Iowa–on–the–East River. Photo: Glow Images, Inc/Getty Images Nativism is ugly, whether it comes from the right or the left. Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams wants to be the next mayor of New York, but he sounded like a tin-pot bigot when he told an audience celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. that fresh arrivals from other states were ruining the city he hopes to lead. “Go back to Iowa, go back to Ohio. New York City belongs to the people that was here and made New York City what it is.
The problem with Adams’s statement is not how but what. Affordability has little to do with which Americans exercise their right to live wherever they damn please. Gentrification is an often cruel fact of life in desirable cities, the product of a burbling economy and national trends toward increasing inequality.
The number of actual Iowans landing in Adams’s borough is vanishingly small: an average of 231 people per year, a trickle made moot by the 211 New Yorkers who moved to the Hawkeye State. Ohio’s huddled masses aren’t jamming our shores either; in fact, that tide runs mostly westward, at a rate of 1,000 people a year. It’s true that tens of thousands of people converge on New York from all over the country every year — but even more leave.
Apparently aware of the contradiction between welcoming some groups and chasing off others, Adams later elaborated on Twitter: “Let me be clear: Anyone can be a New Yorker, but not everyone comes to our city with the spirit of being part of our city. I have a problem with that.” He doesn’t object to newcomers’ race or birthplace but to their behavior. All he asks in exchange for his blessing is “as simple as saying ‘hello’ to your fellow neighbors.
JDavidsonNYC We were 'pushed' out of our Brooklyn neighborhood by people who moved in and started mugging us & turned our great high school into a scary place. They weren't from Iowa.
JDavidsonNYC Having newcomers come into my yard to tell me turn my music down & ask my guesses to keep quiet at a summer wkend get together is also a “betrayal of the spirit of NYC”. Born, raise & still live on my block since 1980.
JDavidsonNYC It was really just awful.
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