New York Didn’t “Drop Dead” in 1975—and It Won’t Under Mamdani, Either

Innocent of the broken history, agnostic to the heartbreaks in those ruins, the new immigrants came because the battered places were cheap. They filled them up like pine saplings sprouting after forest fire. They asked for little, and, under the anemic social contract of the restructured city, they got little. But by 1990, immigrants made up 29 percent of the city’s population, and 40 percent of its business owners. Factories closing and flight to the suburbs had starved New York. The new immigrants fed the city, paying billions in income and sales tax, populating its parks, and filling it with new rhythms, flavors, and families. It became a safer city as it became again a more immigrant city.

The New York that died in the fiscal crisis was the city inherited from nineteenth-century immigrants, their muscular unions, their instinctual collectivity. The new immigrants operated in a different way: entrepreneurial, independent. Today immigrants like those near Charlotte Street own 47 percent of the small businesses in the city and 62 percent of the restaurants, groceries, nail salons, barber shops, and bodegas that fill our neighborhoods.

Immigrants continue to literally build New York: The construction industry—from laborers to engineers—is 61 percent foreign-born, and about two-thirds of those are undocumented. People who came to New York from another country now make up 37 percent of the city’s population, responsible for more than a third of the economic activity. Undocumented immigrants alone pay $3 billion in sales, property, and business taxes, according to an analysis by the Immigration Research Initiative, a nonpartisan economic think tank. If just one in 10 undocumented New Yorkers are deported or detained, an IRI analysis found, New York State would lose $310 million in state and local taxes. Trump understands this about as well as Ford comprehended the bond market. If ICE empties the now bustling streets, New York will return to those bad old days of stunted economy and haunted blocks.