A City, Just Like a Country, is Made By Those Who Live In It

Just the other day, my wife and I went to lunch in our neighborhood, something we had not made time to do just the two of us for far too long. While sitting and talking, she noticed Kareem Rahma walk by. Rahma has a show called SubwayTakes that she catches on occasion. Turns out, he lives in our neighborhood.

It also turns out he moved to the city the same year that we did, something I learned in his recent episode with Jennifer Lopez. I learned about it because he was probing her on her take, which is that “you have to be born in New York to be a New Yorker.” He protested that when he moved here in 2012, he was told it just takes 10 years. Lopez rejected this. He posited a scenario where he lived here for 50 years, and she still stuck to her guns.

They’re laughing, and it’s mostly harmless posturing from someone who largely lives somewhere else anyway, but of course, locals really do feel that way about other people occupying the place where they were born. They feel, as she does, that it’s wrong how “everybody wants to claim the city,” whether it’s New York or anywhere else. And even though this city is almost synonymous with American cosmopolitanism and dynamism, they have in fact largely succeeded in making it harder to move here, and harder still to stay.

The defenses of doing this range from merely insulting your intelligence to the outright absurd, but what all of them have in common is that they are indistinguishable from the petty hatreds and jealousies that have led to a system of concentration camps being built in this country.

The people who made New York what it is are people like the ones who live in the large Chinese immigrant community near my neighborhood. Or people who moved here from Puerto Rico, as Lopez’s parents did. Or people who moved here from Mexico, or from Italy. Or…from Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin.

A city is what the people who live there, make a life there, raise their kids there, and pay their taxes there, make of it. And so is a country.

It is bad enough that so much of our country was willing to vote for a man—one of Lopez’s authentic New Yorkers—whose convention handed out signs reading “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!” But New York City is a place where less than half of residents were born in New York State and 40 percent of residents were not born in this country. To act as though there is some quintessentially New York thing that some are simply born with is a joke, and it should be treated as such.

Anyone should be able to become a New Yorker, and anyone should be able to become an American. You cannot call yourself a liberal in good standing without embracing this basic principle and all it implies.

Featured image is A Crowd Of European Immigrants Arrives At Ellis Island