New York Final Destination

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Life for any immigrant anywhere is apt to be hard. New York has some aspects, like crime and physical decay, that tend particularly to taint the immigrant experience. Marian Ponanta, a Pole who works as a typesetter in New York, says his countrymen come expecting a city that always shimmers. "They only know America from the movies," says Ponanta. "It's ironic, but much of the Polish government propaganda about America turns out to be true. Those who want to come don't believe it. Then, over here, they discover there is dirt, violence, cockroaches, unemployment. They undergo tremendous stress." Kaen Singkeo, a Laotian farmer, was mugged within weeks of his arrival in Brooklyn in 1982. "I thought people here would all be nice," he says without irony or bitterness. "Now, after I was robbed, I know I must be careful of people who may attack me." Mohan, the professor, shrugs off the recurrent vandalism of some Indian-owned shops in Queens. "Irish kids do it, black kids do it, American kids do it," he says. "It is an urban problem, not an immigration problem."

The hardship is endured by some immigrants because even a difficult New York life is preferable to their former lives. In most cases the immigrants' anesthetic is hope, the idea that they can work their way out of deprivation. Flor Rojas arrived last October from the Dominican Republic. Why? "Because there was not enough money." She lives with a friend in a cramped Bronx apartment. Her taxi-driving husband and a son live with another friend in Manhattan. She awakes each day at 5 a.m., takes the subway almost two hours to her minimum-wage factory job in Brooklyn, packing nail polish. The couple manage to save as much as $200 a month, which they send to four children still back in the Caribbean. The monthly remittances amount to twice what Flor earned in a month as a hospital worker in Santo Domingo.

New York is easy-entry capitalism on the cheap. There are plenty of ways of making a living that hardly exist in more spread-out, laid-back places: driving a taxi, selling hot dogs from a cart, hawking toys on the sidewalk. In what other city is an automobile truly unnecessary? As ratty as the subways are, the 235-mile system is still extraordinary: at any time of day or night, anywhere in the city, a job is only 90 cents away. The brightly colored, highly schematic subway maps are, for immigrants without English, the only comprehensible city guide.