Around 7 a.m. one day in August, the first migrants sent to New York City by the governor of Texas arrived on a bus without any warning and drowsily walked into their new lives.
They joined others who moved into shelters, then hotels, then white tents on an island in the East River and, as more came, empty office buildings and school gymnasiums. They enrolled their children in nearby schools, ate boxed meals served by the city, and dressed in discarded pants and shirts donated by volunteers.
By June, the city had counted more than 80,000 newcomers. About half moved to public shelters, and the city’s shelter system reached 100,000 that month. City officials tallied up housing costs: an estimated $4.3 billion by next summer. Mayor Eric Adams pleaded for federal aid, belittled President Biden and warned that the city was being “devastated.”
But unseen and unheard of were economists and social scientists, who point out that the immediate controversy has overshadowed an established truth: the city was built by waves of migrants who settled, paid taxes, supported a workforce, started businesses, and generally strengthened communities. lifted. they joined.
This latter group will do the same, they argued.
Without immigrants, New York City would shrink. Even if New York never gets back what it spends now, the economists and historians say, the migrants will ultimately be good for the city.
“In so many ways, immigrants have always made and remade America,” said Nancy Foner, an immigration historian at Hunter College. “And they’re doing it again.”
Some newcomers have already started to reshape their lives and the city around them. They include Pedro Perez, a migrant from Venezuela who is fluent in English, and who studied Monday morning for the SAT and planned his applications at elite universities.
“My dream is to graduate from Princeton and become a lawyer,” said 22-year-old Perez.
Among them is Wilfredo Yanez, 29, who arrived from Venezuela on Friday and had a job at a construction site in Manhattan on Tuesday.
“I didn’t want to be a burden to the city, or depend on them for help,” Mr. Yanez said.
And then there’s Belsy Antolinez, who uses a little blue scooter to deliver food all over town and shares an apartment with other migrants in Corona, Queens, where she raises her three children.
“My dream is to have a restaurant, because I like cooking the most,” says Mrs. Antolinez, 35.
Like most migrants arriving in New York City, these three needed help when they first arrived, but were impatient to become self-sufficient.
“Yeah, for a while, maybe some of them need a little help,” said Giovanni Peri, an economist at the University of California, Davis. “But if you take a deep breath, you see that American cities will benefit from these people coming to work.”
In the long run, economists and historians see a familiar picture: A spike in immigration fuels heated political debate, even as people who immigrate, both legally and illegally, take root and begin to contribute economically.
“Immigration is integral to the country’s economic growth,” said a National Academy of Sciences report published by 29 of the country’s top economists and demographers.
“It’s very hard to find an economist who doesn’t think that,” said Tara Watson, an economist at Williams College.
Within this broad consensus lies a narrow strip of disagreement. Economists, including Mr. Peri, highlight decades of research showing that migrants improve the wages of native workers in the United States or have no influence at all.
However, Gordon Hanson, an economist at Harvard University, says migrants are allowed to lower the wages of native workers, but only in certain cities and economic conditions. These negative effects disproportionately affect Americans with less education, previous immigrants, and black workers.
But, Mr. Hanson said, he still agrees on the greater economic benefits.
“I think the most important thing is that we agree on the main statement, that immigration is a net positive for the US,” he said.
The path taken by Ms. Antolinez and her husband, Darwin Valbuena, already follows economists’ expectations for migrants. The family fled San Cristobal, a small town in Venezuela, more than a year and a half ago after a bodega they owned was attacked by robbers. Mrs. Antolinez was seven months pregnant.
After crossing to California, the couple applied for asylum, flew to LaGuardia airport and moved into the two-bedroom apartment of Rut Ostos, an evangelical minister who had married them back home, in January 2022.
Now, with hustle and a little help, the family has established a foothold in New York City.
A member of Mrs. Ostos’s church offered the Valbuenas a four-bedroom apartment in Corona that they rent with two other families. Mr. Valbuena, a former professional football player, works two jobs as a football coach and plans to open his own football academy.
“It was hard to leave everything behind to make a fresh start in a country we didn’t know,” says Mr Valbuena, 37. “But that’s how we are, we’re always working.”
However, Mr Valbuena has some advantages that many migrants do not enjoy. In addition to a place to stay, he has a college degree and a temporary permit to work.
Others seeking asylum may not succeed. They will become undocumented immigrants, who generally receive lower wages and thus pay lower amounts in taxes, Hanson and Peri said. They also face greater risks of exploitation and possibly deportation. A housing shortage has made it extremely difficult for people — New Yorkers and newcomers alike — to find permanent homes.
And many newcomers arrived with no connections to help them navigate a challenging city, at least at first.
But the arrival of thousands of migrants, regardless of legal status or education level, comes at an ideal time to address the city’s demographic problems, experts said. Nearly half a million residents left New York City between 2020 and 2023, a 5 percent decline, according to the Census Bureau.
Graduates and families with children have left the city in record numbers. New York City’s population of undocumented workers also fell, dropping by about 60,000 during the decade ending in 2018.
Those declines are bad for the economy, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. The Trump administration’s policy of curbing immigration, coupled with the drop in immigrant numbers due to the coronavirus pandemic, left two million “missing migrants,” Peri found.
“We’re seeing a few more immigrants coming in, but we’re catching up a bit with the dramatic halt in immigration over the past few years,” Peri said.
The situation is reminiscent of the 1970s, when an influx of immigrants saved New York City from economic collapse as businesses and middle-class white families left the city, said Tom Wright, executive director of the Regional Plan Association.
“The most successful public policy in New York in the 1970s was being open to immigration,” said Wright. “If it weren’t for that, New York City might have landed on a trajectory similar to Detroit’s.”
Without immigrants, the entire metropolitan region would have lost 600,000 people between 2000 and 2006, Ms. Foner said.
Right now, New York City is experiencing labor shortages and needs 10,000 bar and restaurant workers, while the state needs 40,000 home health workers and 70,000 nurses and nursing assistants, researchers and industry groups said.
The growing labor shortage is partly due to the demographics of the US population, which, at 38.9 years, is the oldest median age in the nation’s history.
In just one industry — construction companies in New York State — the retirement of middle-aged workers could cause job openings to more than triple to more than 150,000 in the next five years, said Brian Sampson, president of the Empire State Chapter of the Associated Builders and Contractors, a trade group.
Immigrants will be crucial to fill those vacant positions, industry leaders said.
“Immigrants tend to come in the prime working age, so they fill exactly where we have a gap,” said David Dyssegaard Kallick, director of the Immigration Research Initiative, a nonpartisan think tank.
Not all new migrants will stay. Some have already moved to other parts of the country or to Canada, which has encouraged legal migration to boost the economy.
The faster immigrants find jobs and apartments on their own, the sooner they can help newer immigrants, said Neeraj Kaushal, a Columbia University School of Social Work professor who studies immigration.
Mr. Valbuena is doing his part. He recently met some newcomers to the city: Mateo Miño, 14, and his aunt Cristina, who was from Quito, Ecuador.
On his second day in town, Mateo had a panic attack. He had arrived after a trip in which he witnessed his aunt Cristina’s attack in Mexico, and then spent three months in a US shelter for migrant youths.
Fortunately, the anxiety attack happened at Mrs. Ostos’ church in Long Island City, Queens. Cristina, who had asked her last name not to be published because she feared reprisals from her attackers, learned about the church in the shelter where the family is staying.
Ms. Ostos suggested that Miño be involved in football through Mr. Valbuena’s team. Cristina started volunteering at the church. She also found work selling food on the street and is looking for something more stable.
“I had nothing,” Cristina said of her arrival in New York. Until, she added, “I found a community that helped me.”