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Emails from Jewish Residents in New York City’s Redlined Neighborhoods

Last week I blogged about New York Governor Cuomo’s pandemic order in New York (See here, here, and here). He placed redlines around Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, and imposed stringent restrictions on prayer and assembly. I will much more to have say about that order in due course. Here, I would like to include a sampling of emails I’ve received in the last week from members of those communities. I think the messages speak for themselves.

Thank you for your honest article—it shows an awareness and the strength to stand up for what is right, even when it isn’t the popular or accepted thing to do. I’m sorry if some Jewish people felt the need to tell you that you’re wrong or outspoken—unfortunately and it is very frightening to see, people are blind to what should be obvious and apparent. If they were able to open their eyes to the truth, perhaps we would be more able to get people together to stand up for our rights. I feel if more people would have the courage and strength the way you did in writing this article, we would not be in the position we are in now, since there is strength in numbers and even more so when we are willing to be outspoken about the truth. Thank you again for your honesty and for your courage.
I wish you only well,

I live in Brooklyn. In a neatly carved out zone so that people who don’t look Orthodox can go to hair salons and restaurants around the corner from Orthodox Jews at the same time the sheriff showed up to check empty school buildings for children. So it is especially frustrating when this rhetoric is permitted. While I don’t have much familiarity with constitutional law, I do think a house of worship has at least as much protection as an essential business even during a pandemic. Particularly when the same govt officials permitted tens of thousands of ppl to gather in protests that were not peaceful. I am attaching a sign that NYC workers put in the elevator of a local office building. It specifically says ‘synagogue.’  They should at least pretend they aren’t targeting the Jews and and write ‘house of worship’.

Thanks for your well written informative article. Crazy how history repeats itself, and how predictable we are as a human race. It’s so disturbing and incomprehensible to me how many influential Jews are just sitting back and watching this happen. Literally allowing it to happen. Silence is definitely not the answer these days. We went from 0 to self destruct in mere months. Who could possibly fathom that this would be America in 2020?! Guess we got too comfortable and cozy thinking this was IT, the ultimate life, and most people left G-d out of the picture… Like I said; we’re so predictable. Anyway, just wanted to thank you, for being a voice. For speaking up. I’m an orthodox Jewish woman from Brooklyn, and don’t have a public social platform, but definitely have lots to say and lots to offer from a real perspective.

Thank you for your accurate portrayal of the situation occurring in New York City today and its chilling parallels to events from the past. We need more voices in the media like yours. Keep up the good work! Signed, An Orthodox Jew in New York City’s Red Zone

Your post has been circulating around in a few of my chats and I wanted to commend you on hitting the nail on the head. Your perspective is refreshing given the difficult times which the Orthodox Jews are enduring, for no good reason. I look forward to reading your insight on this matter as it develops. An Orthodox Attorney.

 

Ty for your recent article explaining Governor Cuomo.  Living in NY for Jewish people is very scary at this time. The way things are unfolding is very unsettling.  I have been living in NY my whole life and have never experienced what we experiencing today. Its really as if we are no more welcomed here as the jews were no more welcomed in Germany and Russia. It’s a sad sad reality. Europe has been experiencing this for a whole and now that it hit my home town it makes it all more scary. My co- workers and myself were all discussing our next move to leave NY. We’re just deciding where to go.  The history is facts and the negative comments just shows how people don’t want to believe facts. The negative comments just further underscores the importance of your article. I appreciate your writing.  Keep the facts coming despite the negativity. people would prefer to think that everything is ok and this will pass and it’s not a wake up call to look at history and see how it’s repeating itself and we should learn from our history. We are not safe any more and we can’t just sit and do nothing.  It’s scary times.

 

Hi, just wanted to say thank you for saying what most Jews are thinking but don’t necessarily have the platform to speak up. I live in Midwood, 11210, on my side of Nostrand Avenue all the Jewish owned stores are shuttered, while just a few blocks away all the stores on the other side of Flatbush Avenue,  still in the same zip code are all open. Shoe stores, electronics,  hair salons, even outdoor dining is being allowed. It’s so obvious that Jews are being targeted and blamed for the current rise in Covid cases which is totally ridiculous. Its frustrating to have to follow our moronic leaders like little mice in a line while others are free to come and go and earn a living.  What’s next? Do I have to pin a yellow star to my shirt with my zip code on it? If it doesn’t stop now it’ll be too far gone to repair and I’d hate to leave my kids a world like that. We really need to assert ourselves before it’s too late. It’s also beyond frustrating to see my kids on their devices doing “school” and falling further and further behind because our schools are all closed. There’s so much more to say and so little time but thank you for letting me vent and thank you for speaking up for all of us who can’t.

 

I really appreciated your article. I live in one of the “red zones” in Brooklyn and as a child of Holocaust survivors I’m starting to understand the baseless hatred that my parents faced.  I never felt the fear of what’s to come as I do now. I’m a born and bred New Yorker who thought I would never leave NY,  the city that I adored! However the Governor and Mayor have made this city intolerable. When I had to buy my young children pepper spray last fall because they were afraid to walk the 3 blocks from their school to our home, neither of them condemned the attacks which were done predominantly by black people. When there were fireworks going off all hours of the night with no end in sight they wouldn’t do anything. Now the streets are teeming with sheriffs, Dept of Bldg’s employees looking to make our lives miserable. My husbands entire office building in Borough Park was targeted today. Inspectors were knocking aggressively on every business door to try to gain entrance to see if there was proper social distancing going on. He said he felt like he was in communist Russia. I guess the worst part for me is the silence all around. Why is nobody speaking up for us? This is what my father described about how his city watched the Jews being rounded up and taken away and no one said a word. I must pick up and leave this city before it’s too late. Thanks again, very well written!

Continue reading “Emails from Jewish Residents in New York City’s Redlined Neighborhoods”

The New York Times’ Jia Lynn Yang on the Ebb and Flow of Immigration 

Q&A

A deputy national editor at The New York Times, Jia Lynn Yang is the author of a timely new book, One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924–1965 (W.W. Norton & Co.). The book begins at a dark moment in American immigration policy, when a restrictive law ended a long period of relatively open borders and effectively stopped mass movement to the United States for the next 40 years. It tells the story of the decadeslong process that led the U.S. to begin accepting foreigners once again. Yet almost nobody involved in that fight foresaw the extent to which the 1965 law finally signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson would open the door to large numbers of new immigrants, including Yang’s family.

Reason‘s Nick Gillespie sat down with Yang first in March and then again in May after the COVID-19 pandemic began to have a major effect on U.S. immigration policy. Among other things, it prompted President Donald Trump to temporarily halt legal migration and led to a delay in asylum hearings on the Mexican border.

Q: You have a personal connection to immigration, particularly the laws of the period that your book covers. What is it?

A: My family would not be here if not for the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. When I began working on this whole project, I’d never heard of the law, never been taught it in high school or college. I had just been told—like, I think, a lot of American families—the gauzy story of how we ended up here at all. Basically, my family’s from China. After the civil war and the Communists won in 1949, my grandparents left for Taiwan, like a lot of other refugees. My parents grew up there and then came to the U.S. in the ’60s and ’70s for college and grad school.

Q: Talk about American immigration policy from the beginning of the republic up through the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. 

A: Our immigration policy was quite open. We needed people to come and colonize this land. If you basically wanted to show up, we didn’t have visas, there were no passports, there wasn’t border control. If you got here—and this was true until really the 1920s—and you made it physically [through] the long, long journey, you could be here.

In 1882, the U.S. passed, for the first time, an immigration law restricting people coming in based on their ethnicity. This was fueled by a huge anti-Asian backlash against Chinese laborers in particular. From that point on, you can see that we are as a country slowly but surely adding more and more restrictions.

Q: What happened with immigration policy between 1925 and 1950?

A: Imagine the 1920s as being a very isolationist, very pro-American, nationalist time where we’re literally closing off borders.

As we’re fighting [World War II], it becomes clear that our immigration laws don’t match our foreign policy. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned the naturalization of anyone who’s Chinese, but during the war, the Chinese are allies, and it seems embarrassing and downright insulting to signal to our ally, “We don’t actually think that you’re up to snuff to be citizens.” So we slowly crack the door open to Chinese immigration.

Q: How did President Ronald Reagan deal with immigration?

A: The last major, truly ambitious reworking of American immigration laws comes under Reagan, and he basically creates a path to citizenship for all these people. He creates amnesty.

I’d argue the next pass at this, under [President] Bill Clinton, is at least as transformative. In the moment it wasn’t considered as ambitious as what Reagan did, but Clinton is the one who really creates this sort of perpetual state of illegal immigration crisis, because he both narrows the pathways to citizenship and increases the reasons to deport people.

Q: Will immigration policy change if a Democrat wins the White House, or are these forces that oscillate between expansive and restrictive immigration policy bigger than any one politician? 

A: I feel like [people in the Trump administration] know this history in a way that Democrats don’t. They will talk about the 1920s and they’ll talk about 1965. They understand that there’s almost a dial that you can turn on American immigration. Sometimes [we] allow a lot of people in. Sometimes we don’t. And they of course want to turn the dial back toward more restriction.

The Democrats—I’m hard-pressed to know what their plan is. They talk a lot about a nation of immigrants, and they celebrate this gauzy mythology, but unless they’re advocating open borders, I’m not clear on what their preferences are for who comes in and who doesn’t.

Jia Lynn Yang on the Immigration Law that Changed America

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity. For a podcast version, subscribe to The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie.

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The New York Times’ Jia Lynn Yang on the Ebb and Flow of Immigration 

Q&A

A deputy national editor at The New York Times, Jia Lynn Yang is the author of a timely new book, One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924–1965 (W.W. Norton & Co.). The book begins at a dark moment in American immigration policy, when a restrictive law ended a long period of relatively open borders and effectively stopped mass movement to the United States for the next 40 years. It tells the story of the decadeslong process that led the U.S. to begin accepting foreigners once again. Yet almost nobody involved in that fight foresaw the extent to which the 1965 law finally signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson would open the door to large numbers of new immigrants, including Yang’s family.

Reason‘s Nick Gillespie sat down with Yang first in March and then again in May after the COVID-19 pandemic began to have a major effect on U.S. immigration policy. Among other things, it prompted President Donald Trump to temporarily halt legal migration and led to a delay in asylum hearings on the Mexican border.

Q: You have a personal connection to immigration, particularly the laws of the period that your book covers. What is it?

A: My family would not be here if not for the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. When I began working on this whole project, I’d never heard of the law, never been taught it in high school or college. I had just been told—like, I think, a lot of American families—the gauzy story of how we ended up here at all. Basically, my family’s from China. After the civil war and the Communists won in 1949, my grandparents left for Taiwan, like a lot of other refugees. My parents grew up there and then came to the U.S. in the ’60s and ’70s for college and grad school.

Q: Talk about American immigration policy from the beginning of the republic up through the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. 

A: Our immigration policy was quite open. We needed people to come and colonize this land. If you basically wanted to show up, we didn’t have visas, there were no passports, there wasn’t border control. If you got here—and this was true until really the 1920s—and you made it physically [through] the long, long journey, you could be here.

In 1882, the U.S. passed, for the first time, an immigration law restricting people coming in based on their ethnicity. This was fueled by a huge anti-Asian backlash against Chinese laborers in particular. From that point on, you can see that we are as a country slowly but surely adding more and more restrictions.

Q: What happened with immigration policy between 1925 and 1950?

A: Imagine the 1920s as being a very isolationist, very pro-American, nationalist time where we’re literally closing off borders.

As we’re fighting [World War II], it becomes clear that our immigration laws don’t match our foreign policy. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned the naturalization of anyone who’s Chinese, but during the war, the Chinese are allies, and it seems embarrassing and downright insulting to signal to our ally, “We don’t actually think that you’re up to snuff to be citizens.” So we slowly crack the door open to Chinese immigration.

Q: How did President Ronald Reagan deal with immigration?

A: The last major, truly ambitious reworking of American immigration laws comes under Reagan, and he basically creates a path to citizenship for all these people. He creates amnesty.

I’d argue the next pass at this, under [President] Bill Clinton, is at least as transformative. In the moment it wasn’t considered as ambitious as what Reagan did, but Clinton is the one who really creates this sort of perpetual state of illegal immigration crisis, because he both narrows the pathways to citizenship and increases the reasons to deport people.

Q: Will immigration policy change if a Democrat wins the White House, or are these forces that oscillate between expansive and restrictive immigration policy bigger than any one politician? 

A: I feel like [people in the Trump administration] know this history in a way that Democrats don’t. They will talk about the 1920s and they’ll talk about 1965. They understand that there’s almost a dial that you can turn on American immigration. Sometimes [we] allow a lot of people in. Sometimes we don’t. And they of course want to turn the dial back toward more restriction.

The Democrats—I’m hard-pressed to know what their plan is. They talk a lot about a nation of immigrants, and they celebrate this gauzy mythology, but unless they’re advocating open borders, I’m not clear on what their preferences are for who comes in and who doesn’t.

Jia Lynn Yang on the Immigration Law that Changed America

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity. For a podcast version, subscribe to The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie.

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Brickbat: The Wheels of Justice Turn Slowly

elderlyarrest_1161x653

When Dade City, Florida, police found Gwen Donahue, a 74-year-old dementia patient who had wandered away from her nursing home, they made sure to run her name through their database They found she had a warrant from nearly a decade ago, and rather than return her to her nursing home, they arrested her. Donahue’s daughter says the warrant stems from a DUI. She says her mother completed all of the terms of her sentence except a two-hour online course, so the judge issued a warrant that none of the family was aware of. It took the family nearly a week to get a judge to sign a release order to get her out of jail.

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Brickbat: The Wheels of Justice Turn Slowly

elderlyarrest_1161x653

When Dade City, Florida, police found Gwen Donahue, a 74-year-old dementia patient who had wandered away from her nursing home, they made sure to run her name through their database They found she had a warrant from nearly a decade ago, and rather than return her to her nursing home, they arrested her. Donahue’s daughter says the warrant stems from a DUI. She says her mother completed all of the terms of her sentence except a two-hour online course, so the judge issued a warrant that none of the family was aware of. It took the family nearly a week to get a judge to sign a release order to get her out of jail.

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On the Art of ‘Stimulus’ Spending With Trump and Pelosi

reason-trump9

President Donald Trump is one of the worst negotiators I have ever seen. One day, he tells House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) that the stimulus talks are over because she insisted on at least a $2 trillion deal and rejected the White House’s offer of $1.6 trillion. The next day, without Pelosi lifting a finger, the president comes back with an offer of nearly $1.9 trillion. Maybe if Pelosi waits, she’ll get her full $2 trillion after all.
Setting the puzzling negotiation tactics aside, this carelessness about American taxpayers’ money is shameful.

I know that everyone is supposedly now a Keynesian, and the refrain inside the D.C. Beltway is that failure to reach yet another so-called stimulus deal would guarantee economic disaster. In spite of evidence that government spending isn’t a miracle cure for the economy and that it’s often a bad investment, many Washington insiders lamented the president calling Pelosi’s bluff by saying that enough was enough and that negotiations were over. Until they weren’t.

So, here we are today. The White House’s new $1.88 trillion offer would reallocate $400 billion of the unspent funds from the previous COVID-19 legislation, for a total cost of about $1.5 trillion. Some Republicans find this apparent surrender by the administration to be incredible, especially because the White House proposal looks almost identical to the Democrats’ bill. As the saying goes, with Republicans like that, who needs Democrats?

Both sides want to send more checks to people. While the spending might not stimulate the economy, there’s no denying that some Americans’ lives will be made easier if they get $1,200 checks. But let’s be honest about this; for some pundits and politicians, sending out these checks isn’t to relieve the pain of a locked-down economy. In fact, many commentators complained that it was a poor political calculation on the president’s part to not send these checks as a preelection gift to voters. Apparently, the president received that message loudly and clearly. The question still unanswered is whether he will also cave and agree to broaden eligibility for a second round to those without Social Security numbers.

As for the rest of the bill, it’s stuffed with programs that promote economic stagnation and even more indebtedness. For instance, both Pelosi and Trump want an unemployment bonus on top of regular unemployment benefits. Pelosi wants to renew the $600 weekly bonus, while Trump wants it to be $400. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the economic impact of each dollar of extended unemployment benefits already extended to Americans since April is roughly 67 cents. The CBO also calculated that if Pelosi’s original $600 benefit were continued, the cost of the bonus plus employment insurance would shrink the economy, due, in part, to disincentives to work.

For the duration of the pandemic, Trump also wants to expand—surely to the delight of Pelosi—the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies for people who have lost jobs and hence lost their insurance, to buy insurance through the individual market. Needless to say, many Republicans see this proposal as yet another a betrayal. And they are correct.

They both support another misguided $25 billion airline bailout that will be a waste to taxpayers. They pretend that they want to help airline workers, even though academic research also shows that bailouts benefit mostly shareholders and creditors more than workers. They both want to spend hundreds of billions of dollars for state bailouts, too. Pelosi wants over $400 billion for states, cities, and tribal lands, while Trump wants $300 billion. As I’ve argued many times over, bailing out the states would be irresponsible. Why shouldn’t state and local officials have to trim their budgets to adjust to this post-pandemic reality, just like everyone else?

As we prepare to spend many more trillions of dollars in “stimulus,” it’s obvious that Democrats and Trump administration officials resist the reality that the problem with the economy isn’t a lack of demand, so a Keynesian spending bill won’t help much.

Most of the economic issues continue to come from the restrictions on commerce in many states and the fact that consumers are wary of catching or spreading the COVID-19 virus. No level of magical thinking and spending will really boost the economy under these circumstances.

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