 for an excellent discussion of immigrant nonprofits and political incorporation.) My analysis is based on archival research and interviews with participants in the policy process. I begin with a brief discussion of the political and historical context in which the campaign for language access in pharmacies took place. I then describe the key policy advocates, summarize the policy history of the campaign, and analyze the variables that explain its success. I suggest that the nature of the issue of language access at pharmacies and the political environment in which advocates engaged, as well as their political skills, contributed to the successful outcome.

The Political Context of Claims Making Following Jennifer Hochschild, Jacqueline Chattopadhyay, Claudine Gay, and Michael Jones-Correa, I define political incorporation as “having the

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capacity for sustained claims making about the allocation of symbolic or material goods” (2013, 10). Along with other analysts, including S. Karthick Ramakrishnan and Irene Bloemraad (2008) and John Kingdon (1995), they note that the political context greatly influences whether a group has this capacity. New York has always been an immigrant city. In 1930, U.S.-born white New Yorkers and their native-born white parents constituted less than a quarter of the population of the city, as is true today. Pre-1965 immigrants (Irish, Italians, and Eastern European Jews) and native-born African Americans and Puerto Ricans were incorporated into the city’s governing coalitions over time; however, this has not yet happened for post-1965 immigrants in terms of elected citywide office.1 Nevertheless, as this chapter demonstrates, the lack of descriptive representation does not obviate the possibility of political incorporation. The history of immigration in New York and the presence of immigrants and their children shape the policy dialogue; all New York City politicians use proimmigrant rhetoric (Mollenkopf 2014). In comparison with other U.S. cities, New York is “very welcoming and hospitable to immigrants qua immigrants” (Waters 2014, 144).2 Indeed, elected officials in New York City (and State) have responded to the demographic context in which they operate by formulating policies that recognize and attempt to mitigate the language barriers that immigrant New Yorkers face when attempting to use public services.3 Mayor Michael Bloomberg also responded to the fear of deportation and other anti-immigrant activity that prevents immigrants from seeking services at city agencies. In 2003 he signed two executive orders that prohibit city agencies from seeking information from residents about their immigrant status when they access city services and from disclosing information about that status (Hu 2003). In May of 2006, officials of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs and the president of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (which ran the city’s public hospitals and clinics) sent letters to city residents and corporation employees about the rights that were guaranteed under these executive orders. Both the issuance of the executive orders and these actions on implementation occurred in response to concerns expressed by the New York Immigration Coalition, its member organizations, and members of the New York City Council (Hu 2003; Whitt 2006). The key citywide organizations working on immigrant health issues have been the New York Immigration Coalition and Make the Road New York. These organizations are briefly described next, and then two of their allies working on language access in pharmacies—the New York Academy of Medicine and New York Lawyers for the Public Interest—are discussed.

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Policy Entrepreneurs on Language Access in Pharmacies In a U.S. policy system that is structured against policy innovation, policy entrepreneurs are individuals or groups inside or outside government who are willing to invest energy, money, time, and reputation to move the policy process to achieve a particular policy outcome (Kingdon 1995). Communities that have faced barriers to formal representation in the U.S. political system have been given voice by interest groups, although such groups must compete against groups with far greater political resources (Strolovitch 2007). In New York City politics, immigrant advocacy groups and their allies have acted as policy entrepreneurs on issues of concern to immigrants and their families.

The New York Immigration Coalition Established in 1987 by a group of immigrant service organizations responding to changes in federal immigration law, the New York Immigration Coalition has continued to address national immigration policy but also works to empower immigrants and to help them gain access to services, especially education and health care. In 2001 the coalition created a collaborative that brought together immigrant community-based and legal advocacy organizations to improve health care access for immigrant populations. The collaborative has addressed health insurance coverage and linguistic and cultural barriers to access.

Make the Road New York Make the Road New York was founded in 2007 by the merger of two immigrant advocacy groups, Make the Road by Walking and the Latin American Integration Center. It has the largest budget and membership of any nonunion advocacy organization for immigrants or workers in New York City. It demonstrated its ability to mobilize community members by bringing more demonstrators (forty-two busloads) to the 2010 immigrant rights march in Washington, D.C., than any other organization in the country and its political influence by changing policy on issues ranging from wage theft to school discipline (see McAlevey 2014, 174–180). Construing its mission broadly at the time, the organization’s goal was to “ensure respect and dignity for immigrant, poor, and working class New Yorkers” (MRNY, n.d.). The culture of Make the Road New York (MRNY) promotes membership participation and leadership development. The organization initially linked service delivery to membership activity (McAlevey 2014), but it now

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provides services (legal services, adult literacy, health access, workforce programs) to all community residents. Many who access services also become members involved in community work. One MRNY staff member said, “We think our model is so powerful because people can access services, but they also have the option to engage in larger, transformative change if they become involved in community work, arm in arm with others” (MRNY staff member 2015).

New York Lawyers for the Public Interest New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI) was established in 1976 to provide pro bono legal services to underserved individuals and organizations working on their behalf. It continues to link law firms and corporate legal departments with those in need of legal services but also does legal and policy advocacy in the areas of disability, environmental justice, and health policy and law (NYLPI, n.d.). The collaboration between MRNY and NYLPI began when Nisha Agarwal (appointed in 2014 by Mayor Bill de Blasio as commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs) came to NYLPI in 2006 as a public interest fellow to work on language barriers in health care. The campaign for language access at pharmacies emerged from her very first meeting with MRNY members and staff in Bushwick, Brooklyn (Richardson 2009). Language access at pharmacies connected directly to language access at hospitals, since patients receiving prescriptions often wanted to discuss their medications, and exactly how to take them, with pharmacists.

New York Academy of Medicine From the time of its creation by a group of “eminent physicians” in 1847, the New York Academy of Medicine concerned itself with urban public health and medical education and scholarship. During the nineteenth century, it was active in reducing infectious disease and maternal mortality (New York Academy of Medicine, n.d.). At the end of the 1980s, the academy’s board of trustees recommended a renewed emphasis on medical education, urban health, and health policy and concerned itself with gun violence, substance abuse, HIV/AIDs, and child poverty (Lieberman and Warshaw 1998). During the last two decades, its research centers have worked on “healthy aging, disease prevention and eliminating health disparities.” The academy identifies itself as “a highly credible urban health think tank” (New York Academy of Medicine, n.d.). As I recount in this chapter, the data about language access in New York City pharmacies provided by academy researchers were

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used very often by policy advocates in their public testimonies and other discussions.

The Safe Rx Policy Process Research on Language Access in New York City Pharmacies The idea of examining the extent of language access in New York pharmacies came from the discussion of a 2005 academy research project that found language barriers to enrollment in children’s health insurance programs (New York Academy of Medicine staff member 2015a). Between February and August of 2006, researchers at the academy conducted a telephone survey of a random sample of two hundred New York City pharmacists, asking about their interpretation and translation practices and their capacity to provide oral and written translation of information about prescriptions and medication labeling in languages other than English. The survey found that less than half the pharmacists (or pharmacy interns) were capable of providing counseling to patients in their own language; only 13.5 percent of the pharmacies had the capacity to provide telephone translation; and less than 8 percent of pharmacies had notices posted about the availability of translation. Among pharmacists who reported serving LEP patients daily, less than 40 percent provided translated medication labels. For languages other than Spanish, this was done only 10 percent of the time. The survey also found that translation services were more likely to be provided at independent pharmacies or those at hospitals or clinics than at chain pharmacies, a confirmation of other studies (Weiss et al. 2007). An article reporting this study was published in 2007 (Weiss et al. 2007), and the study and its findings were summarized in an article in the widely read JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association; Mitka 2007). In addition, there was coverage of this study in New York and national health media, including the New York Times, the New York Daily News, and the Washington Post, as well as television stations in various cities primarily during April, May, and June of 2007 (New York Academy of Medicine staff member 2015c).

Complaint to the Office of the New York State Attorney General In July and October 2007, NYLPI filed civil rights complaints with the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) for New York State against chain pharmacies in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island, and Nassau on behalf of LEP members of MRNY and other community-based organizations

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that were members of the New York Immigration Coalition Health Access and Advocacy Collaborative. The complaint alleged that these pharmacies had violated Title VI of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, the New York City human rights code, and a New York State education law that requires that pharmacists provide personal counseling to patients on their medications when dispensing and refilling prescriptions. The complaint was that the pharmacies had failed to provide “skilled” oral interpretation, medication labels, and information on medications to LEP individuals in their own languages and notification of their rights to these services (NYLPI 2007). Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination based on “race, color, or national origin” by any entity receiving federal funds. The courts and the Department of Health and Human Services have interpreted this to include people with LEP. Attached to the October complaint was a report titled Bad Medicine that contained more than twenty stories of LEP patients whose health was damaged or threatened by not being able to speak to a pharmacist in their own language or receive medication labels or information about their medications (dosage, side effects, etc.) in that language. The report cited an Institute of Medicine study on the problem of medication errors and the New York Academy of Medicine pharmacy survey (MRNY and NYLPI 2007). During the months that the complaints to the OAG were filed, MRNY held rallies, issued press advisories, and held press conferences at which community members told their stories about the consequences of the lack of language access at pharmacies (MRNY staff member 2014). At a November 2007 rally of about a hundred people held at an Eckerd Pharmacy on Roosevelt Avenue in East Elmhurst, Eric Gioia (the local city councilman who represented District Twenty-Six in Queens from 2002 to 2009), said, “No one should be denied proper health care based on their country of origin or the language they speak. This is a huge problem, especially in such a diverse area as Queens” (Kadushin 2007). On April 23, 2008, NYLPI filed an amended complaint with the OAG that cited additional pharmacies and included eight more testimonies by members of MRNY (NYLPI 2008). In November 2008 agreements were signed between the OAG and CVS and Rite-Aid to provide language access to LEP customers. Several months later, in March and April 2009, agreements were signed between the OAG and five other pharmacy chains.

City Council Action The Language Access to Pharmacies Act of 2008 (Intro 859-A) was introduced into the city council in October 2008 by Betsy Gotbaum, the New

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York City public advocate. Gotbaum and Councilman Gioia were the primary champions of language access at pharmacies in the council (MRNY staff member 2014). The bill, which was sponsored by more than half (twenty-seven) the city council, required that chain pharmacies provide counseling on medications and written translation of prescription labels and other medication-related information to LEP speakers of the seven most common languages used in New York City. Pharmacies were required to post the availability of this language assistance. The Department of City Planning would determine the most common languages every two years, on the basis of the American Community Survey. As of 2010, these languages were Spanish, Italian, Russian, Korean, Chinese, French Creole, and Bengali. Language access in health care had been on the agenda of the city council Committee on Health before the introduction of Intro 859-A. In April 2007 the committee held a hearing, “Overcoming Language Barriers in Health Care Provision.” The deputy chief medical officer of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation testified at this hearing about how the corporation was implementing 2006 New York State Health Department regulations on language access in hospitals.4 Staff of both the New York Immigration Coalition and the Commission on the Public’s Health System discussed specific methods to increase language access for LEP individuals both in medical settings and in Medicaid offices.5 Dr. Ruth Finkelstein, the director of Health Policy at the New York Academy of Medicine, summarized the findings of academy study on uninsured children, and her colleague Dr. Linda Weiss, the lead researcher on the 2007 academy pharmacy survey, described that study (New York City Council 2007). Thus, researchers from a prestigious New York City medical educational institution were testifying about language barriers in accessing health insurance coverage and information about medications. Two public hearings were held on the legislation addressing language access in pharmacies by the city council Committee on Health, one in June 2008 and the second in May 2009. The speakers at both hearings included elected officials, policy researchers, LEP individuals, staff of immigrant advocacy organizations, and representatives of pharmacies. The advocates for mandating language access in pharmacies presented three major arguments: one about health and safety; one about civil rights, equality, and morality; and one about the policy precedents for language access. Gotbaum began the June 16, 2008, hearing by using two different frames to present the problem of lack of language access in pharmacies, a healthand-safety frame and an equality frame. The health-and-safety frame, invoked throughout the discussion of this issue, is clear in her statement:

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We live in a multilingual City . . . and many of these New Yorkers are currently putting their lives at risk by taking prescription medications without a real understanding of the directions and warnings that are on these medications. . . . This lack of information has proven somewhat dangerous for large immigrant populations in many parts of the City. (New York City Council 2008; emphasis added) She then posited the safety of LEP New Yorkers as an explicitly moral issue using an equality frame: Several big name pharmacies are denying equal access to non-­ English speakers. . . . Requiring New York City pharmacies to offer free accessible translation and interpretation services is a moral issue that must be considered to protect the well-being of the 1.8 million New Yorkers who either do not speak English or don’t speak it well. Interpretation and translation services are imperative to ensure the health and safety of all people. (New York City Council 2008; emphasis added) After Gotbaum’s opening statement, five New York City residents recounted (through interpreters) their difficulties in getting information at pharmacies about their medications in Spanish. In each case, the emphasis was on the actual or potential danger this posed to their health. One resident said: Sometimes I do not take the medication because I am afraid that it might [adversely] affect me. Once, when I took the medication without knowing exactly how, I got dizzy and nauseous. I am very worried about my health because I fear that I might take my medicine wrong and get very sick or worse. (New York City Council 2008) Later in the hearing, a representative from the South Asian Council for Social Services said that the South Asians served by his organization had the same problems with language access in pharmacies as those described by the Spanish-speaking individuals who testified. Theo Oshiro, the director of Health Advocacy at MRNY (and as of November 2017, a deputy director of MRNY), and Nisha Agarwal, then a staff attorney with NYLPI, gave essentially the same testimony at both the 2008 and the 2009 city council Committee on Health hearings. They framed language access as one of civil rights, arguing that most LEP patients were not enjoying their rights under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or under

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New York State education law. Both also invoked the precedents of New York State Health Department implementation of regulations about language access in hospitals and the actions of the OAG against chain pharmacies in response to the lawsuit brought by NYLPI. Finkelstein, of the New York Academy of Medicine, summarized the findings of the 2006 academy pharmacy telephone survey and described a more recent pilot study of the use of a telephone translation line by pharmacists.6 The presence of Finkelstein and a colleague from the academy at the 2008 hearing reflects the importance of the research done by academy staff to city council deliberations, as does a briefing paper prepared for the city council Committee on Health by the Human Services Division of the council. The briefing paper cites the 2007 article by Linda Weiss and colleagues on the pharmacy survey nine times in its seven pages (New York City Council Committee on Health 2008).7 The influence of first-person narrative on this debate is apparent because the briefing paper refers to Bad Medicine, the MRNY and NYLPI (2007) compilation of stories of LEP individuals who were harmed or feared harm because they did not have access to information about their prescription medications in their own language. In addition to researchers, elected officials, LEP individuals, and staff of immigrant advocacy organizations, a representative of the National Association of Chain Drug Stores also testified at the June 2008 hearing. She acknowledged the importance of the issue and discussed related policy problems such as the shortage of multilingual pharmacists and methods to recruit them. She also raised the question of the accuracy of translations as a safety issue. Council members asked witnesses about language access at the smaller, independent pharmacies. Theo Oshiro said that the members of MRNY complained about lack of language access at chain pharmacies because the small, independent pharmacies, often pharmacist owned, usually interpreted for consumers in the languages that were common in their area.8 The council members present at the hearing did not question the need for language access at pharmacies but rather raised questions about its implementation, such as how to deal with individuals illiterate in their own language. It is important to note here—as a continuation of the earlier discussion of political context—that almost half the eleven members of the city council Committee on Health in 2009 were immigrants, and one was the son of immigrants. The five born outside the United States were Mathieu Eugene, John C. Liu, Rosie Mendez, Maria del Carmen Arroyo, and Kendall Stewart; the committee chair, Joel Rivera, is the son of an immigrant. At the second city council hearing, on May 4, 2009, six MRNY members (only one of whom had testified at the previous year’s hearing) discussed the

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negative consequences of their inability to get information about their prescription medications in Spanish, and Weiss discussed her research findings. In addition, two researchers at the Health Literacy and Learning Program at Northwestern University discussed the importance of language access as part of health literacy, noting that studies by the Institute of Medicine have found that incorrect prescription information was a major cause of “medication errors” and “adverse events” (New York City Council 2009a, 99). Three witnesses responded negatively to the council bill. A representative of the city’s Department of Consumer Affairs discussed the difficulty of enforcing the law, especially the determination of mandated languages. A spokesperson for the New York Metropolitan Retail Association argued that the OAG’s settlement in 2008 and 2009 with pharmacies had resolved the problem, obviating the need for council action. A representative of the National Association of Chain Drug Stores expressed concern about the high cost of written translation in many languages and proposed that health insurance plans be responsible for interpretation and translation for their LEP patients. On August 18, 2009, the Committee on Health of the city council passed Intro 859-A with nine affirmative votes and two committee members absent (New York City Council 2009b, 10). Two days later at a meeting of the full city council, Speaker Christine Quinn argued for the passage of the bill in terms of the health and safety of New Yorkers and again referred to the 2006 pharmacy survey done by the academy. Both the Speaker and the Committee on Health chair Joel Rivera thanked the staff of MRNY and NYLPI for their work on the issue. Councilman James S. Oddo, a Republican from Staten Island and the council’s minority leader, spoke against the bill: “I think that the taxpayers who are feeling overwhelmed want every government resource today in this climate to go to essential services” (New York City Council 2009c, 41). The bill passed, thirty-six to seven.

Action at the State Level The Safe Rx bill was introduced into the New York State Assembly by Assemblyman Richard Gottfried, the Democratic chair of the assembly Health Committee during the 2011–2012 legislative session. Senator Kemp Hannon, the Republican chair of the Senate Health Committee, was approached by advocates for the legislation and agreed to sponsor the bill in the state senate.9 The bill required oral interpretation of information and translation of written materials for LEP individuals obtaining prescriptions from chain pharmacies or through the mail. It also mandated the commissioner of the New York State Health Department to develop requirements for prescrip-

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tion labels that would meet the needs of senior citizens (New York State Assembly 2012a). The bill’s advocates mobilized a coalition of supporters. More than a hundred organizations—social welfare agencies; advocates for the disabled, seniors, the mentally ill, and family planning; unions; professional associations; academic institutions; and ethnic and immigrant advocacy organizations—were listed as supporters of the Safe Rx bills in the assembly (A.7342) and Senate (S.5000) and more than twenty-five of these groups sent Memoranda of Support for the bill during May and early June 2011. Before any action was taken by the state legislature, however, advocates found another avenue for achieving their goals. In January 2011 Governor Cuomo created a Medicaid Redesign Team (MRT) to restructure the New York State Medicaid program and reduce spending on the program. The thirty-two members of the MRT initially appointed by the Cuomo administration consisted of the usual suspects— executives of hospitals and other institutional health care providers, representatives of professional associations, and elected and appointed government officials (New York State Department of Health 2011b). However, a group of advocacy organizations, led by the Commission on the Public’s Health System, asked the New York State Health Department to include community-based organizations on the MRT (MRNY staff member 2014). Among the MRT work groups was the Health Disparities Work Group, charged with the development of recommendations to the New York State Health Department on establishing reimbursement rates for “culturally competent care” and for “incorporating interpretation and translation services to patients with limited English proficiency and who are hearing impaired.” Among the twenty members appointed to the Health Disparities Work Group were policy staff from four immigrant advocacy organizations: MRNY, the Coalition for Asian American Children and Families, the New York Immigration Coalition, and NYLPI. Dr. Jo Ivey Boufford, president of the New York Academy of Medicine and an academic leader concerned with reducing health disparities, was also a member (New York State Department of Health 2011a). The issue of language access at pharmacies was raised by the immigrant advocates at work group meetings and became a very high priority as the work group’s recommendations were developed (MRNY staff member 2014). The work group made fourteen final recommendations; the two highest priorities were expanding research on health disparities and providing Medicaid reimbursement for the cost of interpretation for LEP and deaf patients. The third was that all chain pharmacies (defined as companies with five or more pharmacies) provide translation and interpretation services for LEP patients; that standardized, understandable prescription labels (clear to those with limited vision) be provided by these pharmacies; and

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that New York State modify official prescription pads to include a place for health care providers to note that patients have LEP (and their language of choice). The first part of this last recommendation, as the work group report noted, was already mandated by local law in New York City, while the proposals on standardized labels and prescription pads were not (Health Disparities Work Group 2011). The recommendations for language access at pharmacies, although not the recommendation for Medicaid reimbursement for hospital and clinic translation services, became part of the governor’s executive budget. Once these recommendations were part of the governor’s budget, MRNY organized a campaign to get legislative approval of the languageaccess provisions. The strategies were similar to those used at the city level; presenting evidence from the New York Academy of Medicine pharmacy study, mobilizing support from organizations representing other constituencies, visiting legislators to ask them for support, and framing language access to pharmacies as a civil rights issue, a public health and safety issue, and a formalization of the OAG settlements. MRNY contacted assembly members and senators who represented their members, many of whom were members of the New York State Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic, and Asian Legislative Caucus. The caucus was “very helpful throughout” and “vocal about their support”; this was important to ensuring that the mandate on language access in pharmacies remained in the state budget (MRNY staff member 2014). According to one member of the state legislature, Governor Cuomo is usually responsive to the caucus members, and in this case, he was also moving to more liberal positions, having begun his first term by cutting programs and budgets (Democratic New York state senator 2014; see also Toobin 2015). Opposition to these provisions of the executive budget was voiced by a representative of the Chain Pharmacy Association of New York State, Michael Duteau, in his testimony at the New York State Legislative Joint Budget Hearing on Health and Medicaid. Duteau discussed the lack of evidence of need for interpretation and translation outside New York City and the danger of mistranslation and unfair liability to litigation (New York State Assembly 2012b). At the same hearing, Craig Burridge, the executive director of the Pharmacists Society of the State of New York expressed concern about the liability of the pharmacist for the quality of interpretation and translation. Almost all of Burridge’s testimony, however, was focused on other issues; primarily the prevention of crimes against pharmacies related to opiate abuse (New York State Assembly 2012b). The Safe Rx legislation was enacted as part of the state fiscal year 2012 budget in April 2012 and became effective on March 30, 2013. The final legislation defines chain pharmacies as corporate entities that own at least

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eight pharmacies. (This was a change from the MRT Health Disparities Work Group recommendation that defined a chain pharmacy as owning at least five pharmacies.) Such pharmacies are required to provide free interpretation and translation for LEP persons in their “preferred pharmacy language” and to “conspicuously” post a notice about the availability of these services. Interpretation and translation can be provided by either pharmacy staff or outside contractors, but pharmacies will not be held liable for mistakes made by contractors, a major concern of the Chain Pharmacy Association at the legislative budget hearing. In addition, pharmacies can seek hardship waivers from these requirements. The preferred pharmacy languages (up to seven) are those used by at least 1 percent of the population in each region of the state; these regions are designated by the New York State Department of Education. In addition, the commissioner of education is charged with developing requirements for translation and interpretation services by mail-order pharmacies and regulations on the content and presentation of all pharmacy drug labels so that they will be understandable to patients (Lentivech 2013; MRNY et al. 2012).

Advocacy in the Bureaucratic Context: The New York State Board of Pharmacy With the legislation enacted, the policy process shifted to the regulatory arena. The pharmacy profession is licensed and regulated by the Office of the Professions in the New York State Department of Education, which is in turn advised by the state Board of Pharmacy, made up of nine licensed pharmacists and two members of the public (New York State Department of Education 2020).10 At the three public meetings (not formal public hearings) held by the state Board of Pharmacy, representatives of some of the chain pharmacies again expressed concerns about the cost of interpretation and translation and the number of required languages. MRNY members testified at two of the pharmacy board meetings, those in Albany and New York City, and submitted testimony for the Buffalo meeting (MRNY staff member 2014). In July 2012 MRNY, the Center for Popular Democracy,11 and NYLPI published “Rx for Safety: SafeRx Recommendations for Clear and Accessible Prescription Medication,” a detailed report summarizing the new law and making recommendations for its implementation. These recommendations included mandating translation and interpretation in the top six or seven languages in New York State (or in the languages spoken by 1 percent of the LEP population rather than 1 percent of the entire population in specific regions of the state), requiring pharmacies to do broad outreach to LEP patients, mandating that official state prescription pads have a place for

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providers to note that patients are LEP, and a plan for monitoring pharmacy compliance. In addition, the report argued against allowing pharmacies to request waivers from the law. The preference of MRNY and other immigrant advocacy groups for up to seven required languages and their opposition to the waiver provisions were acknowledged in the memo sent by the pharmacy board to the Professional Practice Committee of the New York State Department of Education explaining the decisions made by the board in drafting the Safe Rx regulations. The members and staff of the pharmacy board, after considering several methods for dividing New York State into regions for the purpose of choosing mandated languages, decided to make the state one region. What then followed was the designation of four statewide pharmacy languages, Chinese, Italian, Russian, and Spanish. This approach was said to provide the largest number of mandated languages outside New York City. Regarding waivers, the board stated that they were part of the law and that few if any waivers would be sought by the pharmacies. The regulations issued by the pharmacy board also included statewide requirements for prescription labels and requirements that labels be printed in at least a twelve-point font (Lentivech 2013). This reflected the framing of this issue by advocates to include the English-speaking elderly and others with limited vision. According to the executive secretary of the New York State Board of Pharmacy (2015), the Safe Rx legislation has been implemented “quietly and effectively.” There have been no complaints to the pharmacy board about the process, and no pharmacy has requested a waiver.12

Why Was the Campaign for Language Access in Pharmacies Successful? MRNY and NYLPI conducted a highly skilled campaign for language access in New York’s chain pharmacies. They mobilized community residents to both demonstrate and testify at legislative hearings, they framed the issue in a way that would have broad appeal and attract support, and they used both litigation and appeals for legislative action in their efforts to make policy change. At the same time, several characteristics of the political context made success more likely. One was the political environment: the relatively immigrant-friendly political culture of New York City and the policy network of immigrant and health advocacy organizations of which they were a part. Another was the very centralized structure of the budget process in New York State, and the final characteristic was the presence of a governor happy to support a policy innovation that would improve health outcomes for New York residents without costing the state money.

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The Resources and Strategies of Immigrant Advocates As Jane McAlevey (2014) has discussed, MRNY has a highly participatory organizational model that engages its members in political education and then in political action. Language access in pharmacies was a policy issue first identified by community members of MRNY (MRNY staff member 2014) who then testified at city council hearings and attended public meetings of the Board of Pharmacy. Elected officials take note of organizations that include large numbers of active members. The advocates for language access at pharmacies also strategically used narratives—the personal testimony of LEP patients—as evidence in their campaign. These first-person narratives demonstrated to public officials that community members were participating politically and stimulated connection and empathy.13 MRNY had developed a reputation, at least among Democratic state legislators, as a competent and influential organization. “When they come to elected officials, they have done their homework. They have the pulse of the community; they do polls and focus groups and nine times out of ten we agree” (Democratic New York state senator 2014). In the assembly “a lot of people are aware of and respect [MRNY]. People notice when they propose or support an issue.” That MRNY has also gotten involved with a wide range of issues with different sets of allies “adds to their influence” (Democratic New York State Assembly member 2014a). Another member of the assembly said that MRNY “is well regarded because they do good grassroots organizing and also good policy work and pick good issues” (Democratic New York State Assembly member 2014b). MRNY and NYLPI are also part of a policy network of organizations that is concerned with issues of access to health care for underserved populations. One of these groups, the Commission on the Public’s Health System, led the demand for representation of health and immigrant advocacy groups on the Medicaid Redesign Team. Another New York institution working to eliminate health disparities, the New York Academy of Medicine, provided data on the problem of language access in pharmacies that were cited in every policy document developed by MRNY and NYLPI, as well as in a report written by city council staff. Researchers at the academy also testified at each of the three city council hearings on language access. Scientific evidence from the academy’s pharmacy survey and other literature on health literacy and patient use of medications was a crucial aspect of the policy discussions on language access. Framing refers to the specific way that political actors present an issue or a policy to an audience, linking the policy or issue to deeply held common values.14 As described previously, advocates for the language access in pharmacies bill in the city council framed it as an issue of health and safety

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and a civil rights issue. The press release from the OAG announcing an agreement with two large pharmacy chains in the fall of 2008 shows how the health and safety frame was used. It included a quotation from the president of the Institute of Medicine (a prestigious national science research institution that is part of the National Academy of Sciences): “Hundreds of thousands of people are put at risk each year for medication error,” and the agreement will “drastically reduce that number in New York” (New York State Office of the Attorney General 2008). Not only was the legislation mandating language access in pharmacies framed in terms of the health and safety of those with limited English skills, but the policy entrepreneurs advancing it also broadened their focus to appeal to elected officials concerned with the needs of older and disabled constituents. In testimony before the New York State Legislative Joint Budget Hearing on Health and Medicaid, Nisha Agarwal stated, “Accessing understandable information about prescribed medications can be of life or death significance” not only for the LEP population in New York State but for “the elderly and others with limited vision, memory and cognitive skills” (NYLPI 2012). Medication labels with large fonts would be helpful to these populations. “Elected officials are particularly sensitive to the needs of seniors, and this broadened the coalition of supportive groups” (MRNY staff member 2014). Another advocacy strategy was presenting the proposals for language access in pharmacies as the legislative ratification of the decisions already made by the OAG (MRNY staff member 2014). In his signing statement accompanying the city council bill, Mayor Bloomberg noted that the city council law was similar to the settlements made between the chain pharmacies and the OAG (City of New York 2009). According to a member of the New York State Assembly, “An important part of the legislative strategy was that we were just codifying the court settlement, not inventing a new set of obligations for the pharmacies” (Democratic New York State Assembly member 2014a). The enactment of legislation at the city (2009) and the state (2012) levels mandating language access at chain pharmacies illustrates both the strategic savvy of MRNY and the way that its membership model fosters political influence. MRNY had many members available for demonstrating and testifying at hearings. In addition, increasing language access in pharmacies was a policy change that would benefit all those not comfortable speaking English in an interaction with a health professional rather than members of any specific immigrant group. The immigrant advocacy organizations that were the policy entrepreneurs on this issue fought for the largest numbers of languages to be included. In the political context of a city with many diverse immigrant groups, this was framed as a cross-ethnic issue.

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The Structure of Policy Making in New York The effort to ensure that LEP patients can access pharmacy services in their own language took place in a particular structural context, the governmental institutions and legislative culture of New York State. The Safe Rx legis­ lation was enacted as part of the fiscal year 2012 New York State budget process, which operates under an executive budget model, in which the governor prepares the budget and presents it to the legislature with bills that are related to implementing the budget (New York State Division of the Budget, n.d.). This very centralized process means that if a proposal is included in the governor’s executive budget, members of the legislature need only approve it. Advocates therefore needed fewer resources than when they had to build support in the two very different houses of the New York State legislature—the Republican senate and the Democratic assembly.15 “The legislature has remarkably little power in the budget process . . . and the governor gives people pieces they want and then expects you to support the rest” (Democratic New York State Assembly member 2014a).

The Political Positioning of Governor Cuomo Recommendations for mandated language access at chain pharmacies were included in the governor’s budget for probably two reasons. First, the initial agreement with the chain pharmacies was negotiated when Andrew Cuomo was the New York State attorney general and was announced in press releases from that office.16 Second, the pharmacy agreement was a budget item that cost the state nothing since all the costs would be borne by the pharmacies. Cuomo’s policies are generally probusiness and antitax. “His liberalism manifests itself in initiatives that entail relatively little government spending, such as marriage equality, the fracking ban, and gun control” (Toobin 2015, 6). Supporting language access at pharmacies was, in the view of a Democratic state senator who was a member of the New York State Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic, and Asian Legislative Caucus, also a way that Cuomo could “build his immigrant credentials . . . in a nonelection year. . . . Cuomo was elected with a conservative mantra and then started shifting back. This was the beginning of the shift” (Democratic New York state senator 2014). According to a Democratic member of the assembly, “Had the MRT process not brought in divergent voices, and had Cuomo not been responsible for the settlement with the pharmacies and on record of supporting the language access, then maybe it would not have become law in 2012. All of these pieces were important” (Democratic New York State Assembly member 2014a).

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One question about the process of enacting the Safe Rx legislation as part of the New York State budget in 2012 is why there was no opposition from business-friendly members of the Republican senate. Again, part of the answer is structural; the legislature negotiates with the governor on the budget and then enacts it as a package. (This process is similar to reconciliation bills in the U.S. Congress.) If Republicans wanted the language-access legislation removed, they would have had to give something to the governor or the Democrats in exchange, but this was probably not something that they strongly opposed. If the pharmacy chains came to them as allies, the senators could say that, because it was part of the governor’s budget, “my hands are tied” (Democratic New York state senator 2014).

The Political Presence and Influence of Immigrant Advocacy Organizations in Health Policy in New York The successful outcome of the campaign for language access in pharmacies in New York clearly shows that MRNY and NYLPI had influence in the health policy arena. An aspect of their capacity for such political influence is their “political presence”: they are “visible” to policy makers and “are seen as legitimate actors in the political community” (Ramakrishnan and Bloemraad 2008, 21). This is made evident by representatives from four immigrant advocacy groups having served on the Health Disparities Work Group of MRT. While the recommendations made by the advocates were not accepted by the pharmacy board, the immigrant advocacy organizations were in the game and their positions acknowledged. MRNY and their allies had enough political resources (in terms of committed members and information about the process) to engage not just during the legislative process but at the implementation stage of policy making as well. The political presence of immigrant advocates continued during the establishment of New York’s health insurance exchange under the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Representatives of MRNY, the New York Immigration Coalition, the Hispanic Federation, and the Center for Popular Democracy served on the Regional Advisory Committee of the New York State Health Benefit Exchange (New York State of Health 2012). This case study of the proposal, legislative enactment, and implementation of the Safe Rx legislation illustrates that MRNY in partnership with NYLPI combined community organization and protest strategies with litigation, evidence, framing, personal narrative, and coalition building to influence elected officials and state bureaucracies in the very complex arenas of New York State government. One of the consequences of the internal organizational processes of MRNY, in which residents who receive services

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are recruited to become direct participants in its leadership and policy activities, is that elected officials perceive it as representative. It also has a very skilled staff that gains support from legislators by strategically framing issues and using both scientific evidence and personal narrative. Health literacy, including knowledge about medications, is viewed as an important element in discussion of health disparities and the provision of quality, patient-centered care. While it is key, language is only one of many barriers to high-quality health care for immigrant and working-class communities. Others include the lack of health insurance or underinsurance and issues related to the structure of health services in New York and the United States generally. Such issues include the location of hospitals and transportation systems, the absence of adequate preventive and primary care health services, and the separation of the environmental, economic, and social causes of disease from their treatment by the medical care system.17 According to a member of the assembly who represents a low-income immigrant neighborhood in New York City, constituents with health-­ related issues are not complaining about language access as much as about long waits for services, lack of space in emergency rooms, and problems with health insurance coverage (Democratic New York State Assembly member 2014b). Passage of city and state legislation mandating interpretation and translation services at pharmacies is partly due to the simplicity of the issue and its framing in terms of medication safety for LEP populations and older English speakers. The implementation of these laws may cost the chain pharmacies some money, but they do not challenge any of the central ways that health services in New York are either financed or delivered. Success may be far more difficult to achieve on the more complex issues of access to health insurance and quality care for documented and undocumented immigrants. Notes Acknowledgment: I am indebted to the very busy policy actors who graciously shared information and insights with me during the research for this chapter. 1.  To date, John C. Liu, the New York City comptroller from 2010 to 2013 is the only citywide elected official who is foreign born. As of 2019, he is representing northeastern Queens in the New York State Senate. However, as discussed in this chapter, an increasing number of New York City Council members are themselves foreign born or the children of immigrants. 2.  Waters (2014) discusses both the tolerance and the racism faced by immigrants and their children in New York City. 3.  When the 311 call center, which provides nonemergency assistance with city services and information about government programs, was established in 2003, it provided language interpretation. In July 2008, Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed E ­ xecutive

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Order 120 stipulating that all government documents be issued in the six most commonly spoken languages (Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Korean, Italian, and Haitian Creole) and that telephone interpretation be available at all city agencies for speakers of other languages. Bloomberg administration officials said that this was the most comprehensive language-access policy in the country (Santos 2008). But two years later the New York Immigration Coalition and Make the Road New York conducted a study that found limited progress in its implementation (Santos 2010). In 2011, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order extending these language-access provisions to all New York State agencies (McAlevey 2014). 4.  The corporation, the largest local public hospital system in the United States, has cared for many undocumented immigrants who are ineligible for public health insurance. It was renamed NYC Health + Hospitals in 2015 (Bernstein 2016). 5.  The Commission on the Public’s Health System is a health advocacy organization whose mission is to “fight for equal access to quality health care for everyone regardless of race, ethnicity, language spoken, diagnosis, or the ability to pay.” It pays particular attention to supporting the public health and public hospital system, as well as other “safety net” institutions that provide health care to the medically underserved. See Commission on the Public’s Health System, n.d. 6.  Although a grant to the academy research team paid for the language line, it was still difficult to recruit pharmacies for the study. However, the pharmacists who participated had positive views about the service and used it to market to more LEP individuals. 7.  Other sources cited were the U.S. census and a 2006 New York City Department of Health report on immigrant health, the Academy of Medicine report (Weiss et al. 2006) about language barriers to accessing children’s health care in New York City, a presentation by Linda Weiss and Emily M. Ambizas on language access at pharmacies at the April 2007 New York State conference “Increasing Language Access in Health Care,” and two other journal articles on language access in pharmacies in other cities. 8.  The other consideration in aiming the campaign at the chain, rather than the independent, pharmacies was resources. The advocates believed that the costs to comply with Title VI might be highly damaging to the small pharmacies but could be much more easily absorbed by the large chains (New York Academy of Medicine staff member 2015b). It was also believed that there would be less political support for the policy if financially struggling small pharmacies were the target (MRNY staff member 2016). 9.  The assembly bill was sent to the Higher Education Committee after the assembly Speaker’s office determined that this should be the committee of jurisdiction. The Health Committee has jurisdiction over public health law; the jurisdiction of the Higher Education Committee includes professional licensing and professional discipline, including pharmacists (Democratic New York State Assembly member 2014a). However, the Higher Education Committee never took action on the bill. 10.  The Department of Education reports to the Board of Regents. Appointees to all the professional boards are to reflect the geographic and cultural diversity of New York State as well as different aspects of each profession (New York State Department of Education 2010). 11.  The Center for Popular Democracy, founded in 2012, is a national organization that supports local- and state-level grassroots community-based organizations working on economic, racial, and social justice issues (Center for Popular Democracy, n.d.b).

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Several current and former leaders of MRNY serve on its board of directors (Center for Popular Democracy, n.d.a). 12.  In 2015 MRNY and the New York Academy of Medicine conducted a study to evaluate the implementation of the law, including a new telephone survey of pharmacists, in-person interviews with a sample of LEP patients who had recently filled new prescriptions, and inspection of pharmacy signage. Their study found that the “vast majority” of pharmacies had the capacity for language interpretation via phone, the capacity to print medication labels in the required languages, and appropriate signage indicating the availability of language services but that a relatively small number of patients were using these services (Scherer et al. 2016). 13.  In their study of the enactment of a 2010 law that expanded California’s foster care program to include young adults up to age twenty, Jennifer Mosley and Katherine Schumacher (2014) found that three different types of evidence were strategically used by advocates. These were research evidence on the negative effect of aging out of foster care, evidence on the short- and long-term costs of the program, and the personal stories of young adults who had to leave foster care. The moving stories told by these youth created bipartisan legislative support for this policy change. 14.  Framing is a process of “value recruitment,” or “efforts of political persuaders to influence the connections individuals make between broad social values and particular political issues” (Nelson, Wittmer, and Shortle 2010, 13). 15.  The assembly has had a Democratic majority since 1974, while the senate has had a Republican majority for most of the last half century. In the November 2018 election, Democrats achieved a working majority in the state senate. 16.  The language access in pharmacies agreement is one of the two settlements (the other is about student loan practices) achieved while Cuomo was attorney general that are mentioned in a profile of Cuomo in the New Yorker (Toobin 2015). 17.  MRNY, the New York Immigration Coalition, and other immigrant advocacy groups in New York City are active on some of these issues, and under Mayor Bill de Blasio immigrant health issues have been the focus of both study and policy initiatives. In October 2015 the Task Force on Immigrant Health Care Access, established by the mayor, issued a report that discussed the financial, educational, and cultural barriers to accessing health services in New York City for documented and undocumented immigrants and made recommendations to overcome these barriers (Mayor’s Task Force on Immigrant Health Care Access 2015). References Bernstein, Nina. 2016. “De Blasio to Propose $2 Billion for New York City’s Hospital System.” New York Times, April 25. https://​w ww​.nytimes​.com/​2016/​04/​26/​nyregion/​ de​-blasio​-to​-propose​-2​-billion​-for​-new​-york​-citys​-hospital​-system​.html. Center for Popular Democracy. n.d.a. “Board.” https://​populardemocracy​.org/​about​-us/​ board (accessed June 11, 2020). ———. n.d.b. “Our Work.” https://​populardemocracy​.org/​our​-work (accessed June 11, 2020). Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York. 2018. “Limited English Proficiency.” https://​d ata​.cccnewyork​.org/​d ata/​t able/​1256/​l imited​- english​-proficiency​#1256/​ 1446/​40/​a/​a.

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City of New York. 2009. “Mayor Bloomberg Signs Legislation to Provide Language Assistance Services in Pharmacies.” September 13. https://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the -mayor/news/395-09/mayor-bloomberg-signs-legislation-provide-language-assis tance-services-pharmacies. Commission on the Public’s Health System. n.d. “What We Do.” http://​w ww​.cphsnyc​ .org/​cphs/​W hat​_We​_ Do/ (accessed June 11, 2020). de Graauw, Els. 2008. “Nonprofit Organizations: Agents of Immigrant Political Incorporation in Urban America.” In Civic Hopes and Political Realities: Immigrants, Community Organizations and Political Engagement, edited by Karthick Rama­ krishnan and Irene Bloemraad, 323–350. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Democratic New York State Assembly member. 2014a. Interview by the author, July 24, New York. Democratic New York State Assembly member. 2014b. Interview by the author, August 19, Bronx, New York. Democratic New York state senator. 2014. Interview by the author, October 22, Queens, New York. Health Disparities Work Group. 2011. “Redesigning the Medicaid Program: Final Recommendations.” October 20. https://​w ww​.health​.ny​.gov/​health​_care/​medicaid/​re design/​docs/​health​_disparities​_report​.pdf. Hochschild, Jennifer, Jacqueline Chattopadhyay, Claudine Gay, and Michael JonesCorrea. 2013. Outsiders No More? Models of Immigrant Political Incorporation. London: Oxford University Press. Hu, Winnie. 2003. “Mayor Widens Privacy Rights for Immigrants.” New York Times, September 18. https://​w ww​.nytimes​.com/​2003/​09/​18/​nyregion/​mayor​-widens​-pri vacy​-rights​-for​-immigrants​.html. Kadushin, Peter. 2007. “Immigration Advocates Push for Bilingual Prescription Labels.” Daily News, November 5. https://​w ww​.nydailynews​.com/​new​-york/​queens/​immi gration​-advocates​-push​-bilingual​-prescription​-labels​-article​-1​.257643. Kingdon, John W. 1995. Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies. 2nd ed. New York: HarperCollins. Lentivech, Douglas E. 2013. Letter to Professional Practice Committee. June 10. http://​ www​.regents​.nysed​.gov/​common/​regents/​fi les/​613ppca1​%5b1​%5d​.pdf. Lieberman, Marvin, and Leon J. Warshaw. 1998. The New York Academy of Medicine, 1947–1997: Enhancing the Health of the Public. Malabar, FL: Krieger. Mayor’s Task Force on Immigrant Health Care Access. 2015. “Improving Immigrant w ww1​ .nyc​ .gov/​ assets/​ home/​ Access to Health Care in New York City.” http://​ downloads/​pdf/​reports/​2015/​immigrant​-health​-task​-force​-report​.pdf. McAlevey, Jane. 2014. “The High-Touch Model: Make the Road New York’s Participatory Approach to Immigrant Organizing.” In New Labor in New York: Precarious Workers and the Future of the Labor Movement, edited by Ruth Milkman and Ed Ott, 173–186. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mitka, Mike. 2007. “For Non-English Speakers, Drug Label Can Be Lost in Translation.” JAMA 297 (23): 2575–2577. Mollenkopf, John. 2014. “The Rise of Immigrant Influence in New York City Politics.” In New York and Amsterdam: Immigration and the New Urban Landscape, edited by Nancy Foner, Jan Rath, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and Roger van Reekum, 203–229. New York; New York University Press. Mosley, Jennifer E., and Katherine Schumacher. 2014. “Strategic Use of Evidence in State Level Policymaking: Matching Evidence Type to Legislative Goals.” Paper presented

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at the 2014 Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, August 28–31. MRNY (Make the Road New York). 2008. “Now We’re Talking: A Study on Language Assistance Services at Ten New York City Public and Private Hospitals.” April. https://​m aketheroadny​.org/​pix ​_ reports/ ​Now ​%20Were​%20Talking ​%20Report​ %20Final​.pdf. ———. n.d. “Our History.” Previously available at http://​ w ww​ .maketheroad​ .org/​ whoweare​_ourhistory​.php (accessed April 4, 2017). MRNY, Center for Popular Democracy, and New York Lawyers for the Public Interest. 2012. “Rx for Safety: SafeRx Recommendations for Clear and Accessible Prescription Medication.” July. https://​maketheroadny​.org/​pix​_ reports/​SafeRx​_ Regulations​ _Recommendations​_ Report​_with​_ Appendices​_ 2012​.7​.17​.pdf. MRNY and NYLPI. 2007. “Bad Medicine.” October. http://​w ww​.maketheroad​.org/​pix​ _reports/​Bad​%20Medicine​.pdf. MRNY staff member. 2014. Interview by the author, July 18 and July 25, Queens, New York. MRNY staff member. 2015. Personal communication, November 19. MRNY staff member. 2016. Personal communication, January 5. Nelson, Thomas E., Dana E. Wittmer, and Allyson F. Shortle 2010. “Framing and Value Recruitment in the Debate over Teaching Evolution.” In Winning with Words: The Origin and Impact of Political Framing, edited by Brian F. Schaffner and Patrick J. Sellers, 11–40. New York: Routledge. New York Academy of Medicine. n.d. “History.” https://​w ww​.nyam​.org/​about/​history/ (accessed June 11, 2020). New York Academy of Medicine staff member. 2015a. Interview by the author, March 16, New York. New York Academy of Medicine staff member. 2015b. Personal communication, December 16. New York Academy of Medicine staff member. 2015c. Personal communication, December 28. New York City Council. 2007. “Transcript of the Minutes of the Committee on Health.” April 11. http://​legistar​.council​.nyc​.gov/​LegislationDetail​.aspx​?ID​= ​4 46972​& ​GUID​ =​FE39A323​-A810​-4BB9​-B7C8​-7757780F963E​&​Options​=​&​Search=. ———. 2008. “Transcript of the Minutes of the Committee on Health.” June 16. https://​ legistar​.council​.nyc​.gov/​L egislationDetail​. aspx​?ID ​= ​4 48513​& ​GUID ​=​1002BA87​ -2F7F​-4ABA​-85B2​-D8E929EA051F​&​Options​=​&​Search=. ———. 2009a. “Transcript of the Minutes of the Committee on Health.” May 4. http://​ legistar​.council​. nyc​.gov/​L egislationDetail​. aspx​?ID ​= ​4 52244​& ​GUID ​=​7423709F​ -DF69​-4C58​-8A7A​-8EE91B7336AE. ———. 2009b. “Transcript of the Minutes of the Committee on Health.” August 18. http:// ​ l egistar​ . council ​ . nyc ​ . gov/ ​ L egislationDetail ​ . aspx​ ? ID ​ = ​ 4 52244 ​ & ​ G UID ​ =​ 7423709F​-DF69​-4C58​-8A7A​-8EE91B7336AE. ———. 2009c. “Transcript of the Minutes of the Stated Meeting.” August 20. http://​ legistar​.council​. nyc​.gov/​L egislationDetail​. aspx​?ID ​= ​4 52244​& ​GUID ​=​7423709F​ -DF69​-4C58​-8A7A​-8EE91B7336AE. New York City Council Committee on Health. 2008. “Language Access in New York City’s Pharmacies.” June 16. https://​legistar​.council​.nyc​.gov/​LegislationDetail​.aspx​ ?ID​= ​4 48513​& ​GUID​=​1002BA87​-2F7F​- 4ABA​-85B2​-D8E929EA051F​& ​O ptions​=​&​ Search=.

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New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. 2006. “The Health of Immigrants in New York City.” June. https://​w ww​.fosterglobal​.com/​policy​_papers/​ HealthofImmigrantsinNYC​.pdf. New York State Assembly. 2012a. “Bill No. A07342.” http://​assembly​.state​.ny​.us/​leg/​ ?default​_ fld​=​&​leg ​_video​=​&​bn​=​A07342​&​term​=​2011​&​Summary​=​Y​&​Actions​=​Y​&​ Committee​%26nbspVotes​=​Y​&​Floor​%26nbspVotes​=​Y​&​Memo​=​Y​&​Text​=​Y. ———. 2012b. “Joint Budget Hearing on Health and Medicaid.” February 8. http://​ nystateassembly​.granicus​.com/​MediaPlayer​.php​?view​_id​=​8​&​clip​_id​=​1322. New York State Board of Pharmacy executive secretary. 2015. Telephone interview by the author, August 7. New York State Department of Education. 2010. “State Boards for the Professions.” February 19. http://​w ww​.op​.nysed​.gov/​boards. ———. 2020. “Statutory Composition and Current Membership.” May 29. http://​w ww​ .op​.nysed​.gov/​boards/​bdcomp​.htm​#phar. New York State Department of Health. 2011a. “Medicaid Redesign Team: Health Disparities Work Group.” October. http://​w ww​.health​.ny​.gov/​health​_care/​medicaid/​ redesign/​health​_disparities​_workgroup​.htm. ———. 2011b. “Medicaid Redesign Team Members.” August 4. https://​w ww​.health​.ny​ .gov/​health​_care/​medicaid/​redesign/​members​.htm. New York State Division of the Budget. n.d. “The Budget Process: Overview.” https://​ www​.budget​.ny​.gov/​citizen/​process/​process​.html (accessed June 11, 2020). New York State Office of the Attorney General. 2008. “Cuomo Announces Agreements with Two of the Nation’s Largest Pharmacies to Provide Customers with Prescription Medication Instructions in Their Primary Language.” November 13. http://​w ww​.ag​ .ny​.gov/​press​-release/​c uomo​-announces​-agreements​-two​-nations​-largest​-phar macies​-provide​-customers. New York State of Health. 2012. “Regional Advisory Committees Established.” September 6. http://​info​.nystateofhealth​.ny​.gov/​RegionalAdvisoryCommittee. NYLPI (New York Lawyers for the Public Interest). 2007. “Discrimination Complaint.” http://​w ww​. nylpi​.org/​i mages/​F E/​c hain234siteType8/​site203/​c lient/​Health​%20​ -​%2010​.31​.07​_ Lingisic​%20Access​%20​-​%20Rx​%20Complaint​%20to​%20AG​.pdf. ———. 2008. Letter to Jennifer Rivera. April 23. http://​w ww​.nylpi​.org/​images/​FE/​ chain234siteType8/​site203/​client/​Health​%20​-​%2004​.23​.08​_ Lingisic​%20Access​%20​ -​%202nd​%20Complaint​%20to​%20AG​.pdf. ———. 2012. “Testimony of New York Lawyers for Public Interest and Make the Road New York before the New York State Legislative Joint Budget Hearing: Health and Medicaid.” February 8. http://​w ww​.nylpi​.org/​images/​FE/​chain234siteType8/​site203/​ client/​2012​.2​.8​%20​-​%20NYS​%20Legislature​%20Testimony​%20​-​%20Budget​.pdf. ———. n.d. “Who We Are.” https://​nylpi​.org/​who​-we​-are/ (accessed June 2, 2020). Queens borough-level official. 2012. Telephone interview by the author, October 18, New York. Ramakrishnan, S. Karthick, and Irene Bloemraad. 2008. “Introduction: Civic and Political Inequalities.” In Civic Hopes and Political Realities: Immigrants, Community Organizations and Political Engagement, edited by S. Karthick Ramakrishnan and Irene Bloemraad, 1–42. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Richardson, Clem. 2009. “Nisha Agarwal Aims to Make NYC a Healthier Place with Health Justice Program.” New York Daily News, July 2. http://​w ww​.nydailynews​ .com/​new​-york/​brooklyn/​n isha​-agarwal​-aims​-nyc​-healthier​-place​-health​-justice​ -program​-article​-1​.425962.

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Santos, Fernanda. 2008. “Mayor Orders New York to Expand Language Help.” New York Times, July 23. https://​w ww​.nytimes​.com/​2008/​07/​23/​nyregion/​23translate​.html. ———. 2010. “Study Finds Language Help for Immigrants Lacking.” New York Times, July 7. https://​cityroom​.blogs​.nytimes​.com/​2010/​07/​07/​study​-finds​-language​-help​ -for​-immigrants​-lacking. Scherer Maya, Tongtan Chantarat, Theo Oshiro, Rebecca Telzak, and Linda Weiss. 2016. “Preventing Medication Errors among Limited English Proficient Patients: Evaluating the Impact of Language Access Laws in New York Pharmacies.” Paper presented at AcademyHealth Annual Research Meeting, Boston, MA, June 26–28. Strolovitch, Dara Z. 2007. “A More Level Playing Field or a New Mobilization of Bias? Interest Groups and Advocacy for the Disadvantaged.” In Interest Group Politics, 7th ed., edited by Allan J. Cigler and Burdett A. Loomis, 86–107. Washington, DC: CQ Press. Toobin, Jeffrey. 2015. “The Albany Chronicles: How Andrew Cuomo Gets His Way.” New Yorker, February 9. https://​w ww​.newyorker​.com/​magazine/​2015/​02/​16/​a lbany​ -chronicles. Waters, Mary C. 2014. “Nativism, Racism and Immigration in New York City.” In New York and Amsterdam: Immigration and the New Urban Landscape, edited by Nancy Foner, Jan Rath, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and Roger van Reekum, 143–169. New York: New York University Press. Weiss, Linda, Tamar Bauer, Cayce Hill, Jennifer Fuld, and Jeanne Bergman. 2006. “Language as a Barrier to Health Care for New York City Children in Immigrant Families: Haitian, Russian and Latino Perspectives.” New York Academy of Medicine Division of Health Policy and New York Forum for Child Health, May. https://​w ww​ .fcd​-us​.org/​assets/​2016/​04/​LanguageBarrier​.pdf. Weiss, Linda, Frances Gany, Peri Rosenfeld, Olveen Carrasquillo, Iman Sharif, Elana Behar, Emily Ambizas, Priti Patel, Lauren Schwartz, and Robert Mangione. 2007. “Access to Multilingual Medication Instructions at New York City Pharmacies.” Journal of Urban Health: Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 84 (6): 742–754. Whitt, Toni. 2006. “A Promise for Immigrants Who Seek Hospital Care.” New York Times, May 31. https://​w ww​.nytimes​.com/​2006/​05/​31/​nyregion/​31hospitals​.html.

7 The More Things Change . . . Machine Politics in Queens Michael Alan Krasner and Ron Hayduk

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his chapter explores the relations of immigrant groups in Queens to politics generally and, particularly, to the borough’s persisting, though diminished Democratic political machine. A comprehensive review of this situation would include a systematic accounting along several dimensions. One is mobilization—the percentage of potential voters in a group who actually register and vote. Another is the number of elected officials, including party officials, from the group. A subsidiary of this point would be the number of group members who receive party endorsements and political support. Resources obtained by group members, including government grants and jobs, building projects such as new schools, and level and quality of public services, would be a third. In contrast to material benefits, symbolic gestures such as including members of a group in ceremonies or having party leaders or elected officials attend a group’s celebrations or other special events would also be considered as a fourth dimension. Obviously, such a thorough review would require a book-length treatment. Our focus in this chapter is more modest. We begin with a discussion that classifies the party system in New York City and identifies its most important processes as they relate to new immigrant groups. We then develop case studies of two groups—Asian and Latino immigrants—that could be considered the most successful, at least in terms of the number of elected officials, focusing on three pioneering individuals. John Liu was first

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a city council member from Flushing, then comptroller of New York City, and then an unsuccessful candidate for mayor and for the state senate. Hiram Monserrate, a Puerto Rican and former New York City police officer, became the first Latino ever elected to office in 2001, representing the neighborhoods of Corona (including the apartment development of LeFrak City), Elmhurst, East Elmhurst, and parts of Jackson Heights. The late Jose Peralta, who was of Dominican descent, worked with the city’s labor unions before running successfully for the state assembly and the state senate from the Elmhurst–Corona–Jackson Heights area. In each case, as the groundbreaking elected official moved up the ladder, other members of his ethnic group succeeded him in the seats he had formerly occupied. By analyzing this process, we seek to reveal and interpret the relations among the Queens County Democratic Party (known universally as County) and the new immigrant groups whose enormous growth has changed all the actors’ calculations. We conclude with the stunning defeat of Congressman Joseph Crowley, the fifty-six-year-old white male head of the Queens County Democratic Party, by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a twenty-eight-year-old Puerto Rican woman from the Bronx, and its implications for other races and the future of the Queens machine. We hope this discussion will serve as a preliminary exploration to more ambitious studies that include all the points above. In addition to the sources cited, our research is based primarily on in-depth interviews with elected officials and former elected officials.

The Dynamics of New York City’s One-Party System New York City is a weakly organized, highly fragmented, decentralized, one-party system. Divided into five boroughs (counties)—each with its own separate party organization—the city has been dominated by the Democrats since the early nineteenth century.1 The county party organizations have historically drawn their membership and support from working-class ethnic immigrant groups, successively the Irish, Italians, and Jews and, more recently, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians (Shefter 1985; 1994; Erie 1988; McNickle 1993; for more on political clubs, see Peel 1935; Adler, Blank, and Peel 1975; Gerson 1989; and Kraus 1991). Elite interests, however, also have been well represented in and served by the party system (Lowi 1967; Newfield and Dubrul 1979; Newfield and Barrett 1988; Shefter 1994; Mollenkopf 1994; Fitch 1993; Thompson 2006; Brash 2011). In the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, the machine, known as Tammany Hall, dominated New York City politics. In the post–World War II era, New York’s party system has more closely resembled the one-party states described in V. O. Key’s classic work S­ outhern

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Politics.2 Key calls one-party systems, “no party” systems because the absence of competition with another party opens the door for factions within the dominant party to become the main actors contending for power. Among the competing factions, the party machines have been able to maintain some power, despite reforms that have limited important resources such as patronage jobs. John Mollenkopf says of New York’s party politics, “Coalitions are fluid, personality-oriented, and often based on invidious racial, ethnic, or status distinctions. Issues are blotted out. In such an environment, the regular political clubs, despite losing power at the center of New York City politics, can continue to hold sway at the periphery” (1987, 494). The Democratic county organizations have maintained political power through voter mobilization or demobilization strategies, the remaining patronage resources, access to the ballot, gerrymandering, campaign finance, access to voting, and Election Day operations. It is well documented that democratic aspirations can be aided or thwarted by expanding or constricting access to the vote and the ladders to elected office (Piven and Cloward 2000). The reason is simple: dominant political actors—of both major parties—resist outsiders, whether as candidates or new and unpredictable voters, because they have incumbency interests and seek to maintain a stable and constricted electorate and party system. Those who have gained public office under existing rules and arrangements resist change. They are served by predictability and stability in the electorate. Rules that encourage challengers and encourage new voters increase unpredictability and uncertainty. This axiom of politics is evident in New York and the case of Queens County’s Democratic Party. Martin Shefter observes: In the early 1970s the majority of officials in New York City who represented district constituencies—city councilmen, state assemblymen, state senators, and civil court judges—were party regulars. New York’s Democratic machine and its affiliated clubs no longer had control over more than a half-million votes, as they had in the mid-1940’s, but in elections for offices that had little public visibility they generally could place more campaign workers in the field than could most insurgents, raise more money, and draw on the talents of lawyers who knew how to use the incredibly (and deliberately) complex election law to get political novices thrown off the ballot.  .  .  . Democratic machine politicians attempted to ward off threats . . . [from challengers] as much by colluding with the Republicans and striking deals with insurgents as by trying to overwhelm them at the polls. (1985, 102–103)

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Democratic Party county organizations have been closely identified with the borough presidents and city council members and with some mayors. Indeed, the county organizations continue to successfully promote their own candidates by denying others access to the ballot, and to absorb or co-opt successful insurgents. Mollenkopf observes, “In exchange for support, the county organizations and political clubs extracted patronage in the usual forms—jobs, contracts, and favorable decisions for their locales” (1994, 123).3 A series of corruption scandals during the mid to late 1980s played a role in the demise of several Democratic Party leaders, which amply shows the extent of such arrangements.4 These scandals undermined the party organizations’ capacities and credibility during the late 1980s, leading to changes in party leadership and policy. Yet even as county organizations and political clubs have declined, they remain a force to be reckoned with in determining electoral outcomes. Mollenkopf describes New York City as the “great anomaly”: a place that should be “a model of strong of minority incorporation and the consequent targeting of policies toward minority interests [given the sizable black and Latino populations that make it a majority minority city coupled with a history of electing some blacks and Puerto Ricans]. The problem, however, is that New York City has not incorporated minorities and, depending on what indicators are chosen, has not produced policies that are especially aimed toward minorities” (Mollenkopf 1986, 591). Although a few years later David Dinkins would become the first African American mayor (1989–1993), this characterization still largely holds true today. For twenty years (1994–2013) New York had white male Republican mayors (Rudy Giuliani, 1994–2001, and Michael Bloomberg, 2002– 2013) in an ethnically diverse city with an overwhelming Democratic voter enrollment, a pattern that ended only with the election of Democratic mayor Bill de Blasio in 2013. And although more minorities have been elected to office at every level of governance, their numbers are not proportional to their share of the population. These results are produced, in part, because election barriers persist that block the full inclusion of New York’s diversifying population. Even though the racial composition of the city changed from majority white to majority minority during the 1980s—more than one million whites moved out of the city and approximately one million people who were mostly people of color, including many foreign-born immigrants, moved into the city—a majority of the active electorate (actual voters) has remained white in local elections (Mollenkopf and Sonenshein 2013, 17). Similarly, barriers to elected office can still be formidable. Dominant factions can still wield important resources to shape electoral outcomes, even if more modestly.

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Machines and Population Changes: The Essential Dilemma and the Means to Manage It When dealing with a stable, homogeneous population, the leaders of a political machine in a one-party system need only consider personal ambitions or factional conflicts. In Queens the presence of many groups, some of which are growing dynamically, produces a much more complicated and difficult situation. The central dilemma faced by party leaders is how to protect loyal incumbents while accommodating new groups’ desires for what Hannah Pitkin styles “descriptive representation” (2013, 11). This phrase refers to the desire of most people in a group to be represented by someone who shares what those involved consider to be their most important social characteristic. The reason is obvious to minority groups: “descriptive representation” serves as a proxy, which means voters trust that the elected official not only understands the plight of the group vis-à-vis each voter’s experience but will work to defend and advance its interests. Jane Mansbridge (1999) argues descriptive representation helps build trust in government and creates a sense of legitimacy and belonging within a minority group. Many states’ redistricting laws explicitly direct those drawing district lines to take into account an area’s community of interest—the social, cultural, racial, ethnic, and economic interests common to the population of the area, which are the probable subjects of legislation. Not surprisingly, the background of a candidate can mobilize (or demobilize) voter turnout in such districts (Levitt 2010). Much of the literature on descriptive representation in the Latino community, for example, has consistently demonstrated the impact of a coethnic candidate in boosting voter turnout (Barreto 2010; Barreto, Segura, and Woods 2004). The specific salient social factor varies from group to group. Thus, for African Americans the main choice has been informed by race. For Jewish voters, religion looms large. For the Chinese, ethnicity is likely to dominate. Among Latinos, ethnicity may contend with nationality. For example, Queens has seen rivalries between Dominicans and Puerto Ricans for elective office, with Colombians, Ecuadorians, and others also in the mix. In the end the issue may come down to the degree of an emerging group’s “political incorporation,” which Reuel Rogers defines as “the process through which new groups begin to participate in politics and eventually achieve representation and influence in government” (2006, 17). Whatever the particularities of the emerging group, the conflict for the machine is clear. Incumbent representatives mainly have come from the older immigrant groups—Irish, Italians, Jews. They have in most cases been awarded their positions as a reward for long and faithful service. For the machine, safeguarding these loyal incumbents must be a high priority. After

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all, who would work for an organization that jettisons its most loyal and hardworking members to satisfy Johnny-come-latelies? On the other hand, how will the machine survive if it alienates growing blocs of voters? This question of survival of the organization versus the survival of particular incumbents is the essential dilemma faced by party leaders in Queens in the current period of massive demographic change. Like most dilemmas, this one cannot be finally or neatly resolved. Instead, the question is whether it can be managed successfully, whether a balance can be struck that preserves the organization over time. In the opinion of knowledgeable observers and our sources, a good part of the reason why the Queens Democratic Party has remained stronger than its counterparts in New York City’s other boroughs is precisely that it has found ways to accommodate, at least to some extent, the new immigrants’ demands and aspirations without alienating or sacrificing the incumbent officeholders. One aspect of this successful management is flexibility. The machine’s leaders hold themselves ready to work with insurgents, to forgive and forget those who challenge incumbents or who defy the machine. For example, machine leaders made it clear to John Liu, who was challenging a controversial incumbent for a city council seat in Flushing in 1997, that while they felt obliged to support the incumbent, Julia Harrison, they recognized that Liu would likely win the next election in 2001 (which he did), and they promised they would then welcome him, “with open arms” (Informant 2012). The machine’s actions may also reflect a typical political calculation: Harrison was becoming a liability (she was accused of being “racist” against the Chinese), and Asian voters were growing in number and potential clout (Hicks 1997). In the end, the machine may have merely read the writing on the wall and sought to get out in front of the shifting demographics and accommodate inevitable challengers. In another example, the Democratic Party in 2013 allied with Rory Lancman in his city council race, though Lancman, then an assemblyman, had in 2012 challenged the organization’s candidate, Grace Meng, to replace the retiring, long-time, incumbent congressman, Gary Ackerman. From the organization’s point of view, Lancman represented a proven quantity, having served previously in the state assembly and having won plaudits as an intelligent, articulate, hardworking representative. This example suggests a second reason for the Queens machine’s relative strength and success. Its choices of candidates are said to reflect a concern for competence and diligence as well as loyalty. According to well-placed sources, candidates are vetted for their ability to deliver constituent services and well-considered legislation along with their commitment to the organization. The practice contrasts with that of earlier versions of the machine and with those of other, less successful machines in other boroughs, where

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widespread corruption and low levels of competence have produced frequent scandals and a greatly weakened organization. This concern for merit guards the machine to some extent against the worst excesses of scandal and the worst effects of incompetence, though the example of state senator Malcolm Smith demonstrates that the system is far from perfect.5 In discussions with participants in Queens politics, the most frequently mentioned measure undertaken by County to accommodate new immigrant groups was the creation of at-large district leaders, appointed by the county chair. Initiated by Thomas Manton, who led the machine from 1986 to 2006, the practice gave representation to immigrant groups that had not elected any of their members to the district leader positions, which collectively hold power over the county organization by dint of their voting to elect the chairperson and other officials. However, the newly created at-large positions lacked this crucial attribute. District leaders had only advisory status and could not vote. Moreover, at-large elections tend to privilege better-funded candidates and larger groups. In our interviews, some representatives of immigrant groups criticized the measure as a symbolic gesture lacking in substance. Representatives of older, better-established groups generally took the position that this was a genuine effort at inclusion and emphasized that it was more than any other county organization in New York City had done. Another device used by County has been endorsing immigrant candidates in citywide races. For example, in the 2013 Democratic primary for the citywide position of public advocate, Letitia James, the African American councilwoman from Brooklyn with ties to organized labor, and Daniel Squadron, a state senator also from Brooklyn, were reckoned the favorites. Instead of going with a contender, County endorsed Reshma Saujani, a longshot candidate from Manhattan, who had actually run against veteran Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney in the Democratic primaries in 2010. It seems likely that part of County’s calculation was that this endorsement would do it no harm among African American voters in Queens, who would not be paying much attention, while doing County more good among the members of the South Asian community in Queens. This impression is reinforced by the presence at the endorsement event of Ali Najmi, president of the Eleanor Roosevelt Regular Democratic Club of Queens and the political action director of the Alliance of South Asian American Labor, who was photographed in a trio with the smiling Saujani and Congressman Crowley, the chairman of the Queens Democratic Party (Orovic 2013). One of our interviewees said that County made considerable efforts to involve members of new immigrant groups in lesser positions when local elected slots were already filled. For example, someone might be made the campaign manager for an incumbent elected official or given a leadership

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role at a local political club. Promises of future rewards operate in tandem with such lesser offices in this situation. Impatient newcomers are urged to wait their turns, with the prospect of higher office held out in exchange for continued loyal service. In addition to rewards, present and future, County also wields several formidable sanctions against insurgent candidates, including cumbersome ballot-access processes that it uses frequently to eliminate insurgent challengers. Taking advantage of one of the most complicated and demanding election laws in the United States, County can call on an experienced stable of election lawyers to challenge insurgent candidates—their residency status and, especially, the validity of the petitions New York State requires every candidate to compile in order to secure a place on the ballot. Being thus removed from the ballot is a serious penalty; even the expensive court struggle to survive a challenge can be a deterrent to an insurgent. According to Gotham Gazette, New York is home to some of the most complex election laws in the country, and many of those cases have involved challenges to candidates’ petitions in New York City, which often results in knocking candidates off the ballot and thereby out of an election (Berkey-Gerard 2003). Two obvious questions that arise from this discussion are who is the Queens Democratic Party machine (County), and what resources support their power? From 1990 to 2018, three white men—Gerard Sweeney, Michael Reich, and Frank Bolz, partners in a law firm—essentially controlled the apparatus, along with Joseph Crowley (another white male), who was the chair of the party. This gang of four essentially selected candidates to the state supreme court—nominally via a party convention—who were then indebted to them for their jobs. The Surrogate’s Court, however, was the main source of power and funds for the three attorneys: it appoints the guardians of estates of those who die intestate (without a will), and those guardians garner significant fees. Sweeney, for example, has raked in $30 million since 2006 (Barkan 2017). Thus positioned and armed, County is a formidable opponent for insurgents.

Case Study: Hiram Monserrate, Jose Peralta, and the Latino Population in Corona and Elmhurst In rare cases, in which an insurgent candidate is poised to flat out beat a County-backed candidate, County may recognize the writing on the wall and yield entirely, abandoning one of its own in favor of a newcomer. Such was the case in 2008, when John Sabini, who had served ten years on the New York City Council and briefly been the leader of the Queens ­Democratic

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Party after the scandal-inspired suicide of Donald Manes, the previous leader, was denied County’s support in a primary battle for a state senate seat. Sabini, who had been term-limited out of the city council, had run successfully in the newly created Thirteenth Senate District, which encompassed parts of Elmhurst, Corona, and Jackson Heights. After a redistricting designed to elect a Hispanic candidate, the district was about 55 percent Hispanic. Despite the demographics, Sabini won the nomination and general election in 2002, 2004, and 2006. In 2002 he benefited from the presence of two Hispanic candidates in the primary who divided 55 percent of the vote between them (New York State Board of Elections 2002). In 2004, running as the incumbent against a single Hispanic opponent, Sabini won with over 57 percent of the vote (New York State Board of Elections 2004). In 2006, opposed by Hiram Monserrate, a Puerto Rican member of the city council who was a former police officer, Sabini won by fewer than 250 votes. In 2008 Sabini was arrested for driving under the influence and pleaded guilty after initially refusing a breath test. With the controversy over his conviction and a renewed challenge from Monserrate, County officials debated his candidacy and decided in May by an overwhelming vote to deny Sabini their endorsement and support. It seems clear that County had calculated that the political future belonged to Monserrate and that their own self-interest lay in allying with the likely winner. A further consideration was that Monserrate, according to a well-placed source, threatened to contest the Queens County Democratic Party leadership of Joseph Crowley if County endorsed Sabini. The possibility of being embarrassed by a narrow victory gave County another reason to drop Sabini, who was in June 2008 appointed by the Democratic governor of New York to chair the state Racing and Wagering Board at a salary of $120,800 per year for a six-year term and  who thereupon decided not to contest the primary. With County’s backing, Monserrate won the primary easily and was elected to the senate in November. Previously, in 2000, Monserrate ran successfully for district leader and defeated a white incumbent that County had backed. Then, in 2001, Monserrate was elected to the New York City Council with County’s backing. This city council district (the twenty-first), which includes the neighborhoods of Corona (and LeFrak City), Elmhurst, East Elmhurst, and parts of Jackson Heights, had been undergoing rapid demographic change for decades, becoming predominately Latino (Sanjek 1998). This may be another instance of County reading the writing on the wall and attempting to get out in front. From the vantage point of emerging groups’ leaders, County often seeks to blunt the impact of demographic change until it can no longer maintain the status quo. Essentially, insurgents contend, County seeks to

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manage political and group conflict on its terms, which rarely coincide with insurgents’ and emerging groups’ interests or terms. Mollenkopf and John Logan explain: Monserrate’s success thus did not stem from his ability to mobilize the Puerto Ricans of the district, nor to draw voters in Dominican areas away from the Dominican candidate. Instead, he got strong support from voters in black neighborhoods (partial correlation of .431) and neighborhoods with Colombians, Ecuadorians, and Peruvians (.851). . . . He thus won the election not on the basis of his own ethnic group, but because he got support from the African Americans who had previously supported Helen Marshall, the most middle-class Latino group, and some white support. The other candidates [Angel Del Vilar (Dominican), Aida Gonzalez-Jarrin and Luis Rosero (Ecuadorians)] had neither intense enough support from their own group, nor came from a sufficiently big group, to compete against this coalition. This outcome had less to do with ethnic mobilization or polarization and more to do with access to party support and campaign financing. (2003, 39) As was the case in John Liu’s election, coalitional politics played a role in the victory as did some support by County. Despite this formal alliance, Monserrate’s relationship with the Democratic organization was at best chilly. He backed his own candidates for district leader positions and departed from County’s positions on policy issues quite frequently. County’s support for Monserrate in these early stages of his career was based on the same calculation as the later decision to support him against Sabini—County recognized his strong political accomplishments and potential. As noted, these had been demonstrated in 2000 when Monserrate, aided by the shrinkage of the Italian population in Corona and by his own hard work and diligent organization, defeated an incumbent district leader, Jimmy Lisa. Monserrate had won despite being from a national group—Puerto Ricans—who were in a minority among Hispanics in Queens, where Dominicans predominated, followed by Colombians and Ecuadorians. However, when he moved in 2001 to extend his influence by backing Julissa FerrerasCopeland, his chief of staff, for the newly created Hispanic-majority assembly seat, this circumstance seemed to work against him. Ferreras-Copeland, who was herself Dominican, was opposed by Jose Peralta, a young Dominican who had worked for New York City’s Central Labor Council, then led by Brian McLaughlin, an assemblyman from Queens and both a union leader and a leader among the Regular (i.e., County-affiliated) Democrats.

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In response to this conflict, which threatened to split the Hispanic community, County initially declined to take a position, telling the two contenders to work it out and then come back to them for an endorsement. Peralta secured considerable backing from labor unions, and after FerrerasCopeland faltered in the early campaigning in 2002, she stepped aside to take a position as district leader, leaving the field to Peralta, who then received County’s endorsement and went on to win the primary and the general election handily. Ferreras-Copeland continued as chief of staff for Monserrate and then in 2009 was elected to the city council when Monserrate vacated the seat to become a state senator. This sequence left Monserrate and Peralta sharing leadership in the Corona, Elmhurst, East Elmhurst, and Jackson Heights community until Monserrate’s personal and very public implosion in December 2008. Though the details of the events were disputed by the participants themselves— Monserrate and his long-time girlfriend—the early public version was that Monserrate had cut his girlfriend’s face severely with a glass after finding another man’s business card in her purse. While both participants later denied this in court, saying instead that he had unintentionally cut her when he tripped while bringing her a glass of water in a darkened bedroom, CCTV footage showed that, after she was hurt, Monserrate had dragged her violently through the lobby of their apartment building, while refusing to call 911, and then drove her fourteen miles to a Long Island hospital instead one of the nearby Queens hospitals. A local court acquitted Monserrate of felony assault charges but found him guilty of one count of misdemeanor assault. A panel of the state senate condemned Monserrate’s behavior, and he was expelled from the senate. It probably did not help him in Albany, or subsequently in Queens, that he had earlier defected from the senate Democrats to the senate Republicans to make a majority in exchange for rewards and then switched back to the Democrats in return for still greater rewards. After his expulsion, County refused to endorse him in the special election in March 2010 to fill his seat, turning instead to Peralta, who defeated Monserrate. Monserrate then tried for a comeback by competing in the primary in 2010 for the assembly seat Peralta had vacated but was defeated by Francisco Moya, an Ecuadorian backed by Peralta and by County. Monserrate was subsequently indicted and convicted on federal corruption charges for diverting public funds for his personal use while a councilperson. As this narrative indicates, County does not stick rigidly with incumbents such as Sabini when their cause seems doomed, especially when doing so runs the risk of alienating a growing group such as Hispanics. It can also quite quickly turn its back on incumbents such as Monserrate who have gravely offended public opinion. Monserrate’s exit also opened the door to

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candidates more representative of the nationalities in the growing Hispanic community and probably less likely than Monserrate to challenge the organization. More generally, the narrative confirms the factionalized nature of one-party politics: note that the dynamics swirl around personalities and ethnic groups rather than substantive issues.6

Case Study: John Liu and the Asian Community of Flushing In contrast to the rather turbulent history just summarized, the politics of the Asian, mainly Chinese, community of Flushing have proceeded in a more straightforward manner, though with a few interesting twists. Before the 1980s, Flushing was a solidly Jewish community, but out-migration and aging—coupled with the immigration reform known as the Hart-Celler Act of 1965—opened the door to an influx of Asian immigrants, mainly Chinese but with some Koreans and other East and South Asians as well.7 The politics accompanying this demographic shift have centered around John Liu, who first ran for public office in 1989 as a candidate for community school board. Liu, an actuary, placed thirteenth in a crowded field of about twenty-seven contestants for nine seats. Eight years later, in 1997, he ran against Julia Harrison, a long-time incumbent city councilperson who had established a reputation as being rather virulently anti-immigrant. Harrison won the primary, but she garnered only 40 percent of the vote running against four candidates, including Liu, who came in second. By 2001, nearly half the district was Asian, and it had a sizable Latino population. However, because many of these residents were not U.S. citizens, less than half the  adults in the district were registered voters (Mollenkopf and Logan 2003, 43). County hedged its bet in 1997, perhaps because it read the demographic tea leaves. Although County had endorsed Harrison, its leaders indicated that they would welcome Liu in the next round of elections (as noted earlier), when term limits would prevent Harrison from running. This they did, and Liu narrowly defeated a Harrison-backed Chinese American candidate, Ethel Chen, winning by 202 votes. Liu attributed his victory to an intense retail campaign, an in-person campaign in which Liu knocked on every door in the district. Liu also used an effective tool honed by County: he knocked three non-Asian opponents off the ballot by challenging their petitions, an effort that was undertaken without help from County. Mollenkopf and Logan’s (2003) analysis of the vote reveals that County’s endorsement may have figured in the outcome, particularly for white voters.

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At this stage, Liu was County’s leading man in Flushing, their link to the Chinese community. This relationship took a strange turn in 2002, when Julia Harrison attempted a political comeback. She first began campaigning for the nomination to the local assembly seat. John Liu saw this move as a direct threat to him, reasoning that if Harrison won, she would then challenge him for the city council (Harrison could run again because it was a nonconsecutive term). He feared that if she were an incumbent assemblyperson, she would be a formidable challenger. To prevent her winning, Liu supported a non-Chinese candidate, Barry Grodenchik, for the assembly seat. Grodenchik had served as a senior aide to the County-backed borough president, Helen Marshall, and had strong ties to labor. It was therefore not difficult for County to accede to Liu’s request to endorse Grodenchik. In response, Harrison quit the assembly race and shifted her focus to the state senate context, challenging the County-endorsed incumbent, Toby Stavisky. Grodenchik went on to defeat the two Chinese candidates—Ethel Chen, who was running as part of a slate with Harrison, and Jimmy Meng, a local businessman who spent lavishly on his campaign—in the primary and to win the general election. Liu put considerable time and effort into this race, cementing his ties to County in the process. Meanwhile, Stavisky and County handily defeated Harrison, effectively ending her political career. In 2004, Meng challenged Grodenchik in the primary, and Liu stood aside, feeling it was not his fight since Grodenchik was the incumbent. Going head to head against Jimmy Meng, the single Chinese candidate in the primary, Grodenchik lost by 566 votes with 41 percent of the overall vote. Meng went on to win the general election but decided not to run for reelection two years later. Instead, he supported his daughter, Grace, an attorney, who ran afoul of legal issues concerning her place of residence and withdrew from the race when threatened with disbarment. Liu reasserted himself, backing and winning County’s endorsement for his former chief of staff, Ellen Young, who won a narrow primary victory in a three-way race with a second Asian (Korean) candidate, Terence Park, and the ubiquitous Julia Harrison (Young received 1,912 votes, Park 1,601, and Harrison 1,855). Young went on to win the general election. However, Grace Meng, backed by her family’s fortune, challenged Young successfully in 2008, defeating County’s candidate (2,845 to 1,991) in the primary and going on to win the general election. Liu once again stepped back from the race, focusing instead on preparing for his own race for New York City comptroller. In the same groundbreaking mode that had led to his becoming the first Asian American elected official in New York City, Liu succeeded in becom-

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ing the first Asian American to be elected to citywide office by winning a runoff against David Yassky, a Manhattan city councilperson. Liu, with County’s backing, had gained 38 percent of the vote against Yassky’s 30 percent in the first primary, with two other candidates from Queens, Melinda Katz and David Weprin, coming in third and fourth. He went on to win the general election. In 2012, with County’s support, Grace Meng won the Democratic nomination to succeed the retiring Gary Ackerman in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he had served seventeen terms. Meng defeated Rory Lancman and two other candidates in the primary before winning the general election. Liu was very active in the campaign to replace Meng in the assembly, supporting the victor, Ron Kim, a Korean American who defeated two Chinese American candidates in a closely fought primary before winning the general election. Liu competed for the Democratic nomination for mayor in 2013 (County backed Christine Quinn, the speaker of the city council), but he lost when his campaign was marred by a fundraising scandal that sent two of his top aides to prison. In 2014, with County’s backing, Liu challenged Tony Avella, a renegade Democratic state senator who joined the Independent Democratic Conference, which voted with the Republicans to make a controlling majority in the state senate in Albany. In a hard-fought, sometimes bitter race, Liu was defeated by about nine hundred votes out of about fifteen thousand cast in the Democratic primary.8 While many observers suggested this defeat would be the end of Liu’s political career, Liu came back to defeat Avella in 2018—a race in which Liu became part of a broader movement that led to the destruction of the Independent Democratic Conference. Whatever his ultimate personal fate, Liu’s story illustrates clearly the evolving relations between the Queens County Democratic organization and Asian Americans. County shifted from supporting an incumbent officeholder widely regarded as racist and anti-immigrant to supporting a representative of the very group that she had vilified. John Liu became County’s man in Flushing because he could deliver votes and provided needed services to his constituents, and until the campaign finance scandal, because he presented a public image of accomplishment that made him a popular figure not only in the Asian American community but throughout Queens. The ins and outs of his campaigns and relationships, his rivalry with the father and daughter Mengs, and his backing of non-Asian and nonChinese candidates illustrate again the nature of one-party politics: it is a personal, candidate-centered politics, geared above all else to the self-­ interest of particular individuals and factions above community interests. Within this system, County acts to maximize its own organizational self-interest, sometimes protecting incumbents, sometimes abandoning

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them to secure the support of newly emerging blocs and promising leaders. Thus, County embraced John Liu and dropped Julia Harrison only when it became clear that Liu had the personal attributes and community support that would enable him to secure votes of emerging ethnic group members for himself and for County’s other candidates and when it became clear that Harrison appealed to a declining demographic.

2018 and Beyond The surprising defeat of Joe Crowley by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on June 26, 2018, sent shockwaves across Queens and the nation. After trailing in the polls and being outspent by more than seven to one, Ocasio-Cortez, a Puerto Rican Democratic Socialist candidate who had never run for office before, sent the fourth-ranking Democrat in Congress (a potential Speaker of the House) to defeat, calling into question the power of the current leadership of the Queens County Democratic Party and the future of the machine. What accounts for this huge upset? To begin, contrary to some postelection analyses (see, e.g., Cauterucci 2018), this election was not merely or primarily a case of “demography is destiny,” although demographic changes and a redistricting during the 2010s reduced the white population to 22 percent while the Latino population grew to 50 percent of the district’s total population. A precinct-by-precinct analysis by Steve Romalewski of the Center for Urban Research of City University of New York shows that ­Ocasio-Cortez got most of her votes from Astoria, Sunnyside, Woodside, and parts of Jackson Heights, places that were not primarily Latino, while Crowley got more votes in East Elmhurst and South Corona and in the Bronx, areas that have more Latino voters (Cuza 2018; Brachfeld 2018). In addition, Ocasio-Cortez benefited from the mobilization of young and firsttime voters, who turned out in sizable numbers and overwhelmingly voted for ­Ocasio-Cortez. Indeed, her campaign targeted such voters—not merely the prime voters who normally turn out in nearly every election, who Crowley (and most campaigns) mainly targeted—and her message and appeal to such voters proved effective. In these ways Ocasio-Cortez was able to neutralize the normal pattern of prime-voter turnout, which tends to skew older and whiter than the eligible voting population in many New York City jurisdictions, by generating votes by younger and progressive voters (and presumably a sizable number of women, though data by sex are not available). This is not to say Ocasio-Cortez did not get votes from immigrants and people of color. She “received at least 30 to 45 percent of the vote in black, Hispanic and Asian precincts,” according to David Shor, a senior data sci-

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entist at the data analytics firm Civis Analytics, who compiled data also showing that younger voters in majority-white districts turned out in high numbers for Ocasio-Cortez. “When I was looking at Latino precincts, there was variance in terms of how (Ocasio-Cortez) did, and the biggest predictor we saw was that she did a lot better in the newer, more-mobile Latino neighborhoods than in the older and more established ones,” said Shor (Segers 2018). In the end, Romalewski says, Ocasio-Cortez’s victory “wasn’t a fluke. . . . She was able to get voters from almost every neighborhood to come out and support her” (Brachfeld 2018). Indeed, Ocasio-Cortez did not just edge out Crowley; she decisively defeated him (57 percent–42 percent), albeit in a low-turnout primary election (only 28,000 Democrats voted out of the 235,745 registered Democrats in the district, about 12 percent) (Jilani 2018). What other factors affected the outcome? Crowley had not been challenged in fourteen years, and many observers have suggested he may have grown complacent, as indicated by his sloughing off requests by OcasioCortez to participate in public debates and his running a lackluster campaign. On the other side, a host of factors appear to produce the unexpected outcome, including the resurgent progressive politics that accompanied, first, Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign and, then, the resistance to Donald Trump. Ocasio-Cortez, herself a veteran of the Sanders campaign, crafted a highly appealing (and progressive) message—calling for singlepayer health care, tuition-free college, a foreign policy that puts human rights first, and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement—and she painted Crowley as beholden to real estate and corporate interests, which contribute to gentrification, and as the boss of a corrupt and antiquated political machine. She drew activists into her campaign from groups such as the Bronx Progressives, Queens Neighborhoods United, Black Lives Matter, Justice Democrats, and not least, the Democratic Socialists of America. She also benefited from a compelling introductory campaign video, which she wrote and which was produced by Democratic Socialists of America activists based in Detroit. When the video went viral, it gave her broad visibility (Bensman 2018). Her team of mostly young, progressive volunteers made 170,000 phone calls, knocked on 120,000 doors, and sent 120,000 text messages. By Election Day, Ocasio-Cortez had more than 500,000 views of her video on Twitter, while Crowley had fewer than 90,000 of his campaign video. “From day one, these volunteers started knocking doors and reaching into their own networks to expand this volunteer army, allowing us to go into election day with over a thousand volunteers willing to mobilize voters,” said Saikat Chakrabarti who worked closely with

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the Ocasio-Cortez campaign and is the president of Justice Democrats. “We buttressed door-knocking with a heavy digital, phone calling, and texting strategy that targeted progressive voters in five different languages. Through this, we built a multiracial, progressive coalition of voters who had been hearing our message for a year and were excited to turn out to vote on June 26. The result: a 68 percent increase in turn out from the 2014 September primary elections in New York.” (Jilani and Grim 2018) Ocasio-Cortez’s high-profile victory—and subsequent campaigning for other progressive candidates in and beyond New York—bodes well for furthering Latino (and immigrant) empowerment and perhaps also for a more progressive politics inside the Democratic Party.

Conclusion Our case studies and general discussion indicate that the relations between the Queens Democratic Party organization and the emerging ethnic groups in Queens reflect the underlying dynamics of a one-party system—the fluid, personalized, faction-ridden politics that have characterized one-party systems from the states of the old Confederacy to current big cities. In this system, the fate of ethnic or national groups, their ability to gain representation and to secure resources and policies that benefit their members, depends crucially on the emergence of leaders who can navigate the system, including the Democratic machine. The danger, of course, is that such leaders will be co-opted by the machine and will fall into the pattern of pursuing their own self-interest at the expense of larger issues and community interests. The analysis also suggests that, even when such a leader emerges and provides descriptive representation, substantive representation is a long way from guaranteed. This is well illustrated by the 2017 defection of Jose Peralta from the regular Democratic Party to the Independent Democratic Conference (IDC), the group that caucused with the Republicans in the state senate. By most standards, the Republicans and the IDC, both of whom opposed the DREAM Act and other measures aimed at helping immigrants and low-income people, did not provide substantive representation to the new immigrant groups. Despite Peralta’s blatant disregard for party loyalty, Joe Crowley opted to try to smooth over the rift. He negotiated with Governor Andrew Cuomo and with Jeff Klein, the leader of the IDC, and the resulting deal dissolved the IDC, which announced its return to the Democratic fold in April 2018. This deal did not satisfy the many Democratic Party activists who had been outraged by the defectors’ actions. They formed the NO IDC NY organiza-

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tion and conducted grassroots campaigns against the eight Democratic senators in the IDC. In Queens, Peralta’s district had already seen an angry community meeting following his defection in January 2017. One of the attendees, Jessica Ramos, ran against Peralta in the Democratic primary. County backed Peralta as did the borough president and many other elected officials in Queens, but the speaker of the city council, Corey Johnson; the New York City comptroller, Scott Stringer; two city council members from Queens, Costa Constantinides and Jimmy Van Bramer; and Ocasio-Cortez, who had defeated Crowley in the earlier congressional primary endorsed Ramos. In the event, Ramos won a decisive victory, carrying 51 percent of the vote against Peralta’s 42 percent. A second Queens IDC senator, Tony Avella, who was also endorsed by County, was defeated by a margin of 50.6 percent to 45.3 percent by John Liu, who made a late entry after Crowley’s defeat. Finally, Catalina Cruz, a dreamer who cast herself as another progressive and eschewed corporate donations (Lipsitz 2018), defeated County-endorsed candidate Ari Espinal by a margin of 49 percent to 39 percent for the assembly seat representing the heavily immigrant and Latino sections of Corona, Elmhurst, and Jackson Heights (Lewis 2018). In so doing, Cruz thwarted County’s effort to use a tried-and-true maneuver to handpick the successor of an incumbent who vacates a seat, a move that almost always allows them to maintain control of a district. In this case, Francisco Moya, the previous County-supported assemblyman, had moved to the New York City Council in January 2018, following his run for the open council seat vacated by Julissa Ferreras-Copeland. Moya supported Ari Espinal, who had worked for eight years as his director of constituent services, and County installed Espinal in the assembly seat via a special election on February 12, 2018, whereby party leaders vote to fill the vacant seat (Carrera 2018). In effect, Espinal became the incumbent for the September primary race. This is usually where the game ends. Cruz, however, outmaneuvered County by capitalizing on the anti-County and pro-progressive fervor, which swept her into office in the September 2018 primary. Cruz, along with Ramos and Liu, cruised to victory in the ­Democratic-dominated general elections in November, much to County’s chagrin. What are the implications of these developments? Is the Queens County Democratic machine fatally wounded? Maybe not, but it is certainly grievously harmed. The defeat of Crowley by Ocasio-Cortez created a rupture in the party’s power structure, providing an opening for other insurgents. The victories of Ramos, Liu, and Cruz landed significant body blows to the machine. Other insurgents will surely be emboldened, and whether any other leader can coordinate the resources and mechanisms that sustained the machine is very much in doubt. However, County is showing no signs of giving up, reelecting Crowley—even after his defeat—as the chairman of the

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Queens Democratic Party in September 2018 by a vote of sixty to four (Campanile 2018).

Closing Thoughts In Chapter 8, Sayu Bhojwani makes a strong argument that pan-Asian organizing through nonprofits maximizes the political power of the groups involved. A related argument deserves mention here. By erasing a potential set of cleavages and conflicts among the constituent groups, nonprofit panAsian organizing avoids partisan conflict and mutes conflict over office seeking, because seeking nonprofit offices is an essentially private process. When time, energy, and resources are focused on this sort of organizing, an alternative to partisan politics is created for those who are motivated both altruistically and selfishly. Thus, the Democratic machine is spared a whole range of potential conflicts. Put slightly differently, if an ambitious member of a new immigrant group can serve the community or her own interests or some combination of the two through the nonprofit sector, this route may offer an attractive substitute for the rough and tumble of partisan politics. Why take on the political machine if another good option is available? Nevertheless, as the Ocasio-Cortez and other cases suggest, taking on the machine directly can also yield victory for outsider groups. This chapter points to the need for further research to shed light on relations among emerging groups and the political system in Queens. Specifically, knowing more precisely what immigrant views are on a range of issues (by national-origin group, if possible) and how many immigrants are naturalizing, registering to vote, and voting could show what potential influences emerging groups and leaders might wield. Similarly, knowing more about how well organized emerging groups are—what issues mobilize them (and demobilize them) and their level of mobilization in parts of the borough relative to other groups—might also shed light on their impacts and the kinds of responses they can elicit from elected officials and the Queens County Democratic Party organization. Last, exploration of what sorts of resources immigrant groups have obtained—for example, government grants and jobs and building projects such as new schools—and the level and quality of public services could provide useful indicators to questions about the effectiveness of immigrant political strength relative to other groups. Notes 1.  According to the New York Board of Elections, as of April 2017, more than 70 percent of voters are registered Democrats (3,427,173 out of 4,996,975 total registrants). Independents (those who register with a minor party or with no party at all) outnumber

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Republicans (by 1,047,719 to 522,629). New York State Board of Elections 2017. Similarly, the overwhelming majority of elected officials are Democrats, as are the political clubs that exist. 2.  The classic depiction of one-party systems in the South remains Key 1949. ­Comparisons of New York City to such systems can be found in Mollenkopf 1987 and 1994. 3.  Several investigative journalists have documented such patronage relationships. For example, New York Newsday conducted a three-month investigation and published a four-part series authored by Ken Fireman in 1988 that extensively detailed such arrangements. Similarly, in 1990, the New York Times also did a four-part series authored by Martin Gottlieb and Dean Baquet. 4.  These scandals include Bronx County leader Stanley Friedman’s involvement in a contract awarded to a virtually nonexistent company he partly owned; Queens County leader Donald Manes taking kickbacks on parking-ticket-collections contracts awarded by officials in Ed Koch’s administration appointed at Manes’s request; and the patronage-hiring operation run out of city hall under the guise of the Mayors Talent Bank headed by Joe DeVincenzo, one of Koch’s key advisors on appointments. Ostensibly intended to promote employment of blacks, Latinos, and women in city agencies, the operation instead regularly hired political referrals (who were mostly white males) submitted by county party leaders, especially from the Richmond (Staten Island), Bronx, and Queens County organizations (Newfield and Barrett 1988). 5.  Smith lost his primary race in 2014 after having been indicted for his part in a bizarre scheme that included conspiring to gain the Republican nomination for mayor by bribery. 6.  After serving time in jail, Monserrate ran unsuccessfully against Moya in 2017 for the same city council seat Monserrate previously held, which was vacated when Julissa Ferreras-Copeland stepped down. County backed Moya in that race. 7.  The 1990 population in District Twenty of non-Hispanic whites was 42.0 percent. That declined to 15.4 percent in 2010, while the Asian Pacific Islander community went from 31.4 percent to 64.1 percent during the same period (Hispanics went from 19.2 percent to 15.0 percent). New York City Department of Planning 2003, 2011. 8.  Liu would have no doubt fared better, and might have won, if not for a late gamechanging (and failed) effort by the Working Families Party (WFP) and many of its unions to back Governor Andrew Cuomo, hoping to use its combined leverage to get the Independent Democratic Conference—including Avella—to caucus with the Democratic Party instead of the Republican Party in the New York State Senate. The conference was blamed by many regular Democrats and the WFP for the failure of key pieces of legislation, such as the DREAM Act, a higher minimum wage, and the Women’s Equity Act. The WFP endorsed John Liu at its convention in June 2014 but later revoked its backing when the conference bowed to pressure from de Blasio and unions and agreed to a power-sharing negotiation with senate Democrats. When the WFP backed away from Liu, it pulled a punch that certainly would have wounded Avella. References Adler, Norman, Blanche Davis Blank, and Roy V. Peel. 1975. Political Clubs in New York. New York: Praeger. Barkan, Ross. 2017. “Three Lawyers Control Queens Democratic Party While One Rakes Millions from Surrogate’s Court Wills.” New York Daily News, April 2. https://​w ww​

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2018/​0 6/​05/​ocasio​-cortez​-new​-york​-14th​-district​-democratic​-primary​-campaign​ -video/. Jilani, Zaid, and Ryan Grim. 2018. “Data Suggest That Gentrifying Neighborhoods Powered Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Victory.” The Intercept, July 1. https://theinter cept.com/2018/07/01/ocasio-cortez-data-suggests-that-gentrifying-neighborhoods -powered-alexandria-ocasio-cortezs-victory-over-the-democratic-establishment/. Key, V. O., Jr. 1949. Southern Politics. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Kraus, Jeffrey. 1991. Ethnicity and Machine Politics. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Levitt, Justin. 2010. “A Citizen’s Guide to Redistricting.” Brennan Center for Justice. http://​w ww​.brennancenter​.org/​sites/​default/​fi les/​legacy/​CGR​%20Reprint​%20Single​ %20Page​.pdf. Lewis, Rebecca C. 2018. “IDC and Other New York Legislative 2018 Primary Results.” City and State, September 13. https://​w ww​.cityandstateny​.com/articles/poli tics/campaigns-elections/idc-new-york-primary-results-2018 .html. Lipsitz, Raina. 2018. “Catalina Cruz Dreams Big in Queens.” The Nation, September 5. https://​w ww​.thenation​.com/​article/​catalina​-cruz​-dreams​-big​-in​-queens/. Lowi, Theodore J. 1967. “Machine Politics—Old and New.” Public Interest 9:83. Mansbridge, Jane. 1999. “Should Blacks Represent Blacks and Women Represent Women? A Contingent ‘Yes.’” Journal of Politics 61 (3): 628–657. McNickle, Chris. 1993. To Be Mayor of New York: Ethnic Politics in the City. New York: Columbia University Press. Mollenkopf, John. 1986. “New York: The Great Anomaly.” PS 19 (3): 591–597. ———. 1987. “Decay of Liberalism: One Party Politics New York Style,” Dissent 34 (4): 492–495. ———. 1994. A Phoenix in the Ashes: The Rise and Fall of the Koch Coalition in New York City Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mollenkopf, John, and John Logan. 2003. People and Politics in America’s Big Cities: The Challenges to Urban Democracy. New York: Drum Major Institute for Public Policy. Mollenkopf, John, and Raphael Sonenshein. 2013. “New York City and Los Angeles: Government and Political Influence.” In New York and Los Angeles: The Uncertain Future, edited by David Hale and Andrew Beveridge, 137–152. New York: Oxford University Press. Newfield, Jack, and Wayne Barrett. 1988. City for Sale: Ed Koch and the Betrayal of New York. New York: HarperCollins. Newfield, Jack, and Paul Debrul. 1979. “The Abuse of Power: The Permanent Government and the Fall of New York.” Science and Society 43 (3): 362–366. New York City Department of Planning. 2003. “Table PL-1: Total Population by Mutually Exclusive Race and Hispanic Origin and Total Housing Units, 1990 and 2000.” https://​w ww1​.nyc​.gov/​assets/​planning/​download/​pdf/​data​-maps/​nyc​-population/​ census2000/​cncl03chg9020​.pdf. ———. 2011. “Table SF1-DP CNCLD: Demographic Profile—2003 New York City Council Districts, 2000 and 2010.” https://​w ww1​.nyc​.gov/​assets/​planning/​download/​pdf/​ data​-maps/​nyc​-population/​census2010/​t ​_ sf1​_dp​_cncld​.pdf. New York State Board of Elections. 2002. “Senate Vote—Nov. 5, 2002.” https://​w ww​ .elections​.ny​.gov/​N YSBOE/​elections/​2002/​general/​2002​_nysen​.pdf.

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———. 2004. “September 14, 2004 Primary.” http://​w ww​.elections​.ny​.gov/​N YSBOE/​ elections/​2004/​2004PrimaryResults​.pdf. ———. 2017. “NYS Voter Enrollment by County, Party Affiliation and Status.” http://​ www​.elections​.ny​.gov/​N YSBOE/​enrollment/​county/​county​_ apr17​.pdf. Orovic, Joseph. 2013. “Queens Democrats Announce 2013 Endorsements.” Queens Chronicle, May 20. http://​w ww​.qchron​.com/​editions/​queenswide/​queens​-democrats​ -announce​-endorsements/​article​_e0ad1e3a​-c187​-11e2​-baa4​- 001a4bcf887a​.html. Peel, Roy V. 1935. The Political Clubs of New York City. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. 2013. The Concept of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Piven, Frances Fox, and Richard Cloward. 2000. Why Americans Still Don’t Vote: And Why Politicians Want It That Way. Boston: Beacon Press. Rogers, Reuel. 2006. Afro-Caribbean Immigrants and the Politics of Incorporation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sanjek, Roger. 1998. The Future of Us All: Race and Neighborhood Politics in New York City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Segers, Grace. 2018. “Will Gentrification and Younger Voters Oust More Incumbents?” City and State New York, July 9. https://​w ww​.cityandstateny​.com/​articles/​politics/​ campaigns​-elections/​gentrification​-younger​-voters​-ocasio​-cortez​-crowley​-biaggi​ -patel​-nixon​-incumbents. Shefter, Martin. 1985. Political Crisis, Fiscal Crisis: The Collapse and Revival of New York City. New York: Basic Books. ———. 1994. “Political Incorporation and Political Extrusion: Party Politics and Social Forces in Postwar New York.” In Political Parties and the State, edited by Martin Shefter, 197–232. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Thompson, J. Phillip. 2006. Double Trouble: Black Mayors, Black Communities, and the Call for a Deep Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

8 The New Machine Nonprofits and South Asian Political Incorporation Sayu Bhojwani

South Asians: A Resonant Grouping

I

n a 2013 study to examine political participation and civic engagement in Queens, I grouped South Asians together to facilitate discussion and analysis of a diverse group that includes three of the fastest-growing immigrant subgroups from the Indian subcontinent: Bangladeshis, Indians, and Pakistanis. In grouping South Asians, I join other scholars and activists in the adoption of a panethnic framework that supersedes narrower, nationalist boundaries that often privilege India and Indians (Das Gupta 2006). Moreover, although these national and regional identities are prevalent among first-generation immigrants, they are less powerful and resonant among second-generation South Asians. Unlike others, I argue that South Asian is not just an organizing identity for South Asian community leaders and college students (Maira 2002) but also a lived reality for many immigrants. Group formation among South Asians extends beyond shared political concerns to cultural commonalities and similar lived experiences. Among South Asians, panethnicity is both a political and social process and a cultural bond. No one South Asian subgroup is identical to another; still, languages, foods, and religions are shared across regional and national boundaries on the subcontinent. Those similarities form the basis for a politically significant panethnic identity in the United States. The vernacular term desi (or deshi; meaning “of the land”) captures that sense of a common cultural

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bond. Used by speakers of most South Asian languages to refer to someone from South Asia, the term desi gained more currency as the community grew and diversified in recent decades. Used both as a noun to refer to members of the group and as an adjective to describe food and music, desi refers to people and cultural emblems that are South Asian. The term’s increase in popularity in the late 1990s and early 2000s corresponds to the increasingly contested relationship South Asians have to racial classifications in the United States. Given its roots in Indic languages, desi encompasses the diversity of South Asians while being relatable to the subgroups of South Asians served by nonprofits, particularly first-generation immigrants. For Bangladeshis, Indians, Nepalese, Pakistanis, and Sri Lankans, desi connotes a relationship to the subcontinent in ways that South Asian does not. The term South Asian gained its currency among organization leaders in the 1980s and 1990s in part as a counter to the upper-class India-centered politics that dominated the public discourse. Newly formed efforts to organize domestic workers, taxi drivers, the LGBT community, and victims of domestic violence embraced a transnational term that was more inclusive (Das Gupta 2006). Over time, South Asian has become politically expedient and has been used by community elites to create panethnic solidarity among South Asians. The panethnicity it connotes facilitates the formation of an interest group and the creation of a sense of shared history (Le Espiritu 1994) and is a basis for mobilization (Enloe 1980). In an increasingly diverse polity, panethnicity can be a useful organizational tool for political insiders (Le Espiritu 1994) because it helps create a larger constituency with more weight (Hannan 1979; van de Berghe 1981). Yen Le Espiritu argues that panethnic identities are often the products of political and social processes rather than “cultural bonds” (1994, 13). Indeed, for some desis who serve as nonprofit leaders, organizing as South Asians allows a stronger, more unified political voice and builds a more inclusive sense of community. Cultural similarities and a shared lived experience among South Asian subgroups strengthen group formation despite significant linguistic and religious differences. The lived South Asian experience refers in part to an assumption of sameness by non–South Asians. Whether for the sake of convenience or out of ignorance, a Hindu born in Mumbai and a Punjabi-speaking Muslim born in Pakistan are perceived by non–South Asians as belonging to the same group. The perception of South Asians as one group masks subgroup differences in income and education and paints all South Asian groups with the same model minority brush. This has negative and positive consequences. In the aftermath of September 11, for example, racially motivated attacks against Sikhs and other non-Muslim South Asians increased because of anti-Muslim public sentiment. Conversely, the perception of South

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Table 8.1 South Asian New Yorkers compared with overall New York City (NYC) population, 2016 All NYC residents (n = 8,461,961)

Bangladeshi Asian Indian Pakistani (n = 120,576) (n = 237,425) (n = 56,599)

Female (%)

52.3

48.7

49.2

47.6

Median age

35.9

31.0

35.0

29.0

6,859,795

90,091

199,281

41,555

58.2

55.1

62.3

56.3

Employment status Population 16 years and older Percent employed Income Total households

3,128,246

29,487

76,612

15,516

55,191

38,300

81,900

60,000

5,851,772

75,729

166,216

34,418

Less than high school ­diploma (%)

19.2

18.4

18.5

23.0

High school or some college (%)

44.6

42.3

35.6

36.8

Bachelor’s degree or higher (%)

36.2

39.3

45.9

40.2

7,906,578

109,626

222,859

50,932

Median income ($) Educational attainment Population 25 years and older

Language Population 5 years and older Speaks English only (%)

51.0

6.5

53.8

15.8

Unavailable

38.5

31.5

44.9

23.0

55.0

14.7

39.3

3,146,112

90,574

149,755

37,305

Foreign born, naturalized citizen (%)

54.3

50.1

62.8

62.4

Foreign born, not naturalized citizen (%)

45.7

49.9

37.2

37.6

English proficient (%) Limited English proficiency or speaks English less than very well (%) Population born outside the U.S.

Source: Data from Peter Lobo, New York City Department of City Planning.

Asians as affluent and well-educated have made them attractive to political actors and parties as potential voters and donors, if only in transactional ways. Among New Yorkers, approximately 415,000 identify as Asian Indian, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani.1 As Table 8.1 shows, Asian Indians’ and Paki-

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stanis’ household income is higher than the average New Yorker’s, but Bangladeshis earn much less per household, despite similar levels of education. Bangladeshis are also more than twice as likely as the average New Yorker to speak English less than very well. Only about half of foreign-born Bangladeshis in New York are naturalized U.S. citizens. These statistics indicate differences not just among South Asian subgroups but also between South Asians and their New York counterparts. In addition to socioeconomic differences, religious, regional, and linguistic diversity and caste are divisive factors that dilute electoral power for South Asians. At the same time, South Asians work side by side with each other and with other ethnic groups in restaurants, homes, taxis and other workplaces. Both conditions affect the ability of community members to build coalitions. Literature on the significance of interest groups and coalition building addresses both the impact of and motivations for such activity. Although coalitions have long been a key element of the political landscape, their importance in the policy-making arena is increasingly significant as numbers of special interest and issue groups grow (Baumgartner and Leech 1998; Heclo 1978; Walker 1983). In this book, Donovan Finn (Chapter 11) and Alice Sardell (Chapter 6) also demonstrate the significance of coalitions. Coalition composition varies according to current political conditions, as new issues and new groups are incorporated into a party’s or candidate’s strategy for winning. Edward Banfield and James Q. Wilson have referred to these “interest groupings” as one of the four possible factions that help win elections, particularly when the coalition is formed around an area of interest represented by the candidate (1963, 131). That coalition of support can dissolve if the candidate moves away from the issue that brought the coalition together. Hugh Heclo’s work on issue networks suggests that a loose network with shared issue interest can become a “shared-action” group that creates a coalition when there is agreement on joint action; the composition of that network varies at different points in the policy advocacy process (1978, 276). Coalitions generally take two forms, those that are permanent and long lasting and those that are temporary or ad hoc (Ansell, Kelly, and Reckhow 2013; Bowler and Segura 2013). Longer-lasting coalitions are formed within political parties or social movements and sustained by long-term common interests and concerns. Temporary coalitions, on the other hand, gain momentum from the groups’ shared support of a particular policy or candidate and tend to disband after their outcomes have been achieved. For minority groups whose electoral power might not yet be fully realized or whose policy needs may be similar to other groups, working in concert with other groups can result in more successful outcomes. Shaun

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Bowler and Gary Segura suggest that coalition building “allows opinion minorities to become opinion majorities” (2012, 26). Working together can amplify the voices of smaller, minority groups into a larger, unified one that is harder to ignore. The group’s size, its leaders’ and members’ attitudes, the issue under consideration, and the local and political context contribute to the conditions necessary for coalition formation (Stone et al. 2001; Gold et al. 2011). Marie Hojnacki (1997) finds that groups form coalitions for specific reasons related to issue context, allies, organization characteristics, and needs for autonomy. Careful calculation of each of these goes into an organization’s decisions to work in alliances or alone. Hojnacki asserts that the more narrowly defined the scope of the issue, the less likely a group is to work within a coalition for policy response. Groups that are larger and have more political power may be less inclined to work with smaller, less powerful groups unless there is a clear benefit from cooperation. Similarly, leaders of different groups may be natural allies because they share visions for their communities or organizations. Although these may not be formal “interlocks” in the way Kevin Hula (1999, 64) describes them, informal relationships between staff, board members, and leaders of organizations can result in coordinated activity between groups. Race can also be at play in coalition formation. Scholars have asserted that coalitions between whites and Latinos or Latinos and blacks are formed in part according to the groups’ social distance, a sociological concept that refers to the relationships and engagement that two groups engage in. Social distance can influence whether groups will work with or against one another (Evans and Giles 1986). Kenneth Meier and Joseph Stewart (1991) assert that this relationship extends to the policy and political arenas. Rufus Browning, Dale Marshall, and David Tabb (1984) have also studied the potential benefits of a rainbow coalition, in which Latinos, whites, and blacks work together for political gain. But the local conditions seem to matter, according to Rene Rocha (2007), who suggests that, for example, Latino immigration may result in Anglos forming more coalitions with blacks if Anglos perceive newly immigrated Latinos to be more socially distant from them. As this literature review suggests, the formation and sustainability of rainbow coalitions largely depend on local factors, including group size, demographics, and the prevalence of nonpartisan elections. These coalitions can be a key counterpoint to identity politics, which leverages a singular identity for electoral gains. Given the significance of coalition building in politics, particularly for minority groups, the role of coalitions in the South Asian community is worthy of examination. The relatively small size of the South Asian community, despite its exponential growth in the two decades since 2000, will make it challenging for South Asians to achieve political power on their

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own, particularly the gold standard of descriptive representation. If South Asians remain permanent minorities, they will need to rely on coalition building to advance their policy or electoral interests. This strategy can prove challenging when negotiating with larger groups, who may have more significant electoral presence and political weight. The South Asian community faces other demographic and structural challenges to coalition work. These challenges are discussed in the following, along with potential opportunities for coalition building, including both temporary, ad hoc coalitions based on electoral and policy needs and longer-term occupational sector coalitions that include South Asian workers strategizing across racial lines for mutual interests in the domestic, restaurant, and taxi industries.

Data and Methods In-depth interviews of nonprofit leaders and political actors in Queens were the best entry point into the community for three reasons. First, they afforded an opportunity for nuanced discussion of the diversity within the community and how that diversity was influencing participation and mobilization. Second, interviews allowed discussion of the ways that noncitizens and undocumented immigrants were being mobilized and were participating in the political process. Randomized surveys, for example, would not have been able to capture data of key subgroups within the South Asian community, particularly the undocumented. Finally, interviews provided the greatest capacity to discuss the dynamic and evolving landscape in which South Asians in Queens are living, working, and engaging in political activity. This case study is as much about an ethnic group as it is about a historical moment in which minority communities are becoming part of a plurality nationwide and, in more immediately significant ways, in local areas like Queens, New York. Elites were selected using purposive sampling, which involved identifying potential interviewees on the basis of specific criteria, described in more detail later. The size of the sample provided enough data to establish trustworthiness and rigor (Davies and Dodd 2002; Lincoln and Guba 1985; Mishler 1991; Seale 1999; Stenbacka 2001). This substantively important group provided critical insights that helped inform the research findings (Mahoney and Goertz 2006). Thirty-three nonprofit leaders, party and elected officials, and candidates were selected for their role in organizing individual South Asians. By virtue of their role as organization or community leaders, they could answer research questions on who and what mobilizes South Asians of different socioeconomic status and the role of cross-racial coalition building. The

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original list of thirty-three grew to thirty-six through snowball sampling, but two of the additional three had similar roles and affiliations to those on the original list and were cut. Of the original thirty-three, four did not respond despite repeated attempts to reach them, and three were unable to be scheduled within the time frame allotted for the research. Five potential interviewees were candidates who emerged in the 2013 New York City Council races. Despite the interviews taking place in the months leading up to the 2013 elections and focusing on political participation, interview respondents did not mention any of these candidates. In the end, the twentysix interviews reached categories of individuals who are at three critical nodes in the South Asian community’s political incorporation process—organization leaders, non–South Asian elected officials, and South Asian candidates for public office. Of the twenty-six, nineteen were representatives of organizations who could contribute to an understanding of what interests motivate their constituencies, their experience of whether and how their members are mobilized, and their perspectives on the community’s political interest and efficacy. Of those nineteen, • Nine were South Asian leaders who represent organizations serving primarily the South Asian community, including groups that work on housing, youth, economic development, and political engagement • Three were South Asian leaders of organizations working with South Asians to build strategic cross-racial coalitions (for restaurant workers, for example) • Two were Asian American (non–South Asian) leaders of community organizations serving the Asian American community • Two were leaders in community organizations serving immigrant and other communities generally (one is South Asian and the other is Asian American) • Three were South Asian representatives of organizations that explicitly define their agenda as political activity Some of the South Asian leaders interviewed belonged to groups based in Richmond Hill and serving the Indo-Caribbean community there, since all respondents indicated that the needs and circumstances there differ from other parts of Queens. For comparative perspective on South Asians in relation to other Asian American, immigrant, and minority groups in the city, interviewees included members of the two pan-Asian federations in the city, the only coalition of immigrant-serving organizations, the only Asian American organization working on voting rights, and one citywide ­coalition

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of service providers. The remaining interviewees were leaders of the one labor alliance of South Asians, the oldest merchants’ association, two board members of a national political action committee, and the one national coalition of South Asian organizations. Semistructured interviews were a series of open-ended questions that addressed the respondents’ demographic background, the background of members or constituents with which the respondent had contact, and several categories of political participation, including nonelectoral activity, mobilization, and coalition building. Each of the electoral participation categories—voting, contributing to campaigns, contacting elected officials— included a request for general observations and were probed with questions about whether a South Asian candidate on the ballot made a difference to members’ participation. The interview questions were organized to elicit the respondents’ knowledge of or perceptions about (1) the members or constituents served by the interviewee, including particularly demographics on immigration status and national origin; (2) the issues of importance to South Asians; (3) the types of political participation by South Asians, including voting, contact with elected officials, contributing to campaigns, and protest; (4) how South Asians were being mobilized for participation; and (5) their experiences, including successes and challenges, with coalition building within the South Asian community and with other groups. Since the interviews included personal observations, data were verified via two means. One method established internal consistency on the basis of interviewees mentioning identical examples of particular activities, as in the case of successful coalition building. In many cases, interviewees reinforced each other’s observations of political participation. A pattern of participation emerged in interviews and thus suggests a phenomenon rather than simply one individual’s observation (Kidder 1981; Heyink and Tymstra 1993). The second method of cross-checking came from document examination. Any information that needed to be factually verified was done using news sources, the New York City Campaign Finance Board website (https://​ www​.nyccfb​.info), or elections data. Confirming evidence from documents supported interview assertions and provided supplemental information as needed to verify facts such as the specific names of policies or the exact districts in which candidates ran for elections. Following the interviews, I asked respondents to complete a survey, which was a means of obtaining some quantitative data, particularly on salient issues of concern in the community and on types of political participation. To analyze those surveys, I created a codebook and Excel spreadsheet of the coded surveys. The survey results provided frequencies for cer-

The New Machine  /  201

tain issues and patterns. Those frequencies shaped the primary focus of my analysis and formed the basis for this chapter.

South Asians in Coalitions All the leaders interviewed from organizations providing direct services or programs to the South Asian community indicated that they had worked successfully in coalitions with the South Asian, Asian American, immigrant, or other minority communities. The Asian American and panimmigrant groups spoke about the significance of South Asian voices in their coalitions and, generally, had worked and remained open to working with the community. They all shared examples of their coalition work and discussed the particular challenges and successes of those coalitions, as well as coalition work in general. Briefly, some of these coalitions within the community concerned the 2010 census and voter registration and engagement in 2012. Key efforts in the first years of the 2000s in the South Asian community and for other racial groups include redistricting following the 2010 census and ending racial profiling. In addition, collaborations by occupational sector are common, such as among domestic workers and allies. Starting in 2010, for example, the coalition We Belong Together mobilized immigrant rights groups and women’s groups in favor of immigration reform. In reviewing responses, I assessed the frequency with which respondents mentioned challenges in coalition building. At least 50 percent of those leaders (of ten leaders running South Asian service or policy organizations) found challenges in the lack of a shared agenda among South Asian organizations, the limited capacity in the groups and the community, and the possibility that their group would lose its individual voice.

Challenge: What Is a South Asian Agenda? Like other ethnic groups, South Asians cannot be expected to have a simple, unified agenda, but unlike other ethnic groups, South Asians have some differences rooted in religious, national origin, and linguistic divisions. Latinos, for example, have both a common language and, often, a common religion, Christianity (Bowler and Segura 2012). South Asian newspapers and television shows are in different languages, including Punjabi, Urdu, and Bengali; houses of worship include churches for Christians, temples for Buddhists and Hindus, mosques for Muslims, and gurudwaras for Sikhs. Language, religion, and national origin are natural separators, and most first-generation South Asians continue to identify as part of their religious or national subgroups rather than as South Asian, making it more of an

202 / Sayu Bhojwani

artificially constructed identity assumed for activism and organizing than one with emotional resonance for the broader community, particularly those who are first generation. Still, the broader panethnic South Asian label plays an important role in consolidating group interests and creating a sense of common history among subgroups. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, racial attacks both enhanced group solidarity among those who understood that the public could not distinguish between South Asian subgroups and highlighted divisions within the community; divisions between first-generation Hindus and Muslims became more pronounced in part as Hindus attempted to distance themselves from the profiling and harassment of South Asians (Kurien 2007; Kibria 2002; Prashad 2012). In addition to religious differences, class divisions create significant cleavages. For example, in the redistricting process, the so-called South Asian opportunity district created in the New York State Assembly stretches from Bellerose, one of the city’s more affluent neighborhoods, with a median household income of $137,334, to Richmond Hill, where the median household income is less than half that, at $56,693.2 This division in income manifests itself in real and perceived differences in public services, such as education. Each of my interviewees who worked in Richmond Hill expressed extreme dissatisfaction with schools, for example. In Richmond Hill, Public School 62 ranks in the 47th percentile and has an overall and student progress grade of B from the New York City Department of Education. By comparison, PS 133 in Bellerose ranks in the 99th percentile of all elementary schools in the city and has an overall and student progress grade of A (New York City Department of Education Scores 2012–2013). One respondent, who works in Richmond Hill, expressed frustration with the new assembly district lines drawn for Assembly District Twenty-Four because Bellerose residents would not be able to understand the concerns of Richmond Hill residents. His solution: “Don’t create communities based on ethnicity. . . . If a bunch of people are living together in certain neighborhoods—a whole bunch of Punjabis, a whole bunch of Latinos, West Indians, whites—leave them together. Don’t create artificial ethnic districts.” This argument is partially rooted in class diversity and the notion that individuals in a diverse ethnic community living near each other share more concerns and interests than a community of individuals of shared ethnicity who are of different socioeconomic backgrounds. In addition, it points to the challenges of building electoral blocs among South Asians of different socioeconomic backgrounds. Finally, it raises questions about the idea of a unified South Asian identity, since the cultural, linguistic, and religious characteristics of the South Asian community are also different in both areas (Punjabi Sikhs

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and Indo-Caribbeans in Richmond Hill and a more diverse first-generation Indian community in Bellerose that includes immigrants from Bengal, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, and other parts of India). As one respondent, a community organizer, said, “This unity of ‘whatever is South Asian-ness’ is very superficial.” In part because of this diversity, the biggest challenge to coalition building that surfaced in interviews was the feeling that issues advanced by one group were not always of as much importance to other groups. One respondent who leads a nonprofit that focuses on organizing low-income community members said it was “difficult to have long-term strategic coalitions. . . . [It’s] better when they are issue specific and time limited.” This pattern matters for both electoral politics and the making of public policy for two reasons: (1) Diverse segments of the South Asian community are often unable to come together around a unified agenda and create a powerful enough voice to be heard in a crowded policy arena such as New York City. (2) In the absence of other South Asian groups with similar interests in a sector, policy, or neighborhood, the South Asian organizations worked across ethnic lines to build coalitions with other ethnic groups. The first reason creates a critical obstacle to power building within the community, but the second creates an opportunity that can strengthen the community’s ability to move its policy agenda forward. Since challenges are concrete obstacles that need to be overcome before opportunities can be explored, I address first the challenges that arose in my conversations with organization leaders.

Challenge: Limited Capacity In their interviews, leaders of South Asian community organizations said their groups were too small and under-resourced to have a staff member dedicated to policy advocacy. Most organizations in the South Asian community provide direct services in a particular issue area (such as housing or youth development) to a specific South Asian subgroup (such as Nepalese or Indo-Caribbeans) or to an occupational sector (usually low-wage workers in service industries). In many cases, policy or civic engagement work is not a part of the core mission and is taken on in response to a time-sensitive issue, such as the election and voter-registration drive described later. Their limited capacity also means that any one group has difficulty moving legislation without other groups, whether within or outside the South Asian community, and that South Asian groups tend not to be the primary convener of panethnic coalitions. For example, 15% and Growing, a policy campaign to ensure that Asian American organizations were receiving city funding proportionate to their population size, has over forty-five orga­

204 / Sayu Bhojwani

nization members who are led by Asians or serve Asian Americans (as of October 2013). The coalition was convened by the Coalition for Asian American Children and Families, the city’s leading Asian American policy organization. Four of those organizations’ leaders were interviewed for this study. As a small minority, they would need the support of a wide range of other groups and competing interests to get South Asian–specific issues to the top of the coalition’s agenda. Still, joining pan-Asian and other coalitions is a key strategy for South Asian groups, whose capacity and infrastructure limit their ability to develop effective coalitions. This study found only two examples of coalition activity initiated by and for South Asian groups at the local level, both organized by Chhaya Community Development Corporation. They are 2010 census outreach efforts and a 2012 voter-registration drive. The latter had ten nonprofit partners and registered 716 new South Asian voters and had direct contact with 6,000 voters in five neighborhoods with large South Asian concentrations. Although this drive was a significant step for the community and for these organizations, both as a collaboration and as a new direction in their work, when viewed in the context of more robust voter engagement efforts by Latinos or pan-Asian and panimmigrant groups, the example highlights the challenges the South Asian community faces in presenting itself as a strong electoral base. One other example illustrates the difficulty of effective political work and coalition building. At the national level, South Asian Americans Leading Together has periodically organized South Asian nonprofits around a common policy platform known as the National Action Agenda. Interview respondents said that advocacy and policy work around that agenda is often difficult for groups in New York City and nationally, given that most groups’ primary mission is direct service.

Challenge: Losing Individual Voice Hojnacki asserts that some groups may avoid alliances in order to maintain their “distinct identity” within a policy arena, even if that means losing the benefits of being in a coalition (1997, 69). For South Asian organizations, maintaining this distinct identity in panethnic settings can be difficult given the limited capacity described previously and the lack of electoral power to advance a policy agenda on their own. Limited capacity hinders groups working on their own, while concerns about losing voice contribute to tensions about working in coalitions with other ethnic groups and of South Asian groups. Respondents cited concerns about achieving a truly collaborative process and an inability to find common ground. For example, when the lead

The New Machine  /  205

member of a coalition has sought funding and controls the distribution of those resources, respondents said the relationship with the coalition felt “corporate” and “transactional” because members were responsible for executing work being overseen by the lead organization. An organization leader described how difficult it was to get support for organizing, because other South Asian groups did not want to focus on organizing and were more concerned with direct services. In another example, some groups did not want to press for a “South Asian district” after the 2010 census, while others felt that was the best way to concentrate the vote. Although such differences are to be expected among organizations serving different segments or constituents within a community, they prove particularly challenging for minority groups with relatively low populations and divide what limited voice and influence the group can garner when working together. Even groups with extensive experience in coalition work expressed concern about losing their particular voice, as much within South Asian as within panethnic settings. Some respondents thought that, when they are the sole representative of South Asian concerns, their voice gets “drowned out” in panethnic discussions. Other respondents were concerned that they had the sole responsibility to be “the voice of the working class” or of a certain occupational sector when they joined coalitions that included only South Asian groups. One leader whose group had worked on a major legislative issue with organizations also working with the same worker population believed her group’s lack of planning and coordinated agenda hurt it in the coalition. Assessing that process, she said, “From now, if I had to plan, we have to plan first. Build our own house.” She elaborated by saying that they had not adequately articulated the interests of their own members before working with a broader coalition and thus their agenda was subsumed by the coalition’s agenda. In this instance, the resolution of the policy concern brought a benefit to the interviewee’s organization members; still, the lingering feelings of being usurped on the national policy scene suggested that the organization would hesitate to join a coalition in the future until its own agenda was more defined. Although other ethnic groups may experience similar challenges, South Asians, unlike Latinos or Chinese Americans, for example, lack the numbers to go it on their own. South Asian organizations, even when they can organize local community members, do not have the electoral power or policy-making presence to single-handedly deliver an election or policy. One of my interviewees, affiliated with a political action committee that has supported congressional and presidential candidates, agreed with other respondents that a significant and singular high-profile example of the South Asian community’s limited political organization was its inability to mobilize following 9/11 and push back on policies such as the Special Registration

206 / Sayu Bhojwani

program in 2002 for registering certain noncitizens. Since then, the emergence of South Asian Americans Leading Together on the national scene has meant a more robust response on civil liberties and immigration issues, including the condemnation of Representative Peter King’s annual hearings, “The Extent of Radicalization among American Muslims,” through community organizing and media presence (Ansell, Kelly, and Reckow 2013). But the lack of a unified voice continues to limit the community’s ability to influence policy making or electoral outcomes on its own.

Opportunity: Coalition Building Despite the challenges they face in coalitions, groups generally remain in coalitions and work within the existing opportunities. In part, they lack the option of exiting, given their limited power. Also, in general, respondents indicated that the coalitions they felt most positive about were those that emphasized a particular issue or policy. This type of advocacy coalition has been shown to be more effective than broader coalitions in other settings, such as urban education reform (Ansell, Kelly, and Reckow 2013). A combination of a clearly defined issue and the right partners in a coalition has helped South Asian groups achieve policy outcomes in New York City, including the Earned Sick Time Act, originally passed in 2014, and the New York State Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, which took effect in 2010. Both were legislative battles in which the Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United and Andolan were involved; these groups advocate for fair wages and treatment of restaurant workers and for domestic workers, respectively. In both cases, organization members testified at hearings, attended protests, and educated their members and elected officials about the benefits of policies to ensure that workers were given paid time off when they were sick and that domestic workers had basic labor protections for paid breaks and vacation time. The passage of both policies benefited South Asian domestic helpers and restaurant workers, even though organizations with South Asian members did not serve as the lead public voices in the debates. The strategy of working with other groups appears to be the only way that South Asians can make headway, at least in the short term. Even with increased voter registration as more South Asians naturalize, the South Asian community will have electoral strength in only a handful of districts in Queens, including Bellerose and Queens Village, Briarwood, Jackson Heights, and Richmond Hill. Given their internal diversity and residential concentration in multiethnic neighborhoods, desis are likely to be most successful by building strong coalitions among themselves and with other ethnic groups, or they risk becoming permanently shut out from the halls of power. The policy gains mentioned have been the product of such coalitions,

The New Machine  /  207

such as in the cases described earlier involving occupational sector coalitions and in other work I have done on educational policy. In an unpublished paper on coalition building, I found that South Asian community groups worked effectively with larger, more politically powerful groups such as the New York Civil Liberties Union to gain passage of Chancellor’s Regulation A-832, on bias-related harassment,3 and A-663, on translation and interpretation.4 Both regulations are significant for the South Asian community but would not have been instituted were it not for important political allies like the LGBT or Latino communities. These policy outcomes are no doubt critical because of their significant effect on community members who attend schools and access other city services. They provide protections to significant numbers of service workers and ensure a safe and healthy environment for the city’s residents and restaurant patrons. At the same time, they fall short of electoral success, or what Richard Alba and Nancy Foner call “the gold standard against which other forms of political participation should be measured,” in particular the election of minority candidates to office (2013, 17). But for South Asians, in the absence of sufficient numbers to elect one of their own, focusing on coalition building across occupational sector and ethnicity can be a useful strategy for achieving policy outcomes. As an organizing strategy, coalition building can be applicable as much to policy gains as to descriptive representation, however. Carlos Menchaca, the first Mexican American elected to the New York City Council, ran a campaign that relied on the Mexican community but also different groups of voters. Ethnic identity was a part of his campaign, not a singular strategy. Mobilizing multiple identities is a key strategy for what I term new-majority candidates. These candidates successfully deploy their ethnic identity through community outreach, their personal story, and mobilization of donors from the community. But they also engage with mainstream media, likely voters from different constituency groups, and political parties. In an increasingly pluralistic society, new-majority candidates are likely to constitute a different form of descriptive representation, in which voters may feel more tied to the candidate’s immigrant or minority background, even if she is from a different racial and ethnic group. The most prominent example of a new-majority candidate is President Barack Obama, who successfully activated his multiple experiences and identities—community organizer, experience living in Asia, African American background, progressive—to mobilize those constituencies. At the time of this study, most candidates from the South Asian community have not been able to deploy a strong enough political coalition to win local office in Queens. But this is an emerging trend for South Asians and other immigrant groups in the near future, particularly in jurisdictions like Queens and New

208 / Sayu Bhojwani

York City, where multiple minority groups are negotiating power. In Queens, for example, 48 percent of the population is white, 28 percent Latino, 27 percent Asian American, and 21 percent black (U.S. Census Bureau 2019). Any candidate for public office must effectively connect with more than one racial minority to win. As Clarence Stone and colleagues observe, “Political equilibria, where they occur, are not spontaneous and natural but created and defended. Power, institutions, and problem definitions are the building material and glue” (2001, 158). In the South Asian community, both institutions and problem definition are in emergence rather than fully developed. In addition, given that the community lacks the power necessary to make change on its own, whether a policy change or in descriptive representation, electoral and policy coalitions are not simply an option but are the only paths to success.

What Next? Like other immigrant groups, South Asian Americans are negotiating institutional challenges, such as citizenship and voting laws and the electoral system, and demographic changes, including increasingly diverse suburbs and more diverse immigrant groups, to find their way in American politics. In New York City, that negotiation has included struggles to ensure that redistricting of state legislative and city council seats maximizes the impact of the South Asian vote and that noncitizen voting be instituted to allow more South Asians an opportunity to participate in the political process. Both efforts have been undertaken in concert with other minority and immigrant groups and will likely be revived after the results of the 2020 census are in. Despite these obstacles to full incorporation, and the recent health and economic impacts of COVID-19, the electoral landscape for South Asians and other immigrant groups in New York City is evolving rapidly. In the 2020 election cycle, two candidates of South Asian heritage won elections to the New York State Assembly. Housing counselor Zohran Kwame Mamdani and human rights lawyer Jenifer Rajkumar will represent Districts ThirtySix and Thirty-Eight, respectively. Several South Asian candidates are running in the 2021 city council elections. Notably, this increasing political representation is pan–South Asian, with Bangladeshi American Shahana Hanif and Guyanese American Felicia Singh among the candidates for city council. South Asians are not the only panethnic immigrant group in the United States grappling with political recognition and incorporation. Grouped for convenience or for political reasons, multiracial and panethnic immigrant groups with diverse national origins grapple with divergent internal interests shaped by socioeconomic status, national origin, race, and religion.

The New Machine  /  209

Asian Americans and Latinos, for example, are all negotiating internal differences while attempting to gain political footholds. Mobilization, from inside and outside, facilitates incorporation. As a mobilizing tool, identity politics is at once a salient and ineffective strategy, having high salience among recent arrivals and new citizens and low salience for the second generation. Coalition politics is a more reliable strategy, particularly in electoral jurisdictions that are ethnically diverse. Connecting with voters of all backgrounds helped the newly elected New York State Assembly candidates get elected in Queens in 2020. Mamdani, for example, will represent a district that is only 16 percent Asian American, and Rajkumar’s district is only 19 percent Asian American (Statistical Atlas 2018a, 2018b). For certain occupational sectors, shared workplace and economic struggles transcend race and ethnicity and serve as more compelling motivators. Shared neighborhood concerns may also be significant mobilizers. Further exploration of coalition politics for electoral outcomes is needed, particularly because electoral organizing during the COVID-19 pandemic appears to have paved the way for South Asian and other candidates from immigrant communities to unseat incumbents in the New York State legislature. More research on the key factors for mobilization is also critical, especially as it relates to immigrant groups with significant bifurcation in socioeconomic status or with diverse immigration histories in the United States. This includes first-generation and fourth-generation Latinos or Asian Americans, both of which include subgroups with varying economic and educational characteristics. How ethnic groups align to create panethnic and cross-racial coalitions is also an area worthy of further study. Communities of interest, which have largely been defined within ethnic boundaries, may be expanded to include other rational, mutual interests that transcend ethnicity. Further research on coalition building by other emerging immigrant groups will discover common incorporation experiences for contemporary immigrants. New research on South Asians and other immigrant groups must resist privileging electoral participation and seek ways to document how those unable to vote or contribute to campaigns are finding a voice in the political process. Notes 1.  These figures come from the 2012 American Community Survey data, which are available at https://​data​.census​.gov/​cedsci. 2.  These figures come from the 2011 American Community Survey data, which are available at https://​data​.census​.gov/​cedsci. 3.  The A-832 regulation concerned procedures for reporting and responding to bias-related harassment in New York City public schools. See New York City Department of Education 2019.

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4.  The A-663 regulation established access to translation and interpretation for those who spoke limited English and were parents of New York City public school students. See New York City Department of Education 2009. References Alba, Richard, and Nancy Foner. 2013. “Entering the Precincts of Power: Do National Differences Matter for Immigrant Minority Political Representation?” In Bringing Outsiders In: Transatlantic Perspectives on Immigrant Political Incorporation, edited by Jennifer L. Hochschild and John H. Mollenkopf, 143–168. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ansell, Chris, Andrew Kelly, and Sarah Reckhow. 2013. “How to Reform a Reform Coalition: Outreach, Agenda Expansion, and Brokerage in Urban School Reform.” Policy Studies Journal 37 (2013): 717–743. Banfield, Edward C., and James Q. Wilson. 1963. City Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Baumgartner, Frank R., and Beth L. Leech. 1998. Basic Interests: The Importance of Groups in Politics and in Political Science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bowler, Shaun, and Gary M. Segura. 2012. The Future Is Ours: Minority Politics, Political Behavior, and the Multiracial Era of American Politics. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Browning, Rufus P., Dale Rogers Marshall, and David H. Tabb. 1984. Protest Is Not Enough: The Struggle of Blacks and Hispanics for Equality in Urban Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Das Gupta, Monisha. 2006. Unruly Immigrants: Rights, Activism and Transnational South Asian Politics in the United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Davies, Deirdre, and Jenny Dodd. 2002. “Qualitative Research and the Question of Rigor.” Qualitative Health Research 12 (2002): 279–289. Enloe, Cynthia H. 1980. Police, Military and Ethnicity: Foundations of State Power. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. Evans, Arthur, and Michael W. Giles. 1986. “The Effects of Percent Black on Blacks’ Perception of Relative Power and Social Distance.” Journal of Black Studies 17 (1986): 3–14. Gold, Eva, Jeffrey Henig, Marion Orr, Megan Silaner, and Elaine Simon. 2011. “Parent and Community Engagement and the Sustainability Challenge.” In Education Reform in New York City: Ambitious Change in the Nation’s Most Complex School System, edited by Jennifer A. O’Day, Catherine S. Bitter, and Louis M. Gomez, 33–54. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. Hannan, Michael T. 1979. “The Dynamics of Ethnic Boundaries in Modern States.” In National Development and the World System, edited by John Meyer and Michael Hannan, 253–275. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heclo, Hugh. 1978. “Issue Networks and the Executive Establishment.” In The New American Political System, edited by Anthony King, 87–124. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute. Heyink, J. W., and T. J. Tymstra. 1993. “The Function of Qualitative Research.” Social Indicators Research 29 (1993): 291–305. Hojnacki, Marie. 1997. “Interest Groups’ Decisions to Join Alliances or Work Alone.” American Journal of Political Science 41 (1997): 61–87. Hula, Kevin. 1999. Lobbying Together: Interest Group Coalitions in Legislative Politics. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

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Kibria, Nazli. 2002. Becoming Asian American: Identities of Second Generation Chinese and Korean Americans. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kidder, L. H. 1981. “Qualitative Research and Quasi-experimental Frameworks.” In Scientific Inquiry and the Social Sciences, edited by Marilynn B. Brewer and E. Barry Collins, 226–256. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Kurien, Prema. 2007. “Who Speaks for Indian Americans? Religion, Ethnicity, and Political Formation?” American Quarterly 59 (2007): 759–783. Le Espiritu, Yen. 1994. Asian American Panethnicity. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Lincoln, Yvonne, and Egon G. Guba. 1985. Naturalistic Inquiry. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Mahoney, James, and Gary Goertz. 2006. “A Tale of Two Cultures: Contrasting Quantitative and Qualitative Research.” Political Analysis 14 (2006): 227–249. Maira, Sunaina. 2002. Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in NYC. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Meier, Kenneth J., and Joseph Stewart Jr. 1991. The Politics of Hispanic Education. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Mishler, Elliott G. 1991. Research Interviewing: Context and Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. New York City Department of Education. 2009. “A-663. Translations.” https://​w ww​ .schools​.nyc​.gov/​docs/​default​-source/​default​-document​-library/​a​- 663​-english. ———. 2019. “A-832. Student-to-Student Discrimination, Harassment, Intimidation and/or Bullying.” https://​w ww​.schools​.nyc​.gov/​docs/​default​-source/​default​-doc ument​-library/​a​-832​-student​-to​-student​-discrimination​-harassment​-intimidation​ -and​-or​-bullying. Prashad, Vijay. 2012. Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today. New York: New Press. Rocha, Rene R. 2007. “Black-Brown Coalitions in Local School Board Elections.” Political Research Quarterly 60 (2007): 315–327. Seale, Clive. 1999. “Quality in Qualitative Research.” Qualitative Inquiry 5 (4): 465–478. Statistical Atlas. 2018a. “Race and Ethnicity in Assembly District 36, New York.” September 14. https://​statisticalatlas​.com/​state​-lower​-legislative​-district/​New​-York/​ Assembly​-District​-36/​Race​-and​-Ethnicity. ———. 2018b. “Race and Ethnicity in Assembly District 38, New York.” September 14. https://​s tatisticalatlas​.com/​s tate​-lower​-legislative​- district/ ​New​-York/​A ssembly​ -District​-38/​Race​-and​-Ethnicity. Stenbacka, Caroline. 2001. “Qualitative Research Requires Quality Concepts of Its Own.” Management Decision 39 (7): 551–556. Stone, Clarence N., Jeffrey R. Henig, Bryan D. Jones, and Carol Pierannunzi. 2001. Building Civic Capacity. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. U.S. Census Bureau. 2019. “Quick Facts: Queens County (Queens Borough), New York.” https://​w ww​.census ​.gov/​quickfacts/​fact/​t able/​queenscountyqueensboroughnew york/​POP645218. van de Berghe, Pierre L. 1981. The Ethnic Phenomenon. New York: Elsevier. Walker, Jack L. 1983. “The Origins and Maintenance of Interest Groups in America.” American Political Science Review 77 (1983): 390–406.

9 How Would You Spend a Million Dollars? Immigrant Engagement in Participatory Budgeting Ron Hayduk, Diana Tamashiro Folla, and Kristen Hackett

S

ocial scientists have long established that low citizenship rates among immigrants, along with patterns of low voter registration and par­ ticipation by newly naturalized citizens, are correlated with under­ representation in government and biased public policy outcomes (Rama­ krishnan 2005; Wong 2008; Mollenkopf and Pastor 2016). In New York, one in five New York City residents—almost one in three in Queens—is a non­ citizen and ineligible to elect government representatives and guide public policy that affects daily lives. In at least twenty-two of the fifty-one city council districts, more than 20 percent of the voting-age population cannot vote because of their citizenship status, and in several districts this propor­ tion rises to more than 40 percent, most of whom are in Queens (see Chap­ ter 1). This level of political exclusion approximates that of other historically excluded groups including women, African Americans, and youth before laws were changed to incorporate them into the electorate (in 1920, 1965, and 1971, respectively). Such conditions challenge democratic ideals—such as “one person, one vote,” “no taxation without representation,” and “gov­ ernment rests on the consent of the governed”—not only because immi­ grants are excluded from formal political participation but also because they are all too often relegated to the lower social order, calling into question our democratic practice. Thankfully, immigrant political exclusion was not always the case, and it does not need to be. Historically, for example, noncitizens voted in New

How Would You Spend a Million Dollars?  /  213

York State and local elections from 1776 to 1804 and did so in New York City Community School Board elections from 1969 to 2002 (Hayduk 2006; Hay­ duk and Coll 2018).1 More recently, democracy advocates have forged an­ other avenue for immigrant civic engagement: participatory budgeting (PB). Born out of social movements in Brazil, PB aims to expand community engagement and power, foster greater government responsiveness and ac­ countability, and ultimately, cultivate a deeper, more deliberative—and egalitarian—democracy (Lerner 2014). In New York City, PB was spear­ headed by a coalition of organizations, including the Participatory Budget­ ing Project, Community Voices Heard, the Urban Justice Center, and other community groups (Su 2017b). Initially inaugurated during the fall of 2011 with the support of four city council members, today PB is used in thirtytwo of the fifty-one council districts across the city—seven in Queens—be­ coming a mainstay of the city’s political landscape. In 2017, 102,800 New Yorkers voted to spend more than $40 million, and in 2019, 118,000 people voted for $39 million—all of which made real improvements in people’s lives (New York City Council, n.d.). One of the underlying values of PB is the inclusion of marginalized groups traditionally excluded from the political process (Wampler 2012). PB as applied in New York City, or PBNYC, explicitly prioritizes the engage­ ment of low-income, minority, youth, formerly incarcerated, and immigrant (i.e., foreign born) community members.2 In PBNYC, residents who are at least eleven years old—regardless of their citizenship status—have the op­ portunity to directly decide how to spend a portion of a city’s budget, rather than elected officials.3 Residents can participate by proposing project ideas, working to develop viable projects with the council and city agency staff, or campaigning and voting for projects. By extending eligibility to foreignborn residents—as well as translating materials, providing interpreters, and conducting targeted outreach—PB by design removes structural barriers to facilitate and boost immigrant participation. PBNYC is overseen by a steering committee with representatives from community-based organizations—including immigrant-led organiza­ tions—as well as city council staff and other stakeholders.4 By engaging im­ migrants, PB affirms and elevates their voices, helps develop their civic ca­ pacities and degree of community organization, and promotes their political participation. In short, PB gives people a taste for directly deciding how to spend public funds, which can set them and their community on a pathway toward greater participation and political incorporation.5 These com­ munity-building features are among PB’s most compelling aspects. This chapter examines immigrant participation in PB with a focus on Queens. What barriers to participation in PBNYC do immigrants face and what facilitates immigrant participation? We address this question by using

214  /  Ron Hayduk, Diana Tamashiro Folla, and Kristen Hackett

a combination of qualitative research methods—including in-depth inter­ views with staff at immigrant-serving community-based organizations (CBOs) and city council offices, and surveys of immigrants in the thirty-two city council districts where PBNYC is used—and quantitative data (voting and census data) collected by the Community Development Project of the Urban Justice Center.6 The research shows that, given opportunities, immigrants participate in PB. One reason is because PBNYC has deliberately worked to address tradi­ tional barriers to immigrant participation, from eliminating the citizenship requirement to providing language assistance, targeted outreach, and ­community-based supports. PB’s promise of concrete—if modest—material improvements to their neighborhoods draws immigrants into the process. Yet the news is not all good. Immigrant participation is uneven: fewer participate in the earlier stages of the PB process when project ideas and proposals are hammered out, even while they vote in sizable numbers at the end of the process. Persistent structural barriers that can limit immigrant participation include language access and immigration status. We focus on participation because it is a necessary and crucial step for immigrant incor­ poration, although not sufficient. As history has amply shown, unless ex­ cluded groups can participate in political processes, substantive progress will not occur (Piven and Cloward 2000). Still, PB’s potential is tremendous. PB draws in people who report they were not previously civically engaged: 51 percent of PB voters in 2014, for example, were not members of other civic or community organizations and 68 percent said they had never worked with others in their community to solve problems (other than in PB) (Kasdan, Markman, and Convey 2014). These findings are consistent with other studies of PB (Baiocchi 2003; Su 2014), and the extensive literature on social capital and immigrant incorpo­ ration, which are replete with examples showing how social and political activity—from participating in parent-teacher associations and block as­ sociations to working on political campaigns or waging protest—can in­ crease individuals’ capacities and sense of political efficacy (Putnam 2001; Ramakrishnan 2005). These activities, in turn, can have significant spillover effects that foster further civic engagement activity (DeSipio 2011). A 2018 study shows that individuals in PB increased their probability of voting in regular elections by an average of 7.5 percent and that “these effects are [even] greater for those who often have lower probabilities of voting—young people, lower educated and lower income voters, black voters, and people who are the minority race of their neighborhood” (Johnson, Carlson, and Reynolds 2018). Thus, the transformative potentialities of PB are multitiered and substantial at both the individual and the community level and vis-àvis local government. By boosting civic engagement of the marginalized

How Would You Spend a Million Dollars?  /  215

(procedural democracy), PB could ultimately produce more equitable re­ source distribution (substantive democracy) (Wright 2010).

PBNYC PB began in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1989, growing from the grassroots social movements that catapulted the Brazilian Workers Party into power. PB subsequently spread rapidly throughout Latin America and ultimately to over 1,500 cities worldwide, including more than fifty in the United States (Wampler and Hartz-Karp 2012). In New York City, like other places in the United States, PB operates at the city council district level. Council members work in partnership with community organizations and district residents, creating a highly localized process that varies across districts. Comprising four stages, each annual PBNYC cycle begins in September with a series of public forums called neighborhood assemblies, wherein residents have the opportunity to voice project ideas to collectively spend a million dollars. In the second phase, which occurs in the late fall and early winter, volunteer community members (budget delegates) form committees to review residents’ ideas and craft projects into feasible proposals. In the third stage, budget delegates return to the community to host project expos at which they present project proposals to the public. Finally, in early April, project proponents conduct campaigns and residents vote on what projects should be funded. Council member staff informs the community on win­ ning projects through in-person and online forums (community meetings, city council’s website, social media, email alerts). Projects are implemented in the subsequent year or years (Meriwether 2014).7 Throughout all the stages of PB, research and evaluation is reported to the PBNYC steering committee and New York City Council members. Figure 9.1 offers a visual representation of a PB cycle in New York City. While the process is expanding in New York, funds for PB face certain restrictions. Council member discretionary funds, the pool from which PB allocations are drawn, can be used only to pay for capital items (brick and mortar). Thus, to be eligible for PB, a project must (1) cost at least $35,000, (2) have a useful life of at least five years, and (3) involve the construction, reconstruction, or acquisition of a physical public improvement. This last criterion excludes funds for services or programs. Categories for PB-funded projects include schools and education, cultural and community facilities, parks and recreation, housing, transportation, and youth. Since its debut in 2010, the number of New York City Council members incorporating PB into their districts has steadily increased each year, with Queens coming in at the top (along with Brooklyn), as shown in Table 9.1.

Neighborhood assemblies, September–November At public meetings in each district, the council members present information on the budget funds; residents brainstorm project ideas and select budget delegates. Ideas can also be submitted online.

Evaluation, implementation, and monitoring, April–onward

Delegate orientations, November

Delegates, and other participants evaluate the process and then continue to meet and oversee the implementation of projects.

Delegates learn about the budget process, project development, and key spending areas and then form committees.

Voting, April

Delegate meetings, November–March

Delegates present the final project proposals, and residents vote on which projects to fund. Council members submit winning PB projects to the city council.

Delegates, with support from council member staff, meet in committees to review project proposals, and meet with city agency staff to discuss the eligibility of projects.

Project expos, March Delegates present draft project proposals to the community and get feedback, with which they revise the projects.

Figure 9.1  Participatory budgeting (PB) cycle. (Source: Used by permission of Participatory Budgeting Project.)

Table 9.1 Adoption of participatory budgeting per cycle for New York City and Queens

Cycle

Year

NYC council district total

Queens council district total

1

2011–2012

4

1

2

2012–2013

8

2

3

2013–2014

10

3

4

2014–2015

24

9

5

2015–2016

31

10

6

2016–2017

31

10

How Would You Spend a Million Dollars?  /  217

In the next section, we look more closely at the structural barriers im­ migrants traditionally face with respect to political participation and power, and identify the ways PBNYC attempts to mitigate these barriers.

Structural Barriers and Pathways to Participation Immigrants face specific challenges to political participation. The most sig­ nificant are citizenship and legal status. The undocumented in particular are wary of government because their lack of legal immigration status makes them vulnerable to detention and deportation, fears made worse after the 2016 presidential election. Nevertheless, many do engage in infor­ mal, nonelectoral politics, such as attending community forums or demon­ strations, becoming members in school committees, signing petitions, or volunteering for an organization or a political campaign (Leal 2002). These activities can prove influential with governmental officials and institutions. Although PB is not a typical formal electoral process, we should expect that the variables scholars have identified in other studies apply. For ex­ ample, language acquisition is a crucial factor affecting political participa­ tion because English proficiency has been shown to be essentially a prereq­ uisite to participation (Barreto and Muñoz 2003). Latinos with access to Spanish-language news are reported to participate at higher rates in elec­ tions than those without (Oberholzer-Gee and Waldfogel 2009). A survey of Asian Americans found that four in five adults described as having low-level English proficiency would make use of translated election materials, and about two in five rely on ethnic media for political information (Wong et al. 2011). According to Karen Pennar, codirector of the Center for Community and Ethnic Media at City University of New York’s Graduate School of Jour­ nalism, 1.8 million immigrant New Yorkers “speak little or no English” and “nearly half” speak “a language other than English at home” (Pennar 2016). Most of these residents rely on the more than three hundred ethnic media outlets in the city. To be sure, immigrant populations face challenges to participation sim­ ilar to other marginalized social groups; scholars point to socioeconomic status, age, educational level, generation, and duration of stay in the United States, among other factors (Wong 2008). In addition, studies show that legal and institutional factors can impede participation, such as cumber­ some voter-registration procedures and election administrative practices (time and place restrictions). Still, as we describe later, traditional structural barriers to political participation are compounded for immigrants, particu­ larly those who have limited English proficiency, lack legal status, and en­ counter cultural obstacles or discrimination.

218  /  Ron Hayduk, Diana Tamashiro Folla, and Kristen Hackett

The socioeconomic status profile of immigrant New Yorkers varies widely, mirroring the hourglass shape of other demographic groups. Con­ sider educational attainment, which is highly correlated with political par­ ticipation. Although a sizable number of immigrants arrive with postsec­ ondary education and professional skills, most do not. As much as 40 percent to 50 percent of the top three immigrant groups in New York City— Dominican, Chinese, and Mexican adults—have attained less than a high school education (New York City Department of City Planning 2013). Some of the adult immigrant residents we surveyed had fewer than eight years of formal education. Local institutions and CBOs have long been credited with helping over­ come such barriers and encouraging participation by introducing them to political stimuli that foster longer-term participation, as other chapters in this volume attest. This is especially applicable to newcomers, who are often unfamiliar with U.S. political processes and are mobilized less by political parties than they were in the past (Wong 2008). In cities, CBOs have fos­ tered political interest and mobilized formal and informal participation among citizens and the foreign born (New York City Department of City Planning 2013). This is particularly true of immigrant-led organizations, which are usually more trusted and are better mobilizers of immigrant residents. In fact, such organizations have had “incredible successes in mo­ bilizing immigrant communities, including organizations that registered sixty thousand new immigrant voters in New York” (Brown 2017, 3). Additionally, such community organizations are often involved in com­ municating immigrant concerns to larger political audiences, whether through collaboration with local government officials or by mobilizing im­ migrant groups through nonformal channels (de Graauw 2016). Commu­ nity organizations often help mobilize immigrant participation beyond just electoral politics and engage communities in a broad array of activities, which may be limited to a specific issue or concern initially but can also create conditions for future mass mobilization (McAlevey 2014; Wong 2008).

Research Design and Data Sources This chapter identifies barriers to immigrant participation—as well as promising practices—that must be addressed to achieve PB’s goals. Our analysis is based on data collected by a research team based at Queens Col­ lege composed largely of students and faculty who conducted interviews and administered surveys with PB participants, PB budget delegates, staff and members of immigrant-serving organizations, community organiza­ tions and civic groups, PB organizers, canvassers, and city council staff.8 We

How Would You Spend a Million Dollars?  /  219

began this process in partnership with the Community Development Proj­ ect of the Urban Justice Center, which has been the main research and eval­ uation partner for PBNYC. The Community Development Project docu­ mented PB participants at every phase of the process via observations; reports from PB organizers, facilitators, and council staff; exit polls of vot­ ers; and vote counts. The Community Development Project’s data provided us with the number of immigrants participating in PB and, in pairing that with census data, helped shed light on the representativeness of immigrant participation by district and across the city overall. From 2012 to 2015, we conducted three waves of data collection totaling sixty-five interviews with CBOs and council office staff and canvassers, and we solicited sixty-three surveys from immigrant community members. Our data collection and research methods were adjusted during each wave to further deepen our understanding of immigrant participation (and nonpar­ ticipation).

Wave 1 From September 2012 to May 2013, Hayduk and twenty-five undergraduate students from Queens College conducted twenty-five interviews with indi­ viduals who had previously participated in PB during cycle 2 as budget del­ egates—but were not participating in the then current PB cycle 3—across all participating city council districts. The interviews were designed to iden­ tify (1) who participated as budget delegates and why; (2) reasons they no longer were participating (whether they were participating in PB in some other capacity or were engaged in other civic activity); (3) factors that fa­ cilitated their initial participation in PB as well as barriers to their participa­ tion and, more generally, strengths and weaknesses of PB processes; and (4) recommendations for improvements to future iterations of PB in New York City, particularly toward increasing immigrant participation in PB and their general civic engagement. The interviews were transcribed in whole or in part. The research team analyzed the transcripts and identified themes that emerged across interviews: time constraints, work and family respon­ sibilities, language and cultural barriers. In preparing to carry out a second wave of data collection, the Com­ munity Development Project again provided guidance in developing our questions and protocols and provided contact information for initial inter­ viewees. The Queens College team also drew up recommendations from members of the PB steering committee who were part of immigrant-serving CBOs to identify other CBOs and council staff to interview. In addition, we conducted independent analysis using census data and Community Devel­ opment Project data to identify immigrant-dense PB districts and then

220  /  Ron Hayduk, Diana Tamashiro Folla, and Kristen Hackett

sought to identify immigrant-serving CBOs in those districts to then inter­ view. Finally, we drew on our own contacts and contacts we obtained from interviewees (snowball sampling method).

Wave 2 During 2013–2015, an additional forty interviews were conducted by Hay­ duk and four research assistants—Merzela Casimir, Ana María Ardón ­Bejarano, Diana Tamashiro Folla, and Kristen Hackett. These interviews followed similar protocols and processes. We interviewed staff from ­immigrant-serving organizations, canvassers, and several city council staff across participating city council districts, with a focus on Queens County. These interviews were designed to document factors that facilitated immi­ grant participation in PB and barriers to their participation from the per­ spective of staff members. Additionally, we solicited recommendations for improving future iterations of PBNYC, in particular increasing immigrant participation in PB and their civic engagement more generally. The semistructured interviews were conducted in CBO offices and council district offices, public cafes, and public spaces (a few were conducted via phone). Most of the interviews were audio recorded and fully tran­ scribed. The research team analyzed the transcripts independently and then discussed the results. We identified themes that emerged across interviews, conducted further analysis, and wrote up results. These interviews answered many of our questions, but they could not answer a deeper question that was emerging: how does PB fit into the larger context of immigrant community members’ lives? CBO and council staff members and PBNYC steering com­ mittee members gave us insight, and we then sought to ask community members themselves.

Wave 3 In the fall of 2015, we partnered with three immigrant-serving organiza­ tions to collect surveys of immigrant community members.9 These organi­ zations were selected because of their status as leading service providers and advocates for the differing and key immigrant communities that comprise the bulk of immigrant residents in Queens. In addition, these CBOs pos­ sessed awareness of, support for, and knowledge of PB as a practice within their communities, including having a similar interest in understanding what barriers and facilitating factors may be involved. Surveys were trans­ lated to accommodate Spanish, Bengali, Chinese (Mandarin), and Korean readers. Using closed- and open-ended questions, the surveys aimed to cap­ ture the knowledge and perspectives of immigrant community members

How Would You Spend a Million Dollars?  /  221

and to assess how and why or why not community members participate politically, with a focus on PB and what it meant in relation to the larger context of their lives. We collected sixty-three surveys from immigrant community members across the city. The majority of survey participants resided in Queens (71.2 percent), with the remaining residing in the boroughs of Brooklyn (16.9 percent), the Bronx (6.8 percent), and Manhattan (5.1 percent). The majority of participants were first-generation immigrants (83.6 percent), with a sub­ set of interviews from second-generation American born (16.4 percent). Nearly half the participants choose to complete the surveys in a language other than English (46 percent), which was Spanish or Mandarin. Although an overwhelming majority of our respondents did not participate in PB, the surveys highlight factors that affect their participation in PB and civic par­ ticipation more generally. For example, respondents discussed work and family responsibilities, mistrust of public officials, and seeing personal meaning in the possible or proposed projects. These responses confirmed themes that emerged during our interviews and provided more insight into them. The following sections explicate our findings and analysis.

Uneven Participation How effectively have PB districts in New York City addressed traditional barriers and engaged foreign-born community members? Results to date are generally positive, though uneven. Table 9.2 shows PB participation city­ wide and by council district for cycles 1, 2, and 3. The data show that PB is gaining traction across the city, with more districts adopting PB each year and, relatedly, greater numbers of New York City residents participating (from 7,736 participants in cycle 1 to 13,889 in cycle 2, to 18,184 in cycle 3). However, a closer examination reveals important disparities in participa­ tion. For example, though overall PB participation is on the rise, that increase is overwhelmingly the result of increases in the number of voters; neighbor­ hood assembly attendance and budget delegate participation is largely con­ stant or dropping in some districts. These patterns tend to hold for foreignborn participants and especially for participants for whom English is not their first language. In Table 9.3 we see that some of the PB districts are nearly 50 percent foreign-born and also have high rates of noncitizens. A few districts with high levels of noncitizens have high levels of PB among foreign-born resi­ dents (e.g., District Thirty-Eight).10 In most districts, however, immigrant participation in PB falls below their proportion of the population.

Table 9.2 Participatory budgeting (PB) among foreign born and nonnative by district, cycles 1–3

District

Total PB participation*

N/A

BD

Voters

PB voters born outside U.S.

PB voters whose primary language was not English

Cycle 3 (2013–2014) 18,184

1661

333

16,642

(6,956) 22%

(7,053) 36%

8

Citywide

1,939

223

50

1,715

(623) 48%

(637) 43%

23

2,212

349

50

1,888

(1,358) 31%

(1,354) 10%

31

2,213

90

41

2,149

(753) 29%

(783) 12%

32

983

70

22

899

(77) 5%

(8) 3%

33

2,148

182

40

1,981

(1,329) 22%

(1,352) 11%

38

3,236

336

43

2,909

(630) 57%

(632) 52%

39

2,509

314

56

2,247

(1,902) 17%

(1,916) 6%

44

1,270

39

12

1,222

(70) 27%

(73) 14%

45

1,107

58

19

1,065

(423) 53%

(430) 8%

Cycle 2 (2012–2013) 13,889

1,546

274

13,035

(—) 24%

(6,928) 10%

8

Citywide

2,063

349

60

1,770

(—) 38%

(—) 38%

23

1,273

221

54

1,116

(—) 29%

(797) 12%

32†

1,010

60

—

976

(—) 15%

(189) 6%

33

2,632

173

40

2,632

(—) 25%

(1,825) 8%

39

3,107

457

50

2,821

(—) 16%

(2,216) 4%

44

1,719

97

15

1,610

(—) 23%

(31) 25%

45

1,035

120

39

940

(—) 52%

(215) 8%

Cycle 1 (2011–2012) Citywide

7,736

2,138

251

5,985

(—) 19%

10%

8

1,632

680

61

1,048

(—) 28%

(731) 16%

32

1,799

380

36

1,639

39

2,752

499

102

2,213

(—) 13%

—

(1,072) 9%

(1,378) 8%

45

1,553

579

52

1,085

(—) 56%

(466) 11%

Source: Urban Justice Center 2012, 2013, 2014. Note: A dash (—) indicates that the data were not included in the CPD report. For the last two columns, the number in parentheses is the number of surveys collected by CPD that answered this question. * Participants in PB may have participated in multiple phases (e.g., participating in a neighborhood assembly and having voted) but were counted only once in the PB overall participation tally. This means that PB over­ all participation tallies are not equivalent to the sum of the tallies for the three phases and instead are lower. † District 32 data should be interpreted with caution. This district was heavily damaged by Hurricane Sandy, and recovery efforts interfered with participation in PB during this cycle.

174,909

160,408

165,257

39

44

45

19

44

33

23

48

28

20

12

17

10

20

21

32

11

Foreign born, naturalized (%)

15

12

11

31

9

13

13

13

17

Foreign born, not U.S. citizen (%)

31

67

39

79

51

45

27

55

62

Non-English as primary language (%)

+9

−6

−6

+4

+3

−28

−5

−13

+20

Foreign born

−23

−53

−33

−27

−40

−42

−15

−45

−19

Non-English as primary language

Source: Data from 2010–2014 American Community Survey, available at https://​catalog​.data​.gov/​dataset/​2010​-2014​-american​-community​-survey​-5​-year​-selected​-population​-tables/​ resource/​f 2e7a43c​-0b76​-4fbd​-99ab​-8e245a73d3eb; Urban Justice Center 2012, 2013, 2014. Note: The data in this table represent the pool of PB-eligible residents by national origin and language. These figures offer a point of comparison that speaks to the representativeness of PB participation among residents for whom English is not a primary language or who were born outside the United States. Though these data represent only those eighteen and older in each district, whereas PB participation eligibility begins at age sixteen, this is as close to the pool of PB-eligible participants as is possible given existing data.

177,249

170,905

38

168,192

33

158,005

31

32

33

34

157,620

28

44

181,299

23

Foreign born (%)

8

District

Total district population

Voting age district population

Differences (voting in cycle 3 PB data vs. district-level data)

Table 9.3 Characteristics of foreign-born population in participatory budgeting (PB) district

224  /  Ron Hayduk, Diana Tamashiro Folla, and Kristen Hackett

Another important district-level factor to consider is language. Table 9.3 shows that PB districts with high numbers of residents for whom English is not their first language have lower rates of PB. This pattern holds true even for districts where high levels of foreign born and noncitizens are accompa­ nied by relatively higher rates of PB, suggesting language differences still present unique barriers. This is consistent with the scholarship regarding immigrant civic and political engagement. The remainder of our analysis aims to illuminate factors undergirding this uneven participation, factors that also present challenges to PB organiz­ ers and the broader goal of advancing immigrant political incorporation. These barriers include immigration status, language access, time and logis­ tic constraints, wariness or distrust of elected officials and government, and assessments of immediate and potential benefits. We also discuss ways PBNYC organizers and council members have or could address these chal­ lenges, including crafting an accessible program design, lowering barriers to entry, doing effective outreach and engagement, providing communitybased resources and supports, and showing the promise of tangible neigh­ borhood improvements. As in other boroughs, PB came to Queens in phases, with most districts beginning only recently. District Thirty-Two (Rockaways) began PB in cycle 1 (2011–2012),11 followed by District Twenty-Three (East Queens) in cycle 2 (2012–2013), and District Thirty-One (South Queens) in cycle 3 (2013–2014). Seven additional districts (19, 21, 22, 26, 27, 29, 30) joined in 2014–2015. The bulk of our research, however, was conducted during the first four years (2011–2015), before the last group of districts began PB. For this reason— and also because data for some districts were not collected at all or were partially collected—our analysis of PB in Queens focuses on Districts Thirty-One, Thirty-Two, and Twenty-Three.

Culturally Competent Outreach, Language, and Access Our survey findings overwhelmingly indicated that many individuals were simply unaware of what PB was or that it was happening in their com­ munities. In response to the question “Why have you not been involved in PB in the past?” two-fifths of our survey sample stated, “I didn’t know about it.” One respondent said, “Nobody knows about PB, especially im­ migrants don’t know anything about PB.” Relatedly, our interviews with canvassers confirmed that language barriers posed significant challenges for them. During the 2013–2014 cycle in District Thirty-One, more than a third of the residents were foreign born and made up 29 percent of PB voters but only 3 percent of neighborhood assembly participants. In the same cycle in

How Would You Spend a Million Dollars?  /  225

District Thirty-Two, 39 percent of the district’s residents were foreign born but only 5 percent voted.12 In District Twenty-Three, by contrast, the foreign born participated at higher rates: the foreign born made up about 45 percent of the residents, 31 percent of PB voters, 23 percent of neighborhood assem­ bly participants, and 12 percent of budget delegates. In fact, as one canvasser noted, the voter turnout for PB in District Twenty-Three was “truly historic” in 2014: the 1,888 residents who turned out to vote marked a 70 percent increase from the previous year. A breakdown of the data, however, reveals that participation is not truly representative of the resident immigrant pop­ ulation in the district. One key factor in District Twenty-Three, and one that is consistent with the academic literature, is language diversity. After all, over 130 languages are spoken in Queens, and District Twenty-Three has substantial numbers of Chinese, Korean, Bengali, Urdu, Arabic, and Spanish speakers. Yet the district provided informational materials in only two languages (Chinese and Korean) during the 2013–2014 cycle. Language diversity in Queens points to the challenges of creating multilingual processes, which inevitably involves translating materials into multiple languages and hiring interpret­ ers, among other things. In the context of resource constraints, advocates are faced with what and how many languages should be considered for translation and interpretation and how to disseminate materials and con­ duct outreach. Translation of materials is not the only barrier at PB events. Canvassers are also challenged to communicate information about PB orally and in writing to residents in appropriate languages. One canvasser summed it up: “I do know that for sure [canvassers] could’ve benefited from [knowing] some other languages” (Canvasser B 2013). Our conversations around language barriers also revealed a related class dimension. One city council staff member, for example, stated that many of the better-educated, higher-income South Asian immigrants speak English well enough that they do not require translation. Another canvasser reiter­ ated the same points regarding many in the East Asian community. How­ ever, other Asian immigrants with lower levels of education and income tend to need bilingual assistance. These differences affect access and par­ ticipation.

A Self-Fulfilling Process? The initial lack of immigrant turnout in early phases of the PB process poses challenges to PB’s goals of inclusion and equity. Without a robust immi­ grant presence at PB events, PB council staff concluded that providing in­ terpreters at events was unnecessary and an added cost. This contributed to

226  /  Ron Hayduk, Diana Tamashiro Folla, and Kristen Hackett

reduced efforts to provide language services; not just interpretation at meet­ ings but also written materials. As one canvasser and logistics aide stated, “Since a lot of the people in the neighborhood do know at least basic En­ glish, we just printed everything in English for the last cycle [2013–2014]” (Canvasser A 2013). But is this a chicken-and-egg situation that produces a self-fulfilling pattern? Is it that non-English speakers do not show up to PB events (neighborhood assemblies and budget delegate meetings), leading PB organizers to forgo translation; or is it that there is no translation at PB events—and little effective culturally competent outreach conducted—so that few non-English speakers engage in PB? Our research suggests both kinds of circumstances are at work in Queens. In fact, our research shows that the lack of adequate translation and ef­ fective outreach did contribute to a lack of participation by some residents in the South Asian and East Asian communities who do not speak English fluently. CBO organizers, for example, lamented they lacked translated ma­ terials or canvassers fluent in the necessary languages, which created barri­ ers to inclusion for non-English speakers. “In Oakland Gardens, there is a big Korean community,” an organizer said. “We just didn’t have the means to connect with them. Overall, we did not do a good job connecting with folks whose first language is not English” (Canvasser C 2013). Another can­ vasser and logistics aide echoed these sentiments: “There’s a lot of new East Indians [who] speak Punjabi and other dialects. I would like to see someone who speaks Punjabi attend the meetings and disseminate the information they learn to their fellow neighbors” (Canvasser D 2013). Another factor regarding linguistic inclusion, which the same canvasser and logistics aide identified, was where and when to distribute materials. She noted that translated materials for populations with limited English fluency are best disseminated in the areas the populations frequent, such as a library or school. Although canvassers were often prepared with materials translated into languages deemed common among residents, there were problems regard­ ing the quality of the translation in some cases. In reading through mate­ rials provided to community members in Bengali during the 2013–2014 cycle, a lead organizer of a South Asian immigrant-serving organization in Queens and proponent of PB reported that the information was poorly translated, leaving community members confused about what PB was and how to get involved. He said that the lack of adequately translated materials can lead to feelings of alienation and deter individuals from getting involved (CBO staff member 2014). In one district with a large population of educated, higher-income Asian immigrants (Korean, Indian), city council staff reported that translated ma­ terials were not necessary and were not widely used (City council staff mem­

How Would You Spend a Million Dollars?  /  227

ber 2013). However, according to canvassers, this made engaging lower-­ income non-English-speaking Asians (Chinese) harder and less effective (CBO staff member 2013). One solution a CBO staff member suggested would be to advertise extensively in the ethnic media in New York City, which is often the main source non-English-speaking community members rely on for news and current events in their communities. In addition to producing greater awareness of PB among immigrant residents, he sug­ gested that advertising in ethnic media would better ensure proper transla­ tion (CBO staff member 2014).

Challenges of Meeting Multilingual Needs at PB Events and Meetings Making community members aware of PB is only part of language-related challenges. Once community members begin attending meetings, commu­ nicating to a multilingual group presents additional difficulties. Meeting attendees need to be able to understand what the organizers are saying and communicate with fellow community members to come to resolutions about how to carry out the process. Some city council districts have at­ tempted to address these challenges by providing translated, written materi­ als at meetings as well as interpretation services, with some even conducting entire meetings in Spanish or Chinese.13 For immigrants with limited English proficiency, meetings without in­ terpretation can produce confusion, alienation, and a sense of not belong­ ing. Moreover, a staff member of another immigrant-serving organization said that non-English-speaking members of her organization who had at­ tended PB events felt excluded despite the presence of interpreters or inter­ pretation devices. She elaborated: If the meetings were conducted in Korean or Chinese, that’d be great. Or conducted in a location where our community feels com­ fortable going, that’d be great. But going to a location that is not extremely accessible, that you’ve never been to, knowing that you’re going to an English-speaking workshop, is very daunting. Even if there is a translator, you will feel like you’re on the outside and you aren’t able to fully participate in a discussion. Especially because in the delegate meetings . . . when you break out into the delegate groups—the education, the transportation, the safety, the parks group—even if you have one translator . . . you would need five trans­ lators, for each group if there are language differences. Language acts as a very difficult hurdle to overcome in this process because so much of [PB] is about communication. (CBO staff member 2013)

228  /  Ron Hayduk, Diana Tamashiro Folla, and Kristen Hackett

During our interviews, another immigrant-serving organization staff member discussed possible scenarios to address language challenges. She suggested, for example, hosting multiple monolingual meetings or provid­ ing interpreters for small group discussions. However, monolingual meet­ ings exclude other community members, which would deter greater com­ munity-building opportunities; holding small group discussions could lead to a sort of ghettoization. This represents a serious challenge to PB ad­ vocates to fulfill its goal of inclusion, one that other contexts and further research might help inform.

Resource Constraints City council district staff operate within constraints that limit levels of out­ reach, translation, and interpretation services provided in PB and elsewhere. Limited budgets pose challenges even for council members with a strong commitment to immigrant engagement. Interviewees in District TwentyThree, for example, said the lack of funds for targeted outreach was a chal­ lenge for immigrant engagement in general. Effective outreach requires funding to hire staff and to support the cost of outreach and translation activities. “It’s hard to take [resources for outreach] out of the office budget,” a staff member said. “I don’t have twelve to fourteen thousand dollars [to do a mailing to the whole district]. That’s not in our budget. So in that sense, no, there’s no money” (City council staff member 2013). He also stated that funds for translation at meetings are not always made available by the city of New York. Financial limitations and onerous workloads also reinforce linguistic barriers if staff is not bilingual. Provision of additional financial support from the city to city council members for these purposes would help overcome language barriers. Re­ search suggests such resources could increase diversity and equity in the pool of PB participants, particularly in the vital neighborhood assemblies and budget delegate phases (Kasdan, Markman, and Convey 2014).

Work, Family, PB? Overcoming Time and Logistic Constraints How does PB rank among other priorities in the lives of immigrant house­ holds, such as work and family responsibilities? If outreach to immigrant residents is successful and motivation is present, what other obstacles in immigrants’ lives make participation in PB challenging? In our research, immigrants’ time constraints loomed large, or framed another way, their commitments to work and family can preclude PB. As one city council staff

How Would You Spend a Million Dollars?  /  229

member put it, “Language is only one challenge. Immigrants tend to be younger. A lot of them are working people, have families, you know, so it’s harder for them to find time to do something like this” (City council staff member 2013). Many immigrants are located in low-wage and precarious work sectors, particularly those who are undocumented, and tend to work longer hours than native-born New Yorkers (Ness 2005; DiNapoli and Bleiwas 2013). In this vein, 45.0 percent of our survey sample indicated that the perceived time commitment required by PB made (or would make) participation in it difficult. Nearly an equal share (44.7 percent) also indicated that family re­ sponsibilities would make it difficult; and in all but two of these cases, these were the same participants. Similarly, through her canvassing experience, one interviewee described how these constraints intersect with PB’s sched­ ule and ultimately limit participation: Meetings were typically during the week from like seven to nine at a school or at the office of the council member. And it wouldn’t work out for [immigrants] because they have work. And if they weren’t at work, they have to take care of their children at home and make dinner. . . . They said maybe if it were on the weekend they would probably try to make it. That was a barrier—them working or taking care of the house. Especially working. People work seven days a week. Always working. (Canvasser 2014) Time and life constraints help explain why we see higher rates of par­ ticipation among immigrants at the voting phase—the simplest and fastest phase of the process—but lower rates in the more deliberative neighborhood assemblies and budget delegate meetings, which require a greater time com­ mitment not always available to immigrants.

Proximity and Accessibility Another issue that intersects with socioeconomic status is proximity and accessibility to meeting sites. Interviewees discussed how inadequate public transportation in the district caused increased commute times, making it more difficult for working immigrant families to attend PB evening meet­ ings. A city council staff member said, “If you finish [work] at five or six o’clock, by the time you get back to here, it’s like seven or eight o’clock. It’s like, you’re going to a meeting? It’s kind of a lot to ask people” (City council staff member 2013). To mitigate these barriers, PB organizers and some council members have held meetings and voting in centrally located areas that immigrants

230  /  Ron Hayduk, Diana Tamashiro Folla, and Kristen Hackett

frequent in their daily routines. For example, in several districts, voting was held in libraries and schools and at various times during the day and the week. Others, like District Thirty-Eight, have employed mobile voting sites, including setting up tables throughout the neighborhood. According to staff in District Thirty-Eight, this attempt to bring PB to the people also contrib­ uted to their higher voting rates.14

Logistic Support and Resource Constraints Additionally, some PBNYC organizations and city council members have provided PB participants with metrocards, childcare, or food at meetings.15 Our survey respondents said such supports “would all help” in making it possible for immigrants to participate in PB. Although these supports alone would not ameliorate all barriers, they would enable greater opportunities to participate for many low-income community members. The actual provi­ sion of such supports, however, has been quite limited. Similar to providing translation and interpretation services, the financial constraints of city council districts inhibit or limit the provision of these supports. Still, some CBOs have attempted to compensate for this lack of support. For example, one CBO held informational sessions about PB at its sites in Brooklyn and Queens for low-income non-English-speaking Latinos. The sessions were held in Spanish, and the CBO provided transportation, food, and childcare. According to staff of that CBO, all these supports increased their members’ engagement in PB. Though no cross-district, comprehensive data confirm this as a tendency, the case is suggestive. A related issue is that, given diver­ gent CBO missions and resource constraints, not every city council district has similarly situated local partners willing and able to accommodate im­ migrants. This research underscores the barriers that the material limita­ tions of immigrants’ everyday lives pose to their joining in PB and other arenas.

Creating Safe Spaces Another important concern specific to immigrant communities is the real­ ity that some are undocumented. Even with effective efforts to mitigate lan­ guage barriers and address the imposition of everyday constraints, fear often remains an obstacle. Interviewees described fear of releasing personal information and participating in something “official.” A canvasser in Dis­ tricts Thirty-One and Thirty-Two stated, “I think if people were able to go to school and go to work much more freely without the fear of being de­ ported, I think if they had that security, they would be more ready to come and vote” (Canvasser 2014).

How Would You Spend a Million Dollars?  /  231

To allay such anxieties, several council members sent clear messages to undocumented residents to reinforce their confidentiality and safety in PB. Moreover, some council members also explicitly sought to affirm the value of immigrants in PB. For example, one immigrant we interviewed said her council member’s “commitment to including immigrants in the process was very clear,” which encouraged her to get more involved in the PB pro­ cess, eventually becoming a budget delegate (Budget delegate 2015). In dis­ tricts where council members had a strong record of advocating for im­ migrant communities, their support behind the process validated it for many immigrants. In District Thirty-Nine, for example, two canvassers partially attributed PB’s success with the Bangladeshi community to their council member validating it. The council member had consistently advo­ cated for this population, citing, for example, his efforts to combat New York Police Department surveillance of Muslims and his appearances at mosques. Similarly, immigrant-serving CBOs can act as trusted intermediaries, forming bridges to other neighborhood residents and to government offi­ cials. Several immigrant organizations we interviewed hosted PB informa­ tional events in their offices and conducted outreach to their members, which they say helped overcome both wariness and language barriers. Holding meetings in their own language, in a space they feel familiar with and affirmed by, with staff skilled and motivated to work with immigrant members can produce a highly effective dynamic that promotes immigrant civic engagement (Wong 2008; McAlevey 2014).

The Benefits and Promise of PB Beyond immigrant voting in PB, however, our interviewees alluded to the transformative potential of PB, revealing why immigrant involvement in PB is important in the first place. Take the example of the MinKwon Center for Community Action, a nonprofit based in Queens. MinKwon has a youth empowerment group that is made up of high school–age Asian American youth, from Southeast Asian to East Asian, many of whom attend Benjamin Cardozo High School. The youth empowerment group was first involved with PB during cycle 2 when MinKwon made the decision to incorporate PB into its existing civic engagement campaigns and get-out-the-vote work. With the help of MinKwon staff, students participated in selecting and drafting project proposals for PB. Among the proposals developed by the youth group were improvements to picnic areas and the creation of a music stage in Cunningham Park, a much used public space in the community. The youth group promoted PB and the project idea through social media, word of mouth among their

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friends, and in their high schools. According to a MinKwon staff member, the process fostered leadership development and allowed the students to gain greater familiarity with government processes and local affairs. Some of our youth members were surprised that common people, who are not necessarily, you know, employees of community centers or anything, just people like us, regular people, . . . after work come to these meetings . . . [and] they care about their communities. . . . It really helped them to learn about the democratic process, make them feel like “I could be the voice. . . . My participation matters, these council members actually do listen to us.” Her response also describes an empowering effect the process had on the students, because, in contrast to formal political processes, more students were able to participate and have a voice. PB voting results proved to be an added influence for the participating youth, given that their idea was a win­ ning project. “I think it helps for youth to feel empowered, because, for the first time you feel like ‘Oh, I’m accepted by society.’ . . . It’s a small thing, but you get to vote. . . . We were 100 percent involved so we were like, ‘Oh, we actually won,’ you know?” These testimonies show how PB can give meaning to immigrant civic engagement. And while interviewees said PB alone will not solve entrenched structural inequalities, they suggested PB can mitigate some of their effects that keep immigrants from being involved in local politics and affairs. When asked if PB helped increase immigrants’ trust in government or po­ litical processes, one District Thirty-One canvasser frankly stated: Somewhat. Not much, but somewhat. It’s a process. Baby steps. . . . We ended up meeting a lot of our goals, so that was good. It’s a con­ tinuous process, it’s kind of a new concept, and I think it’s more in development. I’m glad we just got the word out and a lot of people can feel that they have some sort of power, some sort of say in their government and how money’s being allocated, how their tax mon­ ey’s being allocated. That is very empowering for people. To be sure, increasing civic engagement alone will not automatically lead to changes in power relations that produce the stark inequalities that exist between and among groups. Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Ernesto Ganuza warn PB advocates about symbolic rather than substantive versions of PB, of attaining greater participatory mechanisms regarding budgets but with­ out achieving real change in the distribution of power:

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The danger exists that [PB] becomes only peripherally connected to centers of power, and instead becomes linked to small discretionary budgets, bound by external technical criteria. It becomes a process of one-sided democratization that brings greater transparency and social justice up to the point where demands are delivered to state officials; what happens after that point—let alone what portions of city budgets are turned over to the popular mandate—are left un­ touched. (Baiocchi and Ganuza 2014, 32) They argue for PB that can come “closer and closer to effective popular control of the local state” (31), which were central goals of PB in its inception in Porte Alegre, Brazil. Isaac Jabola-Carolus (2017) argues PBNYC’s institu­ tionalization in recent years has led to increased administrative capacity— which is important to ensure effective implementation—but decreased civil society influence. If a more equity-oriented version of PB can be forged and if advocates prevail in promoting more robust PB processes—and greatly expand city funds governed by community input via PB—then such PB initiatives could deepen substantive democratic practices and outcomes (Baiocchi and Ganuza 2014; Su 2017a; Lerner 2017; Menser 2018). These concerns notwithstanding, PB has proved to be an effective ave­ nue for immigrant civic engagement. If PB processes can be expanded and more firmly connected “to the centers of decision making” (Baiocchi and Ganuza 2014, 31) with an equity focus, then its transformative potential might eventually be realized.

Conclusion Our analysis identifies factors that can impede immigrant participation, including language barriers, socioeconomic status constraints, and fear of exposure related to immigration status. We also point to emotional effects of these barriers, which essentially send an exclusionary message. Although PB organizers are largely aware of these barriers, addressing them is not straightforward, particularly given the organizers’ financial limits and those of council offices and CBOs. Our study shows how traditional struc­ tural barriers to participation, which affect other marginalized groups, are compounded for immigrants by limited English-language proficiency, citi­ zenship and legal status, and cultural factors specific to immigrant groups. Constraints imposed by work and family responsibilities are exacerbated for immigrants in multiple ways, such as when outreach is not conducted in appropriate languages and when meetings are not linguistically accessible. This can instead create disincentives and discourage immigrant participa­

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tion. For immigrants who are undocumented, attending a meeting or par­ ticipating in a government-sponsored or public event can expose them to detention or deportation. Conversely, holding meetings in languages im­ migrant residents speak makes meetings accessible and inviting, as does holding meetings by trusted community organizations in safe spaces; when outreach is conducted in multiple languages and in sensitive ways; when immigrant community leaders and members engage their neighbors in schools, libraries, parks, public plazas, transit hubs, and community orga­ nizations and gardens; and when material supports are provided, such as metrocards, food, and childcare. Such provisions and practices help immi­ grants overcome traditional structural barriers that can be compounded for immigrants and barriers unique to them. In short, changing structures gov­ erning civic engagement can affect who participates and, thereby, social and political outcomes (Hayduk 2020). In addition to logistic barriers, we also highlight another underlying challenge: the extent to which PB can and does address the broader material needs of immigrant community members. Though larger-scale and more systematic research is needed to investigate this further, at this point we can suggest that if PB can positively affect the everyday lives of immigrant com­ munity members, greater immigrant mobilization is capable of promoting people-powered public policy. PB provides a significant new civic engagement opportunity for foreignborn residents. Although the level of immigrant engagement in PB is still less than their total proportion in the population, immigrants in many dis­ tricts do participate at significant rates and express enthusiasm about such opportunities. PB provides a means for immigrants to engage meaningfully with each other, different neighborhood groups, and government and to exercise genuine decision-making power over issues affecting themselves and their communities. If expanded and deepened with careful design and implemented with conscientious equity, PB holds great potential to further engage marginalized groups and forge pathways toward greater immigrant participation, incorporation, and empowerment. In the short term, PB has implications for other immigrant-friendly ­initiatives in New York and elsewhere. For example, New York City now provides an identity card (a form of municipal ID) that anyone can obtain regardless of citizenship status (Morrison 2016). This will expand oppor­ tunities for undocumented immigrants and others who need a govern­ment-issued ID to pursue housing, banking, jobs, and more (Shapiro 2017; Martínez 2017).16 This new ID card could and should also serve as a viable form of voting ID for future PBNYC cycles. PB has relevance for another New York City initiative: a proposed bill would extend voting rights to lawfully present noncitizen residents in mu­

How Would You Spend a Million Dollars?  /  235

nicipal elections. Backed by a majority of the New York City Council, this legislation would allow an estimated 1.3 million immigrants in the city to vote for all municipal offices (Campaneli 2016).17 The bill would also allow immigrants to run for office, which together with an increase in immigrant voting could affect not only electoral outcomes and the ethnic and racial composition of municipal offices but also public policy outcomes in New York City. The bill was reintroduced in January 2020, but it has not been enacted at the time of this writing (Gartland 2020). With these considerations in mind, further research into PB and im­ migrant participation can shed light on ways to build a more robust, inclu­ sive, and substantive participatory democracy capable of empowering mar­ ginalized communities and dismantling current power structures. Notes Acknowledgments: We thank Ana María Ardón Bejarano, Merzela Casimir, Jessica Sperling, and thirty political science seniors from Queens College who contributed to this research project during 2013 and 2014; the Community Development Project at the Urban Justice Center, especially Alexa Kasdan, Lindsay Cattell, and Erin Markman; the PBNYC Research Board (convened and coordinated by the Community Development Project); and Con Edison and the Immigrant Studies Working Group at Queens Col­ lege for their financial support of this research. Portions of this chapter were previously published as Ron Hayduk, Kristen Hackett, and Diana Tamashiro Folla, “Immigrant Engagement in Participatory Budgeting in New York City,” New Political Science 39, no. 1 (2017): 76–94. Copyright © Caucus for a New Political Science, reprinted by per­ mission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com, on behalf of Caucus for a New Political Science. We thank New Political Science for granting permission to reprint parts of this article. 1.  Forty states granted noncitizen immigrants the right to vote in local, state, and even federal elections from 1776 to 1926. Currently, immigrants vote in local elections in eleven towns in Maryland. Globally, noncitizens vote in local, regional, or national elections in at least forty-five countries. A measure considered in the New York City Council, which gained wide support in 2013, would restore voting rights to all residents in local elections. The bill was reintroduced in January 2020 but has not been enacted at the time of this writing (Gartland 2020). 2.  Foreign born is the term used most frequently by government agencies (e.g., Cen­ sus Bureau), while immigrant is more commonly used by researchers and mainstream media outlets. In this chapter, we use foreign born and immigrant interchangeably. We distinguish between foreign-born persons who have naturalized and become citizens of the United States and those who remain noncitizens—as well as those who are docu­ mented and those who are undocumented immigrants—in several sections of this chap­ ter, where data permit making such distinctions. 3.  At its inception in 2011, PBNYC’s age eligibility requirement was sixteen, but that was gradually reduced to fourteen and then to eleven, though some districts had allowed such younger residents to participate. New York City Council 2018. 4.  Beginning in 2014, the city council began to host the PBNYC steering committee and helped coordinate efforts citywide.

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5.  Immigrant political incorporation is often gauged by measuring levels of immi­ grant participation and impacts on governance, including by examining the proportion of immigrants in a district, the proportion of immigrants naturalized and eligible to vote, the proportion registered and voting, the proportion of representatives with immi­ grant backgrounds, the degree of responsiveness and accountability of representatives, policy outcomes, and measures of social well-being of the immigrants over time. Gener­ ally speaking, the greater (or lesser) degree of immigrant participation, representation, and social well-being, the greater (or lesser) degree a group is considered incorporated. Hochschild et al. 2013. 6. See New Political Science 39, no. 1 (2017) for articles about PB in New York City. 7.  The implementation process can take more than a year, which some of our inter­ viewees identified as a deterrent for marginalized communities. PBNYC is moving to track the status of the projects in districts. 8.  Thirty Queens College political science senior students and five graduate re­ searchers (Diana Tamashiro Folla, Kristen Hackett, Ana María Ardón Bejarano, Merzela Casimir, and Jessica Sperling) worked over a three-year period (2012–2015). Research was designed with guidance from the Community Development Project, par­ ticularly from Alexa Kasdan, Lindsay Cattell, and Erin Markman. Research complied with informed consent protocols regulated by the Queens College’s Institutional Re­ view Board. Ron Hayduk was a member of the PBNYC Research Board (convened and coordinated by the Community Development Project), from 2012 to 2015, when it was disbanded. 9.  The three nonprofit organizations are Make the Road New York, a membershipled community organization of mostly Latinos based in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and Co­ rona, Queens; Queens Community House, a multiservice settlement house serving lowincome, largely Latino and Asian residents that has program sites throughout central Queens; and Chhaya, a South Asian community development corporation based in Jackson Heights, Queens. 10.  These districts reportedly have an effective and established regime of commu­ nity leaders and community organizers actively involved in PB, supportive and engaged city council members and staff attending to the needs of community residents, and ample resources to engage residents. Menchaca 2016; Russo 2016. 11.  In 2012, Hurricane Sandy derailed PB in District Thirty-Two. 12.  “Limited data was collected . . . due to low survey return rates [by the district office], so the information gathered provides a snapshot of only some PB participants.” Kasdan, Markman, and Convey 2014, 99. 13.  For cycle 4 (2014–2015), information was collected on 164 of the 179 neighbor­ hood assemblies held citywide. Eighteen districts (75 percent) had language support for at least one assembly, and nine assemblies (5 percent) were held in a language other than English. Seven districts reported providing interpretation for budget delegate meetings, and three reported providing translated materials (Urban Justice Center 2015). 14.  This information was extracted from data collected by the Community Develop­ ment Project and from staff members in District Thirty-Eight. See Kasdan, Markman, and Convey 2014; and Urban Justice Center 2015. 15.  According to the Community Development Project data, seventy-seven, or 47 percent, of all neighborhood assemblies spanning seventeen districts offered food and eight, or 5 percent, spanning three districts offered childcare. During budget delegate orientations, fourteen districts reported providing food, two reported providing child­

How Would You Spend a Million Dollars?  /  237

care, and two reported providing metrocards. See Kasdan, Markman, and Convey 2014; Urban Justice Center 2015; and Kasdan and Markman 2017. 16.  IDNYC became the subject of a contentious legal battle regarding local author­ ity over measures to protect immigrants, such as deleting IDNYC information after two years, against the federal administration’s deportation priorities that were sup­ ported by some state assembly members. Reports show, however, that applications have risen since the 2016 national elections. While many highly praise the ID card’s benefits and the ­increased need for its protections given the federal shift in immigration pri­ orities, some immigrants are still fearful of releasing their information in this political climate. 17.  Efforts to restore voting rights to immigrants in local elections in New York City have largely been based in Queens and were spearheaded by New Immigrant Commu­ nity Empowerment in 2004. The coalition’s approximately fifty organizations include Adhikaar; African Communities Together; the Arab American Association of New York; the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund; the Black Institute; the Black, Latino and Asian Caucus; CAAAV; Chhaya CDC; the Chinese-American Plan­ ning Council; Cidadao Global; Demos; Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM); Educa­ tional Alliance; Faith in New York; Hispanic Federation; LatinoJustice PRLDEF; the MinKwon Center for Community Action; the National Action Network; the New York Immigration Coalition; the New Sanctuary Coalition; Queens Community House; the Street Vendor Project; Unite Here Local 100; United Neighborhood Houses; the Univer­ sity Student Senate at CUNY, and VOCAL–NY. See United Neighborhood Houses and New York Immigration Coalition, n.d. References Baiocchi, Gianpaolo, ed. 2003. Radicals in Power: The Workers’ Party and Experiments in Urban Democracy in Brazil. London: Zed Books. Baiocchi, Gianpaolo, and Ernesto Ganuza. 2014. “Participatory Budgeting as If Eman­ cipation Mattered.” Politics and Society 42 (1): 29–50. Barreto, Matt A., and José A. Muñoz. 2003. “Reexamining the ‘Politics of In-Between’: Political Participation among Mexican Immigrants in the United States.” Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences 25 (4): 427–447. Brown, Heath. 2017. Immigrants and Electoral Politics: Nonprofit Organizing in a Time of Demographic Change. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Budget delegate. 2015. Interview by the authors, June 3, Manhattan, NY. Campanile, Carl. 2016. “New Bill Could Give Illegal Aliens Voting Rights in New York City.” New York Post, February 22. https://​nypost​.com/​2016/​02/​22/​new​-bill​-could​ -give​-illegal​-aliens​-voting​-rights​-in​-new​-york​-city/. Canvasser A. 2013. Interview by the authors, June 6, Queens, NY. Canvasser B. 2013. Interview by the authors, June 19, Queens, NY. Canvasser C. 2013. Interview by the authors, June 19, Queens, NY. Canvasser D. 2013. Interview by the authors, June 19, Queens, NY. Canvasser. 2014. Interview by the authors, September 17, Queens, NY. CBO staff member. 2013. Interview by the authors, June 10, Queens, NY. CBO staff member. 2014. Interview by the authors, May 29, Queens, NY. City council staff member. 2013. Interview by the authors, July 2, Queens, NY. de Graauw, Els. 2016. Making Immigrant Rights Real: Nonprofits and the Politics of Integration in San Francisco. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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DeSipio, Louis. 2011. “Immigrant Incorporation in an Era of Weak Civic Institutions: Immigrant Civic and Political Participation in the United States.” American Behavioral Scientist 55 (9): 1189–1213. DiNapoli, Thomas P., and Kenneth B. Bleiwas. 2013. “The Role of Immigrants in the New York City Economy.” Office of the State Comptroller Report 8-2014, November. https://​w ww​.osc ​. state ​.ny​.us/​sites/​default/​f iles/​reports/​documents/​p df/​2 018​-11/​ report​-8​-2014​.pdf. Gartland, Michael. 2020. “Immigrant New Yorkers Authorized to Work in U.S. May Get Voting Rights in City Elections under Proposed Council Bill.” New York Daily News, January 21. https://​w ww​.nydailynews​.com/​new​-york/​ny​-voting​-non​-citizen​-census​ -immigration​-coalition​-20200121​-cb72iliwazgy7djk74vvsjonai​-story​.html. Hayduk, Ron. 2006. Democracy for All: Restoring Immigrant Voting Rights in the United States. New York: Routledge. ———. 2020. “Migration and Inequality: A Structural Approach.” Cosmopolitan Civil Societies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12 (1): 1–20. Hayduk, Ron, and Kathleen Coll. 2018. “Urban Citizenship: Campaigns to Restore Im­ migrant Voting Rights in the US.” New Political Science 40 (2): 336–352. Hayduk, Ron, Kristen Hackett, and Diana Tamashiro Folla. 2017. “Immigrant Engage­ ment in Participatory Budgeting in New York City.” New Political Science 39 (1): 76–94. Hochschild, Jennifer, Jacqueline Chattopadhyay, Claudine Gay, and Michael JonesCorrea, eds. 2013. Outsiders No More? Models of Immigrant Political Incorporation. London: Oxford University Press. Jabola-Carolus, Isaac. 2017. “Growing Grassroots Democracy: Dynamic Outcomes in Building New York City’s Participatory Budgeting Program.” New Political Science 39 (1): 109–125. Johnson, Carolina, H. Jacob Carlson, and Sonya Reynolds. 2018. “Testing the Participa­ tion Hypothesis: Evidence from Participatory Budgeting.” https://​w ww​.hjacobcarlson​ .com/​fi les/​PBTurnout2018​.pdf. Kasdan, Alexis, and Erin Markman. 2017. “Participatory Budgeting and CommunityBased Research: Principles, Practices, and Implications for Impact Validity.” New Political Science 39 (1): 143–155. Kasdan, Alexa, Erin Markman, and Pat Convey. 2014. A People’s Budget: A Research and Evaluation Report on Participatory Budgeting in New York City, Cycle 3. New York: Urban Justice Center. https://​takerootjustice​.org/​resources/​a​-peoples​-budget​ -a​-research​-and​-evaluation​-report​-on​-participatory​-budgeting​-in​-new​-york​-city​ -year​-3/. Leal, David L. 2002. “Political Participation by Latino Non-citizens in the United States.” British Journal of Political Science 32 (2): 353–370. Lerner, Josh. 2014. Everyone Counts: Could “Participatory Budgeting” Change Democracy? Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. ———. 2017. “Conclusion: Time for Participatory Budgeting to Grow Up.” New Political Science 39 (1): 156–160. Martínez, Edwin. 2017. “Fear of Trump Boosts Applications for IDNYC.” Voices of NY, March 28. http://​voicesofny​.org/​2017/​03/​fear​-of​-trump​-boosts​-applications​-for​-id nyc/. McAlevey, Jane. 2014. “The High-Touch Model: Make the Road New York’s Participatory Approach to Immigrant Organizing.” In New Labor in New York: Precarious Work-

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ers and the Future of the Labor Movement, edited by Ruth Milkman and Ed Ott, 173–189. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Menchaca, Carlos. 2016. “The Importance of Participation.” Red Hook Star Review, March 17. http://​w ww​.star​-revue​.com/​op​-ed​-importance​-participation​-council​ -member​-carlos​-menchaca​-district​-38/. Menser, Michael. 2018. We Decide! Theories and Cases in Participatory Democracy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Meriwether, Kristen. 2014. “For Rapidly Expanding Participatory Budgeting, Next Step: Tracking.” Gotham Gazette, July 24. http://​w ww​.gothamgazette​.com/​government/​ 5154​-rapidly​-expanding​-participatory​-budgeting​-next​-step​-tracking. Mollenkopf, John, and Manuel Pastor, eds. 2016. Unsettled Americans: Metropolitan Context and Civic Leadership for Immigrant Integration. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni­ versity Press. Morrison, Aaron. 2016. “Immigrant Identification Card: New York City Issues over 730K Free IDs, One Year after Program Launches.” International Business Times, January 13. http://​w ww​.ibtimes​.com/​immigrant​-identification​-card​-new​-york​-city​ -issues​-over​-730k​-free​-ids​-one​-year​-after​-2263399. Ness, Immanuel. 2005. Immigrants, Unions, and the New U.S. Labor Market. Philadel­ phia: Temple University Press. New York City Council. 2018. “New York City Council Participatory Budgeting Rule­ book, 2018–2019.” https://​w ww​.dropbox​.com/​s/​r x4okekzvo2g46i/​PBNYC​%202018​ -19​%20Rulebook​%20​%28English​%29​%20Style​%20B​-FINAL​.pdf​?dl​= ​0. ———. n.d. “Participatory Budgeting.” https://​council​.nyc​.gov/​pb/​c ycle​-7​-results (ac­ cessed June 25, 2020). New York City Department of City Planning. 2013. “The Newest New Yorkers: Charac­ teristics of the City’s Foreign-Born Population.” https://​w ww1​.nyc​.gov/​assets/​plan ning/​download/​pdf/​planning​-level/​nyc​-population/​nny2013/​nny​_ 2013​.pdf. Oberholzer-Gee, Felix, and Joel Waldfogel. 2009. “Media Markets and Localism: Does Local News en Español Boost Hispanic Voter Turnout?” American Economic Review 99 (5): 2120–2128. Pennar, Karen. 2016. “CUNY J-School Offers Testimony to NYC Council on Behalf of the Ethnic Press.” CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, January 28. http://​w ww​ .journalism​.cuny​.edu/​2016/​01/​c uny​-j​-school​-offers​-testimony​-to​-nyc​-council​-on​ -behalf​-of​-community​-and​-ethnic​-media/. Piven, Frances Fox, and Richard A. Cloward. 2000. Why Americans Still Don’t Vote: And Why Politicians Want It That Way. Boston: Beacon Press. Putnam, Robert D. 2001. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster. Ramakrishnan, Subramanian Karthick. 2005. Democracy in Immigrant America: Changing Demographics and Political Participation. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer­ sity Press. Russo, Carmen. 2016. “Community Engagement Prized by Participatory Budgeting Proponents.” Gotham Gazette, April 8. https://​w ww​.gothamgazette​.com/​city/​6269​ -community​-engagement​-prized​-by​-participatory​-budgeting​-proponents. Shapiro, Rachel. 2017. “As IDNYC Lawsuit Is Stalled in Court, Documents Still in Limbo.” SILive.com, July 7. http://​w ww​.silive​.com/​news/​2017/​07/​idnyc​_ suit​_ stalled​ _in​_court​_ci​.html.

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Su, Celina. 2014. “Participatory Budgeting in New York City.” Metropolitics 1 (2014). http://​w ww​.metropolitiques​.eu/​Participatory​-Budgeting​-in​-New​.html. ———. 2017a. “Beyond Inclusion: Critical Race Theory and Participatory Budgeting.” New Political Science 39 (1): 126–142. ———. 2017b. “From Porto Alegre to New York City: Participatory Budgeting and De­ mocracy.” New Political Science 39 (1): 67–75. Swaner, Rachel. 2017. “Trust Matters: Enhancing Government Legitimacy through Participatory Budgeting.” New Political Science 39 (1): 95–108. United Neighborhood Houses and New York Immigration Coalition. n.d. “Our City, Our Vote.” Accessed September 25, 2020. https://​pronto​-core​-cdn​.prontomarketing​ .com/​537/​w p​-content/​uploads/​sites/​2/​2020/​02/​Our​-City​-Our​-Vote​-9​.pdf. Urban Justice Center. 2012. “A People’s Budget: A Research and Evaluation Report on the Pilot Year of Participatory Budgeting in New York City.” https://​takerootjustice​ .org/​w p​-content/​uploads/​2019/​06/​pbreport​.pdf. ———. 2013. “A People’s Budget: A Research and Evaluation Report on Participatory takerootjustice​ .org/​ w p​-content/​ Budgeting in New York City, Year 2.” https://​ uploads/​2019/​06/​Report​_ PBNYC​-cycle2​_citysummary​_ 201310​-1​.pdf. ———. 2014. “A People’s Budget: A Research and Evaluation Report on Participatory takerootjustice​ .org/​ w p​-content/​ Budgeting in New York City, Cycle 3.” https://​ uploads/​2 019/​0 6/​CDP​.WEB ​_​.doc ​_ Report ​_ PBNYC​-cycle3​-FullReport ​_ 20141030​ .pdf. ———. 2015. “A People’s Budget: A Research and Evaluation Report on Participatory takerootjustice​ .org/​ resources/​ a​ Budgeting in New York City, Cycle 4.” https://​ -peoples​-budget​-a​-research​-and​-evaluation​-report​-on​-participatory​-budgeting​-in​ -new​-york​-city​-cycle​-4​-full​-report​-october​-2015. Wampler, Brian. 2012. “Participatory Budgeting: Core Principles and Key Impacts.” Journal of Public Deliberation 8 (2): 1–15. Wampler, Brian, and Janette Hartz-Karp. 2012. “Participatory Budgeting: Diffusion and Outcomes across the World.” Journal of Public Deliberation 8 (2). https://​delib demjournal​.org/​articles/​abstract/​137/. Wright, Erik Olin. 2010. Envisioning Real Utopias. London: Verso. Wong, Janelle. 2008. Democracy’s Promise: Immigrants and American Civic Institutions. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Wong, Janelle, S. Karthick Ramakrishnan, Taeku Lee, and Jane Junn. 2011. Asian American Political Participation: Emerging Constituents and Their Political Identities. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

III Placemaking

10 Placemaking and Public Space in Hyperdiverse Astoria Sofya Aptekar

T

he neighborhood of Astoria in northwestern Queens has undergone changes that epitomize the transformation of the borough as a whole. Astoria has experienced multiple waves of immigration, most recently adding an extremely diverse layer of immigration onto its designation as New York’s Greek neighborhood. No one group dominates—or even comes close—as newcomers from North Africa, Bangladesh, Mexico, South America, China, and Japan share space with long-term and second-generation immigrants from southern Europe. Astoria also mirrors the larger race dynamics of Queens: at a time of exploding immigrant-driven hyperdiversity, it continues to be home to massive public housing projects, which shelter a large population of residentially segregated low-income and poor African Americans and Puerto Ricans. At the same time, the 2010s saw an explosion of high-end development, rising rents, and new affluent populations. In such a diverse neighborhood, what takes place in public space? How do so many different kinds of people share Astoria’s limited parks, gardens, libraries, street markets, and sidewalks? What are the power dynamics of placemaking under conditions of such rapid demographic, political, and economic transition? In this chapter, I write about the spatial landscapes of this dramatically changing neighborhood. After providing a background on the history and present of the neighborhood, including gentrification, I describe the racially coded shared understandings of local geographies, including the mental maps residents rely on and the ways these are reproduced and evolve in

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Astoria. I then use examples of several public spaces to illustrate particular configurations of race and ethnic relations on the everyday interactional level, including places of interaction and engagement, places of exclusion, and places of parallel coexistence. I show how some of these public spaces are intricately involved in the economic transformation of the neighborhood, as fought-over vehicles of conflicting visions for development and progress. I draw on extensive ethnographic fieldwork; analysis of census data and secondary material, such as local media stories; and government and organizational reports. Patterns of interactions and routine encounters in public space reflect larger currents transforming Astoria and the borough of Queens.

Astoria: Past and Present Astoria is located in northwestern Queens. Although, like other neighborhoods in New York, it does not have hard and fast boundaries, it is commonly defined by several geographic features. On the west and north, Astoria is bound by the East River. To the south is a vast stretch of the Sunnyside Railyards. In the east, the neighborhood abuts the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway and a large cemetery. These geographic features, particularly having waterways on two sides, give a somewhat sheltered quality to the neighborhood and one that some longtime residents credit for its village feel. LaGuardia International Airport, with its complex of runways, hotels, car rentals, and parking lots, is in the northeast corner of the neighborhood. Many New Yorkers and visitors glimpse Astoria from inside a taxi or the M60 airport bus on their way to and from LaGuardia. Astoria is also home to another important city pathway, that to Rikers Island, the main city jail just north of the neighborhood and accessible by bus. The East River waterfront features dramatic views of Manhattan, Roosevelt and Randall Islands, and multiple bridges. A new initiative aims to improve public access to the waterfront, but aside from the large Astoria Park between the Robert F. Kennedy (Triborough) Bridge and Hellgate Bridge used by Amtrak trains, the neighborhood lacks parkland and playgrounds when compared with the rest of Queens and the city (New Yorkers for Parks 2015). Until the establishment of regular ferry service in the nineteenth century, the area that is now Astoria was a small moribund settlement. In fact, its name comes from a failed attempt to flatter John Jacob Astor, a Germanborn millionaire businessman, into investing in the area in the early nineteenth century. Population expanded dramatically in the 1870s with an influx of Irish, German, and Polish immigrants, many of whom worked on the Long Island Rail Road. German immigrants also lived in Steinway Village around the still functioning Steinway Piano Factory, enjoying the many

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biergartens there and sending their children to a German-language school. Astoria was an important vacation destination as well: large homes of summering Manhattanites lined the East River waterfront, and trolleys took people to North Beach. While the latter has been turned into an airport, old beach-style homes (many subdivided into apartments) can still be seen in the Old Astoria section of the neighborhood (Greater Astoria Historical Society 2009). By the early twentieth century, the immigration streams to New York City were heavily composed of Italians and Russian Jews (Foner 2000). While not many Russian Jews settled in Astoria, many Italians did. In fact, migration from Italy continued for decades. Several Italian enclaves existed in Astoria, including a thriving commercial and residential strip along Fourteenth Street in the west. Even in the first decade of the twenty-first century, immigrants born in Italy were the sixth-largest foreign-born group in Astoria.1 Numerous Italian bakeries and several prominent Catholic churches mark the continual presence of Italian immigrants on the neighborhood. Many immigrants from Croatia settled in the same areas of Astoria as the Italians. But another southern European immigrant group ultimately came to define the neighborhood. Greek immigrants began arriving to New York in significant numbers in the early twentieth century, with a second wave of migration following the dismantling of national-origin quotas in 1965 and lasting through the early 1980s (Alexiou 2013). Astoria became the site of a Greek American community centered around the large Saint Demetrios Cathedral, established in the 1920s. By the 1990s, with few new immigrants arriving from Greece, many Greeks and their children moved out of Astoria, settling in the leafier suburbs further east in Queens or on Long Island beyond city boundaries. However, Astoria retains its Greek character, and Greek Americans who no longer live in Astoria have much to draw them back for visits, including the church, cultural centers, and restaurants. Remaining Greek-born Astorians now live predominantly in the northern part of the neighborhood, also known as Ditmars, which is composed largely of single-family homes. Greek Americans may increasingly live outside Astoria, but they still own a lot of the real estate. And along with Italian Americans, they are integrated into the local political machines. Several local politicians, such as city council member Costa Constantinides, are Greek American. Walking down the streets of Astoria, a visitor sees a multitude of Greek flags, houses painted the colors of the Greek flag, Greek language on signs, Greek restaurants, and Greek names on flyers, buildings, and real estate plaques and even hear spoken Greek, particularly among the older residents. While transitioning from a small farming community to a bustling immigrant neighborhood, Astoria also underwent significant changes in its

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economy and land use. With regular ferry service and subsequent construction of bridges and tunnels that connected it to Manhattan, Astoria became home to a multitude of small industrial establishments, from textile factories to meat processing. In its heyday, this industry brought thousands of workers into the neighborhood from elsewhere in the city. Many factories were located on the East River waterfront, as was common in the city as a whole. Strikingly, some industry remains in Astoria, even as luxury apartment buildings become more common on the waterfront. For instance, industrial bakeries, small-scale metal shops, appliance repair shops, and plenty of car repair businesses, particularly catering to yellow taxi cabs, operate there. Astoria is also home to two massive power plants, both on the waterfront, and is a part of what is known as Asthma Alley because of poor air quality. Nevertheless, as elsewhere in the United States, there was a significant decline in industry in Astoria in the mid-twentieth century and a concomitant decline in blue-collar jobs available near the neighborhood. Housing stock in Astoria is a mix of small apartment buildings and single- and multiple-family homes. After World War II, the government built several large housing developments, including a middle-class cooperative and public housing complexes. Some of the latter were built on the East River waterfront, at a time when it was still strongly associated with industry and the polluted air, water, and soil that went with it. This, too, is a familiar pattern in New York and one that poses unique challenges as the waterfront draws developers’ interest in the twenty-first century. The legacy of this period is that public housing is more prevalent in Astoria than in the rest of Queens and even in the city as a whole. Almost 14 percent of Astoria’s housing stock is public housing units, compared with only about 4 percent in Queens and 8 percent citywide (Furman Center 2020). Initially, the public housing complexes were settled primarily by white GIs and their families, but soon they became predominantly African American and Puerto Rican. As whites moved out to more suburban neighborhoods (or actual suburbs), African Americans and Puerto Ricans were blocked from huge swaths of the city by discriminatory real estate practices while also unable to access the same housing subsidies that whites could in the suburbs because of other barriers and similar practices there. Many of the African Americans who moved to Astoria came from southern states as part of the Great Migration (1910–1930). Puerto Ricans and the domestic southern migrants came at a time when international migration to Astoria was slow but white ethnic neighborhoods thrived. Interviews with older residents reveal a history of violence and tensions between the predominantly African American residents of public housing and nearby white ethnic neighborhoods. Shared mental maps of the area assigned particular

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areas as belonging to different groups, and streets served as boundaries. Such mental maps persist in the public imagination while also being challenged by the changing geography of the neighborhood. Today, Astoria, like New York City in general, continues to be racially segregated, with African Americans concentrated in the public housing developments. Astoria’s population is only 4 percent non-Hispanic black (around 5 percent black when Hispanic blacks are included). The census tracts that do not contain public housing in Astoria have almost no African Americans. The tracts that do contain public housing are primarily black and Hispanic. Whereas almost half of African Americans in Queens are homeowners, only 5 percent of African Americans in Astoria own their homes.2 Local African American leaders cite discrimination in the real estate industry as partly responsible for these low rates. Hispanic homeownership rates lag as well, at 11 percent compared with 27 percent for Queens. Three census tracts in Astoria are more than half Hispanic, and these are along the Astoria Boulevard artery immediately to the east of Astoria Houses public housing complex. In the 2010s, the correspondence between race and public housing began to break down somewhat, because immigrants from Bangladesh and China were placed in public housing apartments. Nevertheless, as can be seen in Figure 10.1, there is a clear racial dividing line in Astoria. The long-standing mental maps of the neighborhood that divide up blocks and streets by race persist, associating neighborhood areas with racist tropes about crime and disorder. Many new immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and Europe learn that west of the multilane Twenty-First Street is considered dangerous territory by those who live on the other side. While Astoria, in general, is known for its diverse restaurants, large produce stores, and fresh seafood, the isolated western area is a food desert characterized by a dearth of elementary services. Those who live on the “wrong” side of Twenty-First Street are bitterly aware that their neighborhood is characterized by the rest of Astoria as unsafe and empty of value. New Yorkers may think of Astoria as the Greek neighborhood, but it is now a microcosm of Queens when it comes to immigration-driven diversity. Slightly more than half the population is non-Hispanic white, about 14 percent is Asian, and 27 percent is Hispanic. Forty-five percent of the population is foreign born, although the proportion of immigrants varies from low levels in some of the public housing developments to highly immigrant areas in central and northern Astoria.3 As with all statistics about Astoria, this should be taken with a degree of caution, because Astoria, along with Jackson Heights and two neighborhoods in Brooklyn, apparently experienced an undercount in the 2010 census, and the city has filed a challenge with the Census Bureau (Roberts 2011).

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Manhattan Astoria Houses (55%)

t ree St 21 st

Roosevelt Island

Percent African American 50–60% 25–50%