Phoenix Paz

PhD Student in History

Monday, May 6, 2024, 9:46am, Queensboro Plaza Station: I wait for the 7; the N pulls away from the opposite side of the platform, wheels shrieking against the steel rails, structure thundering as the train roars out of the station. How I wish the plans to revamp the system included dealing with the noise. Grey water, somehow slimy, drips onto the track in front of me in the morning gloom. A woman cautiously navigates a folding laundry cart loaded with fresh fruit around the blue plywood structure that still consumes the width of the platform after two years of continued construction. The wheels of the cart threaten to spill over the platform’s edge. It is the same type of cart my grandmother used back when I was a girl, its metal ribs painted red; the strong tread of its black rubber tires prevent the cart from slipping. A watermelon sits precariously on top, green rind glowing almost in the grey of the morning. The woman herself wears a soft pink cardigan, her dark curly hair streaked with grey pulled back into a bun, comfortable sneakers on her feet. The 7 pulls up, brakes screeching and doors hissing as they pop open. People pour out. The woman uses her foot to tilt the heavy cart back and shoves it onto the train with an easy economy of movement that comes from long practice.

I wonder who she is, this woman with her cart of fruit. Where is she from? How long has she been in the city? Is New York home? Or does she want to return to her country, someday, when she knows it is safe?

***

More than 183,000 migrants have arrived in New York City since spring 2022, the New York Mayor’s Office found in a March 2024 study. Of these recently arrived migrants, some 67,200 have found refuge only in the city’s 218 emergency and homeless shelters, the New York Times reports. New York City Mayor Eric Adams states that the situation in which migrants find themselves upon arriving to the United States is a “national humanitarian crisis.”

Migration to the United States has reached unprecedented levels since 2022. The continued economic and political instability in Venezuela and Ecuador, political repression in Haiti, religious persecutions in China, the war in Ukraine, and the conflict between Israel and Hamas have all contributed to the diversification of the migrant population seeking refuge or asylum in the US after the COVID-19 pandemic. In fiscal year 2023, the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) reports there were 3.2 million migrant encounters across all borders and ports of entry, including airports. Of these, some 2.5 million encounters occurred along the US-Mexican border, where undocumented migrants increasingly turn themselves in to US Border Patrol to request asylum.

Political events, economic instability, and climate change are also changing the character of undocumented international migration along the southern border. While in the past, the undocumented migrant population consisted largely of single men from Mexico or northern Central America seeking employment, today, families with young children and unaccompanied minors constitute the largest proportions of undocumented migrants crossing the southern border, according to the MPI. They are fleeing not only economic insecurity or persecution by state actors, but also domestic violence, or forced recruitment or persecution by non-state actors. Their journeys are often longer, too. Many of today’s migrants face multiple relocations and cross several national boundaries before arriving at the United States. In 2023, for example, USCIS (US Citizenship and Immigration Services) received 431,000 affirmative asylum applications, with Venezuelans, Cubans, Colombians, Nicaraguans, and Haitians constituting the top five nationalities. The EOIR (Executive Office for Immigration Review) received 316,000 defensive asylum applications, though nationality data was not provided. Of these asylum applicants, some 409,000 of them crossed the Darien Gap between Colombia and Panama before making their way north to the United States in the first 10 months of 2023.

Despite the unprecedented numbers of international migrants and asylum seekers, US migration policy has not been updated since the mid-1990s, and immigration is an increasingly polemical political issue that Congress refuses to address in a systematic manner through the reconceptualization of US migration policy. Because Congress has not addressed immigration, migration and asylum policy is decided through a combination of executive orders and judicial review, which results in significant fluctuations in policy between presidential administrations and the inconsistent application of different policies between states. For example, politicians in Texas and Florida have chosen to bus undocumented migrants to Washington D.C. or to other states including New York and California rather than use state resources to regularize migrants’ status or facilitate work authorization.

Additionally, the president cannot fund different federal departments without approval from Congress. Therefore, the agencies within the Department of Homeland Security that review immigration and asylum applications and work authorization for migrants—US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Patrol (CBP)—remain chronically underfunded and understaffed, and technologically out-of-date. As of September 2023, USCIS had only 760 asylum officers working in 11 offices around the country, and a backlog of more than a million affirmative asylum applications. Similarly, the New York Post reported in 2023, that the New York State branch of ICE is fully booked with defensive asylum case reviews until 2032, meaning that some asylum applicants will wait for nearly a decade for their case to be brought before court. Once in court, the adjudication process for asylum applicants can take up to four years to complete. Thus, migrants seeking asylum or the regularization of their status face years of living in limbo before knowing their fate.

***

Thursday, May 9, 2024, 5:15pm, 34^th Street Harold Square: Street level, behind the station stairs: The woman has a folding chair; it’s green. I think she may have borrowed it from the park across the street. Her fruit is displayed on a soft, dove-grey folding card table, and she has a small collapsible dolly tucked neatly underneath. There are cups of mixed fruit, bright yellow and juicy red, that remind me salpicón, my favorite snack in the sticky heat of Colombia’s  Caribbean coast. There’s pale green mango bichce with salt, so different from the orange tamarind and red tajin chile powder I saw another woman selling earlier. Pink watermelon. Yellow pineapple. The woman’s long silky black hair is tied back in a careful braid, and she wears pink sneakers, jeans, and a light blue sweater. She looks up from the phone in her lap, sighs, resting her head against the wall behind her, and closes her eyes for a second, clutching the rail of the subway stairs next to her.

It’s early evening, and the return-home traffic rush is in full swing. A food truck that sells fresh-fruit smoothies and juices pulls up 35^th to the corner with 6^th and looks for a place to park. I cannot see the driver, so I look towards the vendor whose face tightens as her dark eyes scan the square. The rich smell of coffee wafts into the street as young professionals push through the door of the One Café and round the corner. I wonder what the workday is like for her and what competition she faces from food trucks or other vendors. Does she prefer being outside, or in the subway? Is the competition different in those places?

***

The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) found that immigrant women were among those most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic; unemployment among this demographic reached 18.5% in May 2020 and the labor force participation rate dropped from 55% to 52%. Researchers at the MPI suggest that the pandemic’s greater impact on immigrant women’s labor force participation was due, in part, to the combination of their roles as primary caregivers for school-aged children or sick relatives at home and a concentration in the service and hospitality industries in jobs like waitstaff, maids, and housekeepers, which were among the most affected by COVID-19 related layoffs.

During the pandemic, many of these women turned to informal street vending as an alternative source of income that gives them the flexibility to keep their children close. Former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s decision to reduce enforcement against informal street vending during the pandemic further increased the appeal of vending for people who needed new sources of income. For example, beginning in 2020, an informal marketplace composed of nearly 80 vendors arose in Corona Plaza in Queens, along the 7 lines. The majority of these vendors were women.

Nonetheless, since July 2021, restrictions against informal vending were reinstated in full force. In fall 2023, the informal market in Corona Plaza was shut down until public outcry led to the creation of a new licensing system. The Queens Economic Development Corporation and the Street Vendor Project worked with vendors to create the non-profit Corona Plaza Vendors Association to allow vendors to continue selling food and wares in Corona Plaza legally. Other vendors have not been so lucky, and the number of fines and arrests have only increased since 2021.

Despite the hardship and insecurity, informal street vending has continued to increase since 2022 in parallel with the arrival of new migrant asylum seekers, who arrive in the city either directly from their home countries, are relocated from other states within the US, or slowly make their way to the Big Apple after months or years of multiple displacements and relocations. The Street Vendor Project, an Urban Justice Center affiliate, estimates that street vendors contribute $293 million dollars to the local economy, $192 million in wages, and over 17,000 jobs annually. However, this estimate is likely to be low as a large part of the vending economy remains informal, or “in the shadows” to use the words of 14^th district city councilman Pierina Sanchez. Many street vendors, she states, lack access to education and resources that would make their jobs safer, healthier, and more profitable for both the vendor and the city.

After weeks of interviewing migrant vendors, New York Times reporters Ana Ley and Nicole Hong found that the recent influx of migrants has led to increased competition between established and newly arrived vendors over territory, and conflict with the police due to the informal nature of the work. Competition and possible police action are just two elements that make vending daunting: long hours, uncertain sales, and uncomfortable conditions on subway platforms or street corners contribute to making vendors feel emotionally exhausted, unsafe, and insecure. However, many new migrants increasingly turn to vending as the lack of a working cellphone and the need to keep young children nearby prevent them from taking jobs in construction or domestic service, other longtime sources of informal employment. Moreover, the comparatively low startup costs of selling candy or bottled drinks make vending more accessible to people with limited resources.

Vending legally in New York City is often difficult for recent migrants. Following the 2022 Asylumworks et al. v. Mayorkas et al. decision, asylum seekers can apply for temporary work permits 150 days after successfully submitting their asylum application. Nonetheless, 150 days still represents a waiting period of six months before asylum-seekers can apply for a work permit. Moreover, immigrants with other migration statuses cannot even apply for temporary work permits while their applications are being processed. Unable to apply for a social security number, obtain temporary permits, or access state-mandated business or vocational licenses that would allow them to work legally in the city, many migrants turn to informal employment.

Even if migrants do get work authorization, permits are often limited to paid employment and do not give the permit holder permission to apply for independent business licenses or entrepreneurship assistance for small businesses and startups. Additionally, NYC limits the number of street vendor permits offered annually, and there are waiting lists of more than 10,000 applicants for both food and merchandise vending, according to Carina Kaufman-Gutierrez, the deputy director of the Street Vendor Project. A vending license or permit represents just the first step in the process of regularization and integration into the formal labor market. Even when someone finally gets their vending license, the expense of buying a food truck or a portable stall can be cost prohibitive. “A license is not enough,” a subway vendor who wishes to remain anonymous informed me in Spanish in a recent interview, “sure, it’ll help you with the police, but it does nothing to improve the healthiness of the work conditions or environment. You have to keep your product safe. And yourself. And a license doesn’t do that.”

***

Tuesday, May 7, 2024, 5:46pm, Colombus Circle Station: B line. The woman wears white sneakers, black capri sweats, and a navy-blue track jacket with red stripes on the cuffs and the waist. Her long black hair is pulled back into a messy braid that falls to her butt. She stands near a steel pillar, painted green, with a small plaque naming the station: Colombus Circle. A green plastic trey perches on top a black laundry cart, loaded with cups of sliced bright-yellow mango, each one carefully wrapped in a plastic bag. A bottle of powdered tajin sits in the front corner of the tray. A pale blue five-gallon paint bucket serves as a temporary garbage can.

The young boy at her feet tugs on her sleeve, looking at her with imploring eyes, his legs clenched tight. She glances around the station, pulls off her light blue latex gloves dropping them into the bucket, picks up a bag, and grabs the boy’s hand. They dart around the corner out of sight. When they come back, she takes a water bottle out of the bag on her shoulder and, kneeling, rinses the boy’s hands. A squirt of hand sanitizer from a small bottle follows with another round of water. She repeats the process with her own hands before pulling out a washcloth to dry the boy’s hands and her own. A new set of latex gloves are then extracted from a box on the fruit cart.

The train pulls into the station and the boy runs to it. The woman dives after him and pulls him back from the crowd as the doors opens. As I get on the train, I watch the woman pull a toy from the bag and hand it to the child, speaking to him firmly. Her words are lost in the din of the busy station.

***

Migrants arriving in New York City face many challenges. Insufficient housing results in tens of thousands of migrants being trapped in emergency shelters without the means for moving on. Additionally, inefficiency in the processing of asylum applications and work authorization forces many migrants to turn to informal means of generating income. These factors combine, deepening migrants’ vulnerability over time. In New York City, city-wide legal limitations on street vending synergize with the lack of coherent, up-to-date national immigration and work authorization policy to create a double marginalization in which people are criminalized for trying to support themselves while living in legal limbo. However, migrants and street vendors are a vital part of New York’s social landscape. As Steve Davies from the Social Life Project states, “It’s time to stop treating them like criminals…!”