When Carmen Vásquez crossed the U.S. border from Mexico, she intended to settle in the Miami area, much like many other Nicaraguans before her.[1] Several months later, however, she landed on Long Island, the supposedly quintessential white, middle-class suburb, east of New York City. Despite its image, Long Island is now the adopted home of tens of thousands of immigrants, many undocumented, who moved there over the past decade. Carmen had never heard of Long Island before she was caught by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and spent five months in a detention center. There, Carmen met several women who joined relatives in Long Island upon their release. They promised to finance her trip north as soon as she, too, was freed. Serendipity, not careful planning, brought Carmen to Wyandanch, a small community in Suffolk County, on Long Island.
For most of this century, immigrant waves have surged into the inner cities, rejuvenating and revitalizing them with their transported energies. Suburbs, in contrast, thrived on the out-migration of “true Americans” from the cities; they welcomed only the sons and daughters or grandchildren of immigrants. Though many immigrants still yearn to move to the suburbs when they achieve the “American Dream,” others, oblivious to this rite of passage, skip the inner cities entirely and migrate directly to suburbia. Generally poorer and unacculturated, these new immigrants challenge the suburban image at the same time that their labor helps to preserve and enhance it. This unlikely marriage is not always happy.
Of the million or so immigrants who enter the United States legally each year, many still gravitate to the traditional receiving areas New York City alone welcomed a million foreign born during the 1980s. But a growing percentage are swelling suburbs around the country. Puerto Ricans began moving to Long Island after World War II; Cubans joined them in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s Dominicans, Haitians, Jamaicans, Salvadorans and many others from Latin America and the Caribbean made their homes in Westbury, Hempstead, Freeport, Brentwood, Central Islip and other Long Island towns.
In Westchester County, north of New York City, old Anglo communities have been transformed. In Tarrytown, for example, the local school district is now 40% Latino, due to a large influx of Dominicans, Cubans and Ecuadorians. In Edison, New Jersey, only a stone’s throw from Manhattan, school officials are coping with a burgeoning immigrant population representing 70 different languages. Once dominated by Italians and then Irish, nearby Union City has become a Cuban enclave and is now attracting Chileans, Colombians, Ecuadorians and Guatemalans.
The suburbanization of immigration is by no means limited to the Northeast. Thousands of Central Americans, Salvadorans in particular, have spilled out of central Los Angeles into the surrounding suburban communities of Cudahy, Bell Gardens, Huntington Park, Lynwood, Southgate, Maywood and South El Monte. Mexicans and Salvadorans have occupied the hills outside retirement neighborhoods near San Diego.[3] Day-labor markets have emerged in Mario County near San Francisco. And in Houston, the devastating economic decline of the 1980s depopulated the western suburbs only to attract a new wave of Guatemalans, Salvadorans and Mexicans into the middle-class housing left behind.
When asked why they did not land in the cities, many immigrants express concerns much like those of society at large: crime, violence and drugs. But when asked what drew them to suburban communities, they rarely mention the attractions normally associated with suburban life: single-family homes, front lawns, open space and shopping malls. Their explanations are more pragmatic: a friend or family member told them about job opportunities and perhaps helped sponsor their trips.
Of course, desires for swimming pools and front lawns didn’t drive the original post-World War II flight to suburbia either. Rather, people were lured to the suburbs as a direct consequence of federal housing policy. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) extended insured mortgages at such low prices that inner-city renters could own a home for less money than continuing to rent.[4] Once comfortably situated in their bedroom communities, suburbanites began the new tradition of commuting to the city to work. Redlining and careful screening of applicants effectively excluded minority groups from access to the loans and, hence, to the suburban dream.[5]
No such government incentives have stimulated recent inimigration into the suburbs. Rather, the decisive factor is the growth of the suburban job market. Between 1980 and 1990, 660,000 jobs were created in the counties surrounding New York City while the city’s job market increased by only 212,000.[6] On Long Island alone, the number of jobs available outstripped the supply of workers by 113,500 jobs.[7] These opportunities were publicized through immigrant networks, whose numbers have blazed and mastered new migratory trails. Don José’s story is illustrative. He arrived in Los Angeles in 1988. For six months he found only temporary jobs while he lived with his brother and many others in a tiny apartment. A friend who moved to Long Island called José and encouraged him to follow, promising him a landscaping job upon arrival. Within days, José abandoned Los Angeles for Brentwood, Long Island, where he immediately found employment.
Perhanps the thorniest problem in comprehending suburban immigration is identifying the first migrants, the “pioneers.” Once the first links in the chain have been identified, it is much simpler to observe how the chain grows. One key manner in which immigrant beachheads are established is the employment of women as domestics and men as grundskeepers. On Long Island’s northern shore, this trend is not new. The “Gold Coast,” as it is known, was home to such preeminent families as the Morgans, the Woolworths and the Pratts. They hired large numbers of servants, including many southern Italian gardeners, thus fostering the growth of immigrant communities on the island.[8]
Rosa Alvarez’s family emigrated from Puerto Rico to Glen Cove in the 1930s. Rosa’s mother had worked for a wealthy Glen Cove family during their vacations in Puerto Rico. The family later asked her to work for them year-round so she followed them to Long Island. She then sponsored the emigration of her children and other relatives. A direct line to Glen Cove was institutionalized.
Doña Lidia Bonilla’s story is similar though more recent. A mother of ten in El Salvador, Lidia made the decision to emigrate after her husband abandoned her and her small business burned down. A friend who had already migrated to the United States helped her apply for an immigrant visa. In the 1960s, visas for seamstresses were relatively easy to obtain, and Lidia had some experience. When she arrived, her friend negotiated a job for her as a maid with an affluent family in Garden City, Long Island. Lidia stayed there for several years, then switched to factory work and began selling Salvadoran food to coworkers. Over the years she parleyed this informal business into her own small restaurant. Meanwhile, she sponsored her children one by one until the family had reunited in the town of Freeport. Lidia’s elder children work in the family business, which has now expanded to include another restaurant in the town of Hempstead.
Lidia recalls that when she first arrived on Long Island in the mid-1960s there were few Spanish-speaking residents. Cubans acted as culture-brokers, providing lodging and job information for a fee. Manufacturing jobs were abundant and paid more than domestic work. Many older immigrants reflect with nostalgia on these years when jobs were plentiful, workers scarce, and housing affordable.
Immigrants’ personal accounts reflect larger changes in the economy between the 1960s and the 1980s. The deindustrialization of the inner cities were, in part, a boon to the suburbs where many companies relocated. Demographic growth in these areas promised a ready workforce, commercial rents were cheaper, and the commute less taxing. On Long Island the explosive growth of the defense industry, spearheaded by such companies as Grumman, Lockheed, Harris and Unisys, created well-paid opportunities for the children of earlier immigrants. In turn, these large corporations spawned scores of peripheral subcontracting firms which supplied parts and services to the giants. These secondary firms, with salaries hovering close to the minimum wage, attracted large numbers of new immigrants, particularly during the huge defense-spending years of the Reagan administrations. Indeed, during the late 1980s, the labor supply on Long Island became so short that gypsy vans began transporting workers, many of them Haitians, from New York City to the Island.[9]
In Silicon Valley, California, the explosive growth of the semi-conductor industry not only created an expanded job market in the midst of suburban San Jose, but it also spearheaded the growth of service industries which attracted thousands of new immigrants. For example, some corporations, including Apple Computer, eliminated in-house janitorial services in the 1980s in order to save on employee benefits. They then subcontracted services to smaller cleaning companies whose workers are almost exclusively Latinos. Most are of Mexican descent and many of them are immigrants who live in the city of San Jose and commute to the suburbs. Under the subcontracting system, these people suffer the costs of corporate restructuring: low wages, few if any benefits, and little job security.[10]
Silicon Valley is just one example of a much larger phenomenon of economic restructuring in the United States marked by a polarization of national income and occupational distribution. Trends in both the manufacturing and service industries have expanded both low-wage and high-wage job markets at the expense of the supply of middle-income jobs.[11] Consumer services and retailing offer many low-wage jobs. Distributive services, such as those involving financial markets, insurance and so on, offer high remunerations. These highly paid individuals, in turn, stimulate the demand for more poor-paid service workers, such as baby sitters, landscapers, gourmet-shop cashiers and even dog-walkers. These jobs, most of which pay no more than $6 per hour, have become the staple for newly arrived immigrant workers.[12]
Immigrants are willing to accept low-wage jobs for several reasons. They tend to lack English-language and other skills needed to access higher-paying jobs. Most must work because they are excluded from the social safety net.[13] And the cost of supporting family left behind in Latin America and the Caribbean is much less than the cost of sustaining them in the United States.
When Yolanda Chávez emigrated to Long Island from El Salvador in 1988, she left her five-year-old son with her brother and a neighbor who cared for the boy during the day. Yolanda, meanwhile, went to work as an interna or live-in maid for a dual-income family. The irony did not escape her. “You abandon your children,” she says, “so you can try to provide them with a better future. You don’t take care of your own; you take care of other people’s children. You suffer a lot for this.” Yolanda recently gave birth to a second son. Now she pays $9 daily for a taxi to her mother’s apartment so that her mother can care for her baby while Yolanda cares for the infant daughter of an Anglo family.
Many wonder why the expansion of manufacturing and service jobs in the suburbs during the 1980s did not attract inner-city youth or local young adults, along with women and immigrants. Indeed prior to the current recession when “help wanted” signs could be seen outside stores and fast-food restaurants everywhere, some efforts were initiated to bus inner-city workers into the labor-starved suburbs. However, many suburbs are traditionally hostile toward urban minorities. In addition, people with solid roots in urban comrnimities are less likely to relocate––particularly for minimum-wage jobs in the expensive suburbs––than are immigrants who have already chosen to uproot themselves. Immigrants shoulder the added burdens of indebtedness from their journeys and the pressure to generate remittances for their families at home. Need and desperation drive them into the job market where most feel at least modestly satisfied since their minimum-wage jobs produce more income than the jobs they left behind in their homelands
Another reason why U.S. workers did not fill all the job openings in the suburbs during the boom years of the 1980s is related to the dramatic demographic shifts which occurred there. Many suburbs were built, grew and thrived during the child-rearing years of the Baby Boom generation, only to find themselves home to “empty nests” in the past two decades. On Long Island, the number of schoolage children in Nassau County fell by some 50% between 1969 and 1989. As Baby Boom turned to Baby Bust, fewer teens and young workers were available to take low-wage, entry-level and dead-end jobs. This opened niches for new immigrants to fill. One notable niche is in fast-food restaurants. A typical McDonald’s or Burger King now greets the customer with a row of native and bilingual youth working as cashiers, who call orders back to food preparers in “Spanglish” and other language mixtures. Cleaning staff tend to have the poorest English skills and move into other jobs as their English improves.
The graying of the suburbs serves as a magnet for immigrant workers in at least two other ways. The escalation of real-estate values during the 1980s increased seniors’ wealth while driving their children away. As a result, fewer children could or would provide services to their aging parents, so immigrants found work as homecare workers, companions, cleaners and groundskeepers. Second, as groups which controlled certain sectors of local economies aged and retired, new niches opened for immigrants. For example, the Long Island landscaping industry, dominated by two waves of Italian immigrants for most of this century, struggled to find enough workers in the late 1980s and resorted to hiring thousands of undocumented Salvadorans.[14] A few seasoned Salvadorans are now establishing their own firms, a phenomenon also observed among Salvadorans in the Washington, D.C. suburbs.
One can imagine that the arrival of so many immigrants, into lily-white suburbs, especially when they represent distinct ethnicities and economic classes, would inspire a great deal of apprehension, if not resentment and conflict. Immigrants may be needed for their labor, but many suburban communities would prefer not to have them as neighbors.
An excellent example of how immigrants have become pawns to the demands of fickle housing and job markets is the story of Central American migrants to the western suburbs of Houston. While much of the U.S. economy rebounded from the recession of the early 1980s, Houston’s economy suffered a massive decline. By 1987, 18% of residential real estate lay unoccupied and real-estate values had plunged by 30%.[15] Developers who had increased the housing stock by 40% in expectation of a large influx of “yuppie” renters now faced bankruptcy. Desperate, many owners actively sought renters among the new immigrant wave entering the area––predominantly Mexicans and Central Americans––who worked primarily in the service economy. The landlords rechristened apartment complexes with Spanish names, hired Spanish-speaking staff, offered free English classes, and lowered rents by as much as 50%.
This restructuring was, however, only temporary; when the area’s economy began to rebound in the late 1980s, landlords quickly moved to reverse incentives. In some cases, building staff were paid to identify overcrowded apartments; in others, repairs were delayed or forgotten altogether. Rents were increased, often doubled overnight. In short, the welcome mat was pulled out from beneath the immigrants’ feet in order to restore the units to their “rightful” inhabitants.
The relationship between new and old suburbanites, already unstable, has become even more conflictive during the current recession as local budgets are cut and homeowners’ concern about real-estate values skyrockets. One linchpin of this tension is housing. Most immigrants cannot afford their own apartment and must share living space with others. Immigrants tend to live in low-income neighborhoods of bedroom communities or established minority enclave towns. Their housing is almost invariably the poorest and frequently it is substandard. Near San Diego, many immigrants have made make-shift homes in the hillsides surrounding new retirement communities. They live in burrows and under tarps by night; by day they seek day jobs in the seniors’ neighborhoods. Residents are disturbed by their presence; they accuse the immigrants of urinating in public, throwing garbage, and damaging the towns’ image in general.[16]
Similar antipathies have exploded on Long Island where the lack of affordable housing has resulted in an underground rental market involving an estimated 90,000 illegal apartments. Much of the problem stems from a zoning policy which favors single-family homes and few multi-family rental units.[17] Homeowners offset escalating property taxes by renting out basements to immigrants. They face little risk of detection by authorities, but great risk of antagonizing property-conscious neighbors. Some residents argue that the immigrants overburden the sewer system, roads and other services. Others suggest these complaints are just a front for concerns about declining property values in areas near immigrant settlements. After all, it might be argued, services were even more taxed by large families during the Baby Boom.
Immigrants like Hilda and Juan Flores are largely unaware of the strain their presence creates among established residents. The couple feel crushed by their responsibilities back home in Peru where their five children depend on regular remittances. They enjoyed a middle-class lifestyle in Peru until the late 1980s when their salaries fell to the equivalent of $50 per month. They entered the United States illegally, hoping to stay only long enough to earn a nest egg to start a business. Hilda and Juan occupy a room with two other boarders in a ramshackle house in Suffolk County, on Long Island. They keep food stored in their room to minimize stealing, but cockroaches dart in and out of the packages. The linoleum in the kitchen is translucent from wear and the “living room” houses another three beds, separated from the front door by a shower curtain.
Hilda and Juan, homeowners in their native country, insist that they would never live under such conditions at home nor would they permit their children to do so. They justify their sacrifice as necessary if they are to save money for their return home. Meanwhile, their “home,” with its front lawn covered with junked cars protected by a mangy dog, is a notorious local eyesore.
Immigrants are also easy targets of animosity because of their visibility. For most suburbanites cars are a necessity, not a luxury, and many households have two or three. For immigrants, however, car ownership is a goal to be achieved over several years, if at all. Many are illiterate in their own language––Central Americans in particular––and therefore cannot pass the written exam to obtain a driver’s license. Consequently, immigrants tend to walk; their presence on the street exaggerates their numbers as well as their perceived effect on local communities’ self-images.
The current recessionary climate has fueled the anti-immigrant fire in many communities, epitomized by Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan’s nativist rhetoric. In Suffolk County, a movement is afoot to repeal a 1986 county law which protects undocumented immigrants from being reported to the INS. Angry at rising taxes, residents are scapegoating immigrants, particularly the undocumented, whom they perceive as overburdening social services and the school system. In California, Gov. Pete Wilson blames immigrants for draining too much tax money from an economy which is rapidly losing tax payers and gaining welfare recipients. On Long Island, a school principal in Elmont reported two undocumented immigrant children to the INS despite a Supreme Court ruling which guarantees all children access to the public school system.
Immigrants in the suburbs and elsewhere have not remained silent and complacent. Workers in Silicon Valley have started to organize unions; renters in Houston have overcome ethnic divisions to resist developers’ attempts to evict them; and immigrant and community organizations are currently negotiating a settlement to a conflict over a day-labor shape-up point on Long Island’s North Shore. In addition, across the country more Latinos and people from the Caribbean are being elected to office, despite the low naturalization rates of immigrant communities.
The 1990 census found that over half of the country’s population lives in suburbia. But today’s suburbs are not the homogeneous “bedroom communities” of yesteryear. The flow of immigrants to the suburbs since 1965 has brought greater ethnic and racial diversity. In the past, non-white people in particular were redlined into distinct towns and neighborhoods. Today the sheer number of newcomers, coupled with the elder residents’ dependence on their labor, precludes their complete segregation.
The ethnic and racial character of today’s suburbia is changing, and its class structure is being realigned. The massive influx of poor, undereducated immigrants, highly visible on sidewalks and in shopping centers, reflects the transfer of jobs from the cities to the suburbs. Multi-class, multi-ethnic and multi-racial suburbs are relinquishing––albeit not always willingly––their homogeneous image, and assuming the status of complex urban centers. As the country becomes ever more suburbanized, the suburbs are becoming more like society as a whole.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sarah J. Mahler wrote her Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia University on Latin American migration to Long Island. She teaches anthropology at the University of Vermont.
NOTES
1. Because their stories were gathered in confidentiality during research, interviewees’ names have been changed to protect their identities.
2. See Leon F. Bouvier and Robert W. Gardner, “Immigration to the United States: The Unfinished Story,” Population Bulletin, Vol. 41, No. 4 (1986).
3. See Leo Chávez, Shadowed Lives (Orlando, Fl: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1992); also New York Times, March 26, 1990 and Nov. 13, 1990.
4. See Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier. The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
5. Ibid., pp. 208-9.
6. New York Times, Dec. 7, 1991.
7. New York State Department of Labor. See Sarah J. Mahler, “Tres Veces Mojado: Undocumented Central and South American Migration to Suburban Long Island,” (Ph.D. diss., Dept. of Anthropology, Columbia University, 1992).
8. See Salvatore Lagumina, From Steerage to Suburb: Long Island Italians (Staten Island, NY: Center for Migration Studies, 1988).
9. Little was known about them until several vans crashed on the highways killing numerous occupants. See New York Daily News, Nov. 10, 1989.
10. Information on these workers is from Christian Zlolniski, a graduate student in anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is conducting doctoral research among Latinos in Silicon Valley.
11. See Saskia Sassen, The Mobility of Labor and Capital: A Study in International Investment and Labor Flow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), especially ch. 5.
12. A Congressional study found that nation-wide, slightly over one-half of all new jobs created since 1979 pay only a poverty wage, some $11,611 for year-round, full-time work. (New York Times, Sept. 27, 1988.) More frequently, many of these jobs have been secured by working women who must employ even less expensive child care, cleaning and other services to enable them to work outside the home.
13. Undocumented immigrants have access to almost no welfare benefits or social services. They may obtain Medicaid only for pregnancy and emergency care. Legal immigrants are often excluded from welfare payments or state-and federally financed medical services for three years following immigration. Furthermore, these immigrants we screened prior to receiving their visas for their likelihood of becoming a “public charge.” Immigrants deemed likely to become public charges are generally denied visas.
14. The notion of an ethnic queue was originally employed by Stanley Lieberson in his book A Piece of the Pie: Blacks and White Immigrants Since 1880 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) and subsequently developed by Roger Waldinger (see for instance, “Immigration and Urban Change,” Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 15 (1989)).
15. Data from Houston supplied by Nestor Rodriguez and Jacqueline Hagar of the Sociology Department, University of Houston.
16. See New York Times, March 26, 1990 and Nov. 13, 1990. See also, Leo Chávez, Shadowed Lives.
17. New York Times (Long Island Section), April 14, 1991; Newsday, Dec. 8, 1989.
