"Immigration restrictions gathering steam in the Congress will have catastrophic social effects in NYC...The proposals violate basic decency and could throw as many as 60,000 immigrant children out of the city's schools and onto the streets...The crackdown on illegal immigrants is deliberately intended to play to the public's worst fears of foreigners and does not take into consideration the positive effects of immigrants in cities like New York."

The current backlash against immigrants is not necessarily anything new. Newcomers in our society have been convenient scapegoats for those looking for easy answers to complex economic and social problems. Each new group experiences resentment from those who came before. With the exception of Native Americans, we all came from somewhere else.

Garment Industry
Perhaps no other U.S. industry is more intimately linked to immigrants than the rag trade. The ready-to-wear industry was founded in New York in the 1880s when Jewish immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe provided most of the labor. As they moved out of production and into management and ownership, they were succeeded by a wave of new Italian immigrants. As European immigration dried up in the 1930s, Puerto Ricans and Southern Blacks took over the production floor. In the 1960s, Chinese and other Asians poured into the garment factories. These days the jobs are done by new Chinese arrivals along with recent immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean.

The second generation never stays. One group of immigrant moves up and out, and another takes its place. That's the whole promise of America. The promise that it's going to be a better deal for their kids.

Many jobs generated by the garment industry are held by native-born Americans. Packagers, truckers, mid-level managers, and wholesale workers are mostly natives. So are people in countless other jobs that were created by the garment industry, from the assemblyline workers in the plants where sewing machines are built to the pink-collar staffs of the designers who cluster near the garment factories.

Immigration not only works for the immigrants, it works for the competitiveness of our city. Apparel is still New York's largest industry, and New York is still the apparel capital of the world. It could not have been without immigrant labor. Without it, may jobs would move offshore. In fact, because of good craftsmanship and low prices, New-York-City-made garment industry goods are competitive with goods made elsewhere in the world.

Immigrant garment workers are skilled. Sewing a shirt in less than 20 minutes without cutting your fingers is skilled. It is a skill that the immigrants have learned abroad. We don't have programs here to teach people how to sew. Immigrants learn it in informal or family networks. How are you going to replace that?

High Technology
The United States would not be remotely dominant in high technologies without immigrants. At every high-tech company in America, the crucial players, half of them or more, are immigrants.

Intel, the $10 billion Silicon Valley company that is the worlds' largest producer of semiconductors, clearly profits from imported brainpower. The hightech company offers a striking example of the creative forces unleashed by bringing together talented, ambitious people from all over the world and allowing them to share ideas in an open, entrepreneurrial economy.

The company was founded in 1968 by two Americans who were quickly joined by Andrew Grove, a 31-year-old Hungarian engineer who fled his country 12 years earlier as Soviet tanks poured in. Grove, who left Hungary with $20 in his pocket, would eventually rise to be Intel's CEO.

In 1969, Intel scored its first big success with the MOS chip which became the semiconductor industry's favorite technology. The team that developed the chip was spearheaded by Les Vadasz, a Hungarian who would eventually become an Intel vice president.

Dov Frohman, an Intel engineer from Israel, in 1971 invented the EPROM chip, which retains its memory even when the power is turned off. It quickly became indispensible in everything from telecommunications equipment to automobiles.

Intel unveiled the 8080, the first general-purpose micro-processor, in 1974. Of the three top people on the development team, Federico Faggin was Italian and Masatoshi Shima was Japanese.

In 1979, the company produced the 8080 chip which, with slight modification, would become the brains of the first IBM personal computer. The team that engineered the chip was headed by Jean-Claude Cornet, a French immigrant.

Intel introduced the state of the art Pentium chip, in 1993. The Pentium project was managed by Vinod Dham of India.

Agriculture
Without immigrants, it might be cheaper to import produce than to grow it.

A little agricultural math exercise: Of the million or so people who make up the full-time farm work force in the United States, the Department of Labor estimates 60 percent are foreign-born. The average wage is around $6.00 an hour. How much would it cost to find native-born Americans to replace them in the fields? Let's say $12 an hour, which most agriculture experts think is a very conservative estimate. That means wages will jump 100 percent and prices 50 percent.

And who would do migrant farm work? You leave your friends and family. You live in a house trailer in an orchard; do your cooking in a group kitchen. And the job only lasts three months. It's outdoor work, often in unpleasant weather; it's physical; it's hard. And you can't even guarantee tenure of work. If there's a bad freeze or a hailstorm just as a crop is ready to be picked, you're not guaranteed anything. You go home empty-handed.

Many of the jobs recent immigrants do don't take jobs away from anyone. Low wages, long hours and hard work are the reasons that most of those in the nanny profession are immigrants. Many of the women who work could not afford to do so if not for these immigrants who work as nannies.

The American high-tech industry is not the only one that will suffer tremendously if anti-immigration measures go into effect. It may soon become more expensive to buy a shirt or more difficult to hire a babysitter or next to impossible to operate a farm. - G.T.

During the early part of the 19th century, the connection between immigration and crime became something of a national obsession. In 1908 the crime wave among immigrant Jews emerged as an explosive political issue after Theodore Bingham, New York City's police commissioner, published an article in which he claimed that Jews accounted for as much as half the crime in New York. Bingham wrote: "It is not astonishing that with a million Hebrews, mostly Russian, in the city (one quarter of the population) perhaps half of the criminals should be of that race when we consider that ignorance of the language, more particular among men not physically fit for hard labor, is conductive to crime...They are burglars, firebugs, pickpockets, and highway robbers."

In 1911, The United States Immigration Commission did a study on immigrants and crime. On the basis of statistics collected in New York, Chicago, and Massachusetts, the commission drew up a composite picture of "race and nationalities...exhibiting clearly defined criminal characteristics. Italians figured most prominently with respect to crimes of personal violence, including murder. The Irish stood out among those arrested for drunkenness and vagrancy. The Jews were disproportionately represented among those arrested for prostitution. In addition, Jews were second only to Native Americans when it came to crimes against property, including burglary, larceny, and receiving stolen goods. Greeks, Italians, and Jews all ranked high with respect to infractions against city ordinances regulating peddling and trade...For the commission, the relationship between nationality and crime was self-evident and implied its own remedy: crime could be reduced by restricting the immigration of those 'races' that were prone to criminality."