Liberal Talk Radio

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg testified on Capitol Hill yesterday that New York needs immigrants:

Mayor Bloomberg criticized the legislation to crack down on illegal immigration being considered by the Republican-led Congress yesterday and called on federal lawmakers to concentrate on the “future rather than pander to rabble-rousers and parochial fears.”

Mr. Bloomberg said the economy would collapse if the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in America were deported. He also said beefing up border security would not, on its own, stop people from flooding into the country without documentation. He called that goal, which is being pushed in the House, “either naive and short-sighted, or cynical and duplicitous.”

“It’s as if we expect border control agents to do what a century of communism could not: defeat the natural forces of supply and demand and defeat the natural desire for freedom and opportunity,” Mr. Bloomberg said during a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting.

You might be wondering why New York City needs immigrants when something like 50% of its African-American male population is unemployed. You also might be wondering whether the increased flow of low-skilled immigrants is “the economic and moral equivalent of a regressive tax”.

You might wonder about these things, but then you’d be avoiding New York’s dirty little secret — that immigrants are the best, most efficient way to revitalize blighted areas, raise property values and raise school test scores. What urban leaders probably don’t want to acknowledge too loudly is that they need immigrants more than you think.

Immigrants, for example, have singlehandedly saved previously blighted Brooklyn neighborhoods like East New York:

Perhaps no neighborhood demonstrates the city’s reversal of fortune more palpably than East New York, a low-rise neighborhood in Brooklyn near the Queens border. Its run-down or ruined brick and wood-frame, two-family homes, poor schools, drug markets and soaring crime made it notorious as one of the city’s worst places to live. In some corners more than half the lots were flattened by arson, abandonment, neglect and two riots. Even five years ago developers were skittish about investing.

But today nearly every vacant lot is spoken for, with spanking new two- and three-family row houses, and older homes being spruced up by longtime residents awakening to their new value.

“We’re one of the last frontiers,” said William S. Wilkins, the Empire Zones coordinator for the Local Development Corporation of East New York. “It’s the cheapest game in town. Where else are you going to find houses for $200,000 to $300,000 in Brooklyn?”

But African-American and Latino police officers, nurses, firefighters and civil servants are not the only ones snapping up houses in a neighborhood that has been largely black and Latino since the 1960’s. So are newcomers to these parts — Bangladeshis — whose community is spilling over the border from Queens. The Millennium Homes company has built or is building 32 two- and three-family homes, many of which are being bought by Bangladeshis, according to Shariar Uddin, Millennium’s sales director. Women in burkas are now a common sight along Pitkin Avenue in the heart of East New York. Several mosques have opened and groceries now sell Bangladeshi vegetables, spices, and halal meats.

And if you think any city or federal housing program could have revitalized East New York, you’re crazy. What’s more, HUD wouldn’t have been able to pump thousands of high-achieving best-and-brightest South Asian students into the school system! And at what cost? Some overcrowding, some more school seats to fill . . . a small, small price to pay for the long-term payoff. Which makes it a no-brainer.

It’s not just New York, either. Northeast Philadelphia had stagnating or declining property values. Now Russian immigrants are moving in and South Asians from the New York City area — priced out of places like Richmond Hill, Queens — are pushing up home prices in this neighborhood. Philadelphia needs immigration.

Are there other examples? I’m sure there are. And I’m guessing that those mayors — knowing full well what immigrants mean to the health of their cities — wouldn’t be caught dead railing against immigration.

And in the political calculus, you can either alienate the future best and brightest or you sell out a native-born underclass that’s going nowhere and which probably never voted anyway. Is it any wonder why Karl Rove is doing what he’s doing?