Immigrants should not be scorned

How easily we forget that Long Island was settled by Dutch immigrants in the mid-1600s and by the English in the 1700s. Italian, Irish and Jewish immigrants arrived in abundance in the early 1900s. They built much of the infrastructure that made Long Island such a desirable place to live, and many of today’s Long Islanders are their descendants.

Now new groups are arriving, thirsting, as their predecessors did, to work and save and achieve the American dream. According to the nonprofit Hagedorn Foundation in Port Washington, Long Island’s immigrant population more than doubled from 1980 to 2006, to more than 465,000, accounting for just over 16 percent of the population. Tiny El Salvador contributes the greatest number, followed by Italy and a number of El Salvador’s Central American neighbors.

We should be happy that immigrants still want to come to Long Island. Subtracting income and payroll taxes, savings and property taxes, they had an estimated $7.5 billion in buying power in 2006 and a total economic impact of $10.6 billion, according to Hagedorn. In many ways, immigrants helped Long Island weather the recent economic crisis. Though it suffered, it was never hit by the massive layoffs that plagued much of the nation, in part because of the economic activity generated by immigrants. The unemployment rate here hovers near 7 percent, in contrast to the national average of 9.5 percent.

Too often, however, immigrants –– particularly those of Hispanic origin –– are ridiculed and scorned rather than welcomed. In Patchogue in 2008, an Ecuadorian, Marcelo Lucero, was murdered by a band of local teens simply because he was Hispanic. The tragedy prompted the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit civil-rights law firm, to issue a report in 2009 examining the “climate of fear” that brought about Lucero’s death.

The law center found a pattern of abuse of Long Island’s Hispanic residents. Hispanic men, the report made clear, are regularly subjected to hate crimes here.

Other workers said they are regularly robbed because thieves know they carry cash and are reluctant to report the crimes for fear of jeopardizing their immigration status with the U.S. Department of Immigration and Naturalization Services.
We can and should do better by Long Island’s immigrants.

Liz O’Shaughnessy of Merrick is setting an admirable example. She began volunteering to teach English at the Freeport Hiring Trailer in 2008. This year she formed her own nonprofit corporation, CoLoKi Inc. (which stands for Compassion Love, Kindness), to keep the trailer going after Catholic Charities closed it last year because of low attendance. Through her hard work, O’Shaughnessy, who grew up in Rockville Centre, has managed to attract dozens of immigrant laborers to the site in recent months. We applaud her. CoLoKi could use donations of food and clothing. For more, go to www.colokiinc.com.

Overcoming hate entails building ties between “native” and immigrant communities. That begins at home. Be mindful of how you speak of immigrants in front of your children. Treat them as you would like to be treated. The golden rule still applies these days.

Our schools can also do better. More school districts should begin teaching Spanish and other languages at the elementary level. Foreign Language in the Elementary School programs –– known as FLES — introduce children not only to other languages, but also to other cultures, and have been shown in numerous studies to improve cultural understanding and reduce bigotry.

Finally, government can do more to provide social services for many immigrant laborers who live in abject poverty –– often with little food and no shelter –– despite working backbreaking 12- to 15-hour days repairing roofs, installing kitchens and mowing lawns. Many of their employers could not survive without them, yet as a society, we do little to lend them a helping hand. Instead, they are too often treated as criminals and terrorists, despite the fact that most are living in the country legally.

That’s just wrong.