The path of Antolinez and her husband, Darwin Valbuena, is already tracking with economists’ expectations for migrants. “I think the most significant thing is that we would agree on the headline statement, that immigration is a net positive for the U.S.,” he said. These negative impacts fall disproportionately on Americans with less education, earlier immigrants and Black workers.īut, Hanson said, he still agrees on the larger economic upsides. Gordon Hanson, an economist at Harvard University, says however that migrants may decrease the wages of native workers, but only in certain cities and economic conditions. Economists including Peri stress decades of research that finds migrants either improve wages for native-born workers in the United States, or have no impact at all. Within this broad consensus lies a narrow band of disagreement. “It’s very hard to find an economist who doesn’t think that,” said Tara Watson, an economist at Williams College. “Immigration is integral to the nation’s economic growth,” according to a National Academy of Sciences report published by 29 of the nation’s top economists and demographers. In the long run, economists and historians see a familiar picture: A spike in immigration stirs heated political debate, even as people who immigrate, both legally and illegally, begin to set down roots and start contributing economically. “But if you take a deep breath, you see that American cities will benefit from these people who are coming to work.” “Yes, for a little while, maybe some of them need a little assistance,” said Giovanni Peri, an economist at the University of California, Davis. Like most migrants who arrive in New York City, these three needed help when they first arrived, but were impatient to become self-sufficient.
“My dream is to have a restaurant because what I love most is cooking,” Antolinez, 35, said. “I didn’t want to be a burden on the city, or dependent on them for help,” Yanez said.Īnd there’s Belsy Antolinez, who uses a little blue scooter to deliver food all over the city and shares an apartment with other migrants in Corona, Queens, where she is raising her three children. They include Wilfredo Yanez, 29, who arrived from Venezuela on a Friday, and by Tuesday had a job at a construction site in Manhattan. “My dream is to graduate from Princeton and be a lawyer,” Perez, 22, said. They include Pedro Perez, a migrant from Venezuela who is fluent in English, and who spent Monday morning studying for the SAT and planning his applications to elite universities.
Some newcomers already have started to remake their lives, and the city around them. “In so many ways, immigrants have always made and remade America,” said Nancy Foner, an immigration historian at Hunter College.
Even if New York never recovers what it spends now, the economists and historians say, the migrants will eventually be good for the city. Without immigrants, New York City would be shrinking. This latest group will do the same, they argued. But unseen and unheard were economists and social scientists, who point out that the immediate controversy has overshadowed an established truth: The city was built by waves of migrants who settled in, paid taxes, buttressed a labor force, started businesses and generally lifted the communities they joined.
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