The Story of Immigration on Staten Island | From the editor

Hello neighbor,

Complain about the economy all you want. It’s sticker shock at the supermarket checkout.

But as much as high prices hurt our pockets, Tuesday’s elections depend on one thing: the immigration crisis.

Kamala Harris says she wants to fix it. ‘My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency’ she assured the Americans.

But Donald Trump has moved the “conversation” on immigration to the point where many of us are less concerned about nuclear war than we are about the migrant shelters in our neighborhood.

There’s no doubt about it: America’s immigration policy is a mess. But has anyone really thought about what Trump’s promise of “mass deportation” would mean?

If he is elected and does what he swears, he will do it. . .

Good luck with your garden construction.

Good luck dining at your favorite restaurant or your favorite fast food joint.

Good luck repairing your stone stairs, replacing your roof, painting your living room. Or finding a home care assistant, or someone to clean your house.

Our economy is built on these workers – legal or not.

There is no one more familiar with Staten Island’s immigrant population than Rev. Terry Troia.

Rev. Troia has headed Staten Island’s homeless organization, Project Hospitality, for decades. She doesn’t sit behind a desk. She patrols our streets on the coldest nights, looking for people without homes, and in many cases she gets those people back on track. She helps them find shelter and work.

I asked Rev. Troia for her thoughts on what “mass deportation” would mean for Staten Island. I’ll let her tell it straight away.

By Rev. Troia

For more than 400 years, immigrants have come to Staten Island to seek refuge from religious or political persecution or for a better way of life.

Eleven million of them were forced into migration – torn from their families and lands on the African continent and forced to build the America whose wealth we now enjoy.

From the first French Huguenots and Belgian Walloons, enslaved Africans brought to Staten Island by European slave traders in those same years, to the Irish who fled the potato famine of the early 20th century, to the Italians who came to work as skilled craftsmen America were brought and construction workers, a few years after the Irish, Staten Island is a welcome place for new immigrants.

And the emerging Eastern European Jewish families who also settled at the beginning of the 20th century, fleeing pogroms in Russia and exile from countries elsewhere in Europe.

In the 1960s to 1970s, newcomers to Staten Island included Albanian immigrants, South Asians from India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, as well as Asians from Korea, the Philippines and China.

In the early 1980s, a significant population of Mexicans began immigrating to our Staten Island shores.

Many came from agricultural work in the south to find work in the off-season. From orange picking in Florida to sweet potato picking in North Carolina, our southern border neighbors took over construction work in New York that was once the domain of Southern and Eastern Europeans.

Mexicans migrated to neighborhoods near major highways on Staten Island, hoping to be noticed for work in the morning.

From Port Richmond, on the edge of two major highway intersections, 440 from the Bayonne Bridge and 278 from the Goethals to the Verrazano Bridge, Mexican workers lined the corners of major arteries, highway access roads, and Port’s main street Richmond, waiting to be picked up for the day’s work.

The Mexican workers and others from neighboring countries – especially Guatemala and Honduras – who called Staten Island home would return to Mexico during the winter months or produce produce in our southern states as construction opportunities dwindled during the winter months.

When 9/11 struck and migrant workers from the Windows on the World restaurant were counted among the 3,000 fallen New Yorkers, life changed for all migrant workers.

Tight border control, a necessary response to a terrorist attack, prevented many guest workers from crossing a closed border to return home.

Day laborers focused on starting new families, while others yearned for the loss of spouses, parents and children they would most likely never see again.

There was a wave of alcoholism, depression, a deep loss of belonging and a great separation of families among these migrant workers.

New relationships were formed and a working-class culture in Port Richmond turned into the creation of new families.

Children of immigrants – Americans because they were born here – filled our schools. Women started working in greengrocers, washing dishes, waiting tables, cleaning houses, and caring for children and the elderly.

The best chefs in our Staten Island restaurants are immigrants, many undocumented, who work hard to feed Staten Island’s restaurant-goers.

They mow our lawns, install our swimming pools, care for our elderly.

Port Richmond teemed with new businesses as day laborers began investing in their new neighborhood, which had become their new home.

Immigrants sent money to their hungry families in poor areas.

The immigrants from Port Richmond, seeking jobs and affordable rents, spread to other small commercial districts: Tompkinsville, West Brighton, New Brighton, Stapleton. Midland Beach and South Beach.

The new immigrant communities were more mixed: Mexican, Arab, Polish, Russian, Albanian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Egyptian, and many South Asian immigrants. A testament to these rapidly growing new immigrant communities on our island was the new language services in schools. Voting information in a range of new languages. New churches and mosques and Hindu and Sikh temples here on our island.

And Staten Island’s restaurants reflect the wealth of new immigrant communities: Palestinian, Yemeni, Turkish, Polish bakeries, Ukrainian delis.

New immigrant communities have revitalized Port Richmond, Tompkinsville and Stapleton and have had an impact in Tottenville, Great Kills and the coastal communities of Rosebank, South and Midland Beaches.

There are Albanians running for office, public celebrations of the Hindu Diwali Festival of Lights.

The celebration of the Day of the Dead in churches and schools has turned the Halloween holiday into something more friendly and family-oriented, instead of a scary scenario of ghosts and monsters.

We have a revitalized local economy and still a great need for more affordable housing, because no matter how hard new immigrants work, those here without acceptable immigrant status will always earn less in shadow jobs, unable to find the kind of decent housing that many enjoy us enjoy.

Tens of thousands of Staten Island immigrants without status pay their taxes to prove that they are American and that their families’ futures belong here. Yet none of them will ever receive the Social Security benefits they paid for. They have expanded Social Security coffers without reaping the rewards of decades of work.

A few months ago, an asylum seeker from Guatemala, who worked for more than twenty years as a handyman in a Catholic parish and school on the island, came to our island after twenty years of raising two children, both of whom have completed their university education and work full-time. professional positions, after waiting twenty years for his asylum case to be heard, he lost his asylum case and had to return to his country, leaving his family behind in Staten Island.

In the film “A Day without Mexicans,” America gets a glimpse of what life would be like if immigrants simply disappeared from their jobs, our schools, our neighborhoods.

Staten Island is said to be a grieving ghost town. America would lose its heart. The economy would tank.

Twelve million undocumented people deported across this country would change the face and heart of this nation, built on the backs of enslaved peoples forced here from Africa, and immigrants brought here through the sewers of Tijuana crawled, or climbed the border mountains for days without water. Endured desert heat and thirst, or rowed boats from Caribbean islands and risked drowning.

Twelve million who returned Emma Lazarus’ welcome, engraved on the Statue of Liberty:

“Keep, ancient lands, your legendary splendor!” she cries

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, storm-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’

Oh by the way: Of course we want to root out criminals who entered America illegally. In the same way we have to deal with criminals who were born here. But it is simply wrong to eradicate good people, who are trying to make a better life for themselves and their families, who work hard and do jobs that we don’t want to or can’t do, jobs that make the lives of American citizens easier or make it more fun. and heartless. Cut through the ugly, vulgar and mean-spirited rhetoric we are bombarded with every day. Vote with your heart on Tuesday in the privacy of the voting booth.

Brian