We Are All New Yorkers
Pick a street, any street, in any immigrant neighborhood in New York, and ask residents how they've been faring over the last couple of years under George W. Bush. You'll discover--as the grassroots group Families for Freedom has been finding in its corner-by-corner surveys--that the city's population inhabits two parallel universes: one for citizens, one for everybody else. Certainly low-wage immigrant workers stand on the far bank of the ever expanding income gap. But as keenly as those who deliver the city's pizzas, immigrants who deliver its babies are feeling the squeeze of the Bush administration's draconian policies and aggressive enforcement. "Whenever the terror warnings come out, our community gets just as scared of what the American government will do to us," says Jagajit Singh, director of programs at the Council of Pakistani Organizations in Midwood, Brooklyn, a neighborhood that has seen thousands of its men harassed, detained, or deported--first through post-9-11 roundups and then through the "special registration" program that required men from 25 predominantly Muslim countries to appear in immigration offices for interviews and fingerprinting. "People believe that the administration hates us and wants us out," Singh adds. [more
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