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NEW YORK — In Jackson Heights, Queens, days after the presidential election, an Indian-American jeweller was left holding an order of two custom men’s gold rings worth US$3,000 (S$4,305). The customer told him he could not pay; he had to go back to his home country before he could be deported.
At the furniture store Casa Dominicana on St Nicholas Avenue in Upper Manhattan, the white leather sofas and bedroom sets have not been selling, the manager, Ms Wendy Calderon, said: “Most people are afraid to go out and shop,” she said. “They are saving their money if anything crazy happens.”
And at the office of Dr Ismael Bastida, a Mexican-born, New York University-trained dentist in Elmhurst, Queens, patients are forgoing teeth-whitening packages and long-term treatment plans. As a result, he ordered fewer syringes and fillings last week from Benco Dental, a family-owned company based in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, where 58 per cent voted for the Republican, Mr Donald Trump.
New York City, where a weighty portion of the economy is driven by immigrants, is already starting to feel the effects of Mr Trump’s election, as residents in Latino neighbourhoods facing an uncertain future have cut back their spending. Forty-seven per cent of the city’s workforce is made up of immigrants, according to the Centre for an Urban Future, a non-partisan group that studies city finance.
Those most worried are undocumented immigrants, whom Mr Trump during the campaign vowed to deport. Some 574,000 city residents are undocumented, and they pay US$793 million a year in state and local taxes, according to a study commissioned by the City Council speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito, a Democrat.
About 10 per cent of the city’s workers are unauthorised, according to United States census figures, although an accurate count is hard to determine.
It is likewise impossible to separate the underground economy from New York’s larger economy, because the city is home to immigrants of every kind of legal status, like day labourers, taxi drivers, kitchen workers in restaurants owned by undocumented immigrants who pay taxes, and college-educated entrepreneurs who have temporary protection from deportation.
If they were to leave the city, either by returning on their own to their home countries or by government order, “it could be a massive ripple effect”, Mr Jonathan Bowles, executive director of the Centre for an Urban Future, said.
“You take away upwards of a half-million undocumented immigrants,” Mr Bowles added, “and these are folks that pay taxes, that spend money in their communities, that may be employing other New Yorkers. And we could see others take flight.”
Dr Bastida had a dire prediction: “It will be an economic tsunami.”
Ms Elizabeth Vilchis, a technology entrepreneur who came to New York as a child from Mexico, said: “Because we’re always in the backdrop, people don’t realise the impact we have.”
She is able to work legally under a program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, created by President Barack Obama by executive action. Mr Trump has promised to eliminate it, potentially affecting some 30,000 young people in New York City and 750,000 across the nation.
Mr Trump’s first priority, he has said, would be to deport criminals — he estimated there were more than two million — living in the United States illegally. He has not said yet how he would force the 11.2 million immigrants without criminal records or papers to leave the country.
State Senator Jose Peralta, whose Queens district includes Jackson Heights, Elmhurst and Corona — the centre of New York City’s business growth in the last decade — said that uncertainty had led to fear-driven decisions, whether it was to return home or to cut back on luxuries.
His constituents, he said, were saying: “Why not just slow down the expenditures? Because I don’t know if I’m going to need this money to defend myself.’”
Mr Ernesto Cury, a Dominican-born accountant in Jackson Heights, said that since the election, several clients had enquired about the tax implications of taking out their profits from restaurants, cleaning services and construction companies. Even if they are not legal permanent residents, Mr Cury explained, immigrants can be self-employed, form a corporation and then pay taxes using an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, because they do not qualify for Social Security.
In Queens, the self-employment rate of foreign-born people is 12 per cent, according to the Centre for an Urban Future, compared with 6.4 per cent of those who are native-born.
Mr Juan Ospina, a naturalised citizen from Colombia, runs two businesses: Mama Empanada y Algo Mas on 82nd Street in Jackson Heights, and a contracting company that recently finished building a nearby hair salon. He says he relies on day labourers who are undocumented, and cannot imagine what would happen if they were not available.
“I don’t believe that Trump will kick out the engine,” Mr Ospina said.
But many undocumented immigrants are now wondering whether he will. In Bushwick, Brooklyn, curve-enhancing Colombian jeans are staying on the rack at a neighbourhood store. Customers from Ecuador have told the Mexican-born owner, Ms Maria de los Santos, that they might need any extra money in the coming year to move their families.
At Ms Patricia Salazar’s clothing and catchall store on Roosevelt Avenue off 82nd Street in Jackson Heights, two customers told her last week that they were leaving the country. And her longtime hairdresser, who worked at a salon up the block, said she was going back to Colombia the next day.
Ms Salazar, who emigrated from Bolivia 30 years ago, said she had been a supporter of Mr Trump because she thought he would be good for business. But now, even though her children and grandchildren are US citizens, she is thinking of returning home.
“I don’t want to live with this thing in my heart, because I am scared,” she said.
Around the corner from her store, Dr Bastida and his daughter, Ms Araceli Thornton, who manages his practice, were wondering whether they might have to combine practices with one of the other dental offices that line 82nd Street, all of them catering to the neighbourhood’s immigrant population.
They see how the businesses in the area are interwoven. “It is a circle,” Dr Bastida said. “One that buys here later eats food from there.”
Perhaps the most ubiquitous symbol of New York’s immigrant-driven economy is the bicycle-riding food deliverer.
Soon after Ms Vilchis, the entrepreneur, graduated from City College of New York with a degree in mechanical engineering, she helped create a start-up technology company to optimise food delivery in the Manhattan neighbourhoods of Hell’s Kitchen and Chelsea.
She employed undocumented immigrants to deliver food at US$15 an hour — a job that usually pays US$7.50, she said. The most frequent orders came from finance professionals who had no time to leave their desks, which led Ms Vilchis to another conclusion: Time is another currency propelling the city’s economy, with lower-paid, often-undocumented workers performing tasks that higher-paid professionals are willing to outsource, including the delivery of pad Thai to their desks.
“A lot of people who are successful in the city, it is because there are immigrants to fill the roles that let them use their time to advance their careers,” Ms Vilchis said. “If we take that away, the whole thing crashes”. THE NEW YORK TIMES