'Little Pakistan'
in New York Hit Hard by 9/11 Aftermath
By
Alisa Solomon
CONEY ISLAND, New York: For "Little Pakistan," where
a hefty portion of the America's 500,000 immigrants from that
country make their homes, 9/11 marked another, related tragedy:
the beginning of their neighborhood's undoing. In two tumultuous
years, the once thriving community here in Midwood has become
a casualty of the "war on terror."
Since
9/11, according to the Pakistani embassy, the New York area Pakistani
community has lost some 10,000 of its estimated 120,000 residents—many
of them fleeing America in pursuit of liberty and opportunity
elsewhere.
"This
country betrayed us," says Syed, who, like most Midwood residents
who spoke to the Voice, requested that his last name not be used.
"Why did I leave my country, my relatives, my home?"
he asks, leaning over the counter of a five-and-dime on the community's
main thoroughfare, Coney Island Avenue, where he has been working
for 18 years.
"Because
over there is no freedom, and over here is much more freedom.
But not now. Over here
is no more freedom." On the eve of the second anniversary
of the WTC attacks, Midwood feels like a shtetl bracing for another
imminent pogrom.
In
a bizarre inversion of the story America likes to tell itself
about its splendor as a nation of immigrants, thousands of Pakistanis
living in the United States have joined in a mass exodus of business
owners, day laborers, students, cabbies, bricklayers, housewives,
hairdressers, and
peddlers.
Historically,
notes Nancy Foner, author of From Ellis Island to JFK:
New York's Two Great Waves of Immigration, sizable portions
of migrants to the US have spent some time working here and then
left, having intended all along to return home with their earnings.
But the current flight of Pakistanis marks the first time in at
least 100 years, she says, when "a group actually feels forced
into the decision to leave. It's very alarming."
Those
are just the voluntary, though reluctant, departures. Since September
2001, the government has removed five chartered jets' worth of
Pakistanis from the US and has sent many more away on commercial
flights.
And
now, this month, immigration hearings are beginning for men who
answered last winter's call that they present themselves for interviews,
photographs, and fingerprinting as part of the government's "special
registration" program. These hearings are likely to result
in more forcible deportations, shrinking even further the population
of Muslims in Coney Island.
Some,
who had spent years building businesses only to see them falter
as customers vanished into detention or deportation—or just
plain feared to venture out of their homes—figured that
America was no longer a place where entrepreneurial drive and
hard work were enough to make a go of it.
They
left goods on the shelves, middle-class homes, friends, relatives,
and even US-citizen children behind, and they purchased one-way
tickets to Lahore or Karachi.
Others,
terrified that returning to Pakistan would drop them in the middle
of sectarian violence or into the hands of a government they had
been punished for opposing—or maybe just into an impossible
economy with no chance of eking out a living—headed for
Canada, saying they were fleeing persecution in Pakistan and America.
Like
the family of a 25-year-old security guard named Raza, more than
2,200 Pakistanis residing in the US have sought refuge in Canada
between January 1 and March 31 of this year; the vast majority
are from the New York area. (Whether Canada will grant them refugee
status remains to be seen in most cases; the processing can take
as much as a year. But in the meantime, at least—unlike
in the US—applicants are authorized to work.)
The
dwindling of the local population was evident at the annual Pakistan
Independence Day parade down Madison Avenue on August 24. In less
anxious times, some 80,000 people turned out for the festivities;
this year, says Ghulam Chaudhry, one of the event's organizers,
35,000 would be an optimistic count.
In
Atlantic City, New Jersey, leaders of the community recently reported,
the area's Pakistani population has dropped from a vibrant 2,000
to a weary and wary 1,000. But nowhere is the devastation greater
than in Midwood.
Midwood
was an obvious target for post-9/11 sweeps, says longtime community
advocate Asghar Choudhri. "When a person goes fishing, he
wants to go where there are a lot of fish," he explains,
noting that in a concentrated immigrant neighborhood like theirs,
casting a net wide will
easily catch people with expired visas, even if it doesn't trap
any terrorists.
No
surprise, then, that despite Pakistan's official cooperation with
the US, migrants from that nation made up about a third of the
762 immigrants the US rounded up and held after the attacks—and
two-thirds of those were from the New York area. Fear gripped
Little Pakistan as FBI and INS agents pounded on doors in the
middle of the night and hauled hundreds of people away.
Choudhri
remembers running errands for his neighbors who, knowing he's
a US citizen, figured it would be safer to ask him to pick up
their groceries than to venture to the corner themselves. Popular
restaurants sat empty.
Then
came special registration. Men with expired visas or those working
without authorization had to choose whether to present themselves
to authorities and face likely detention and deportation, or break
one more immigration law by going further underground.
Or,
like Raza's 18-year-old brother and parents, leave the country.
Community groups that had sprung up after 9/11 to assist detainees
began to organize free legal clinics on registration requirements.
In
its storefront office on Coney Island Avenue, for instance, the
Council of Pakistani Organizations (COPO) handled hundreds of
such cases. Harder than drumming up pro bono attorneys to assist,
admits director Mohammad Rizvi, was knowing what to say when people
asked him what they should do. "We explained the law,"
he says.
Many
of those taking a chance in Canada are breaking their families
apart. Raza was married on August 31 and had to implore distant
relatives to offer the parental blessings that are part of the
traditional ceremony. Missing his mother and father on this momentous
day wasn't something he'd thought about back in February when
he drove the family up to Buffalo so they could cross the border
into Canada and ask for political asylum as Shiites fearing religious
persecution in their homeland.
"I
feel so bad," he says. "But they didn't have any choice."
They had wanted to spare Raza's younger brother from special registration
because they worried that he would be deported to Pakistan. Unlike
Raza, who holds a green card, his brother and parents have no
valid US documents.
Raza
and his family had good reason to worry. Those men who did register
and were found to have overstayed their visas or to be otherwise
out of status were given "notices to appear" (NTAs)—dates
when they would have to attend hearings before an immigration
judge. Most will be sent away—even some with good arguments
for staying. Ahmed, a 48-year-old grocery store
worker, for instance, was sponsored by his employer for a green
card more than two years ago.
But
sluggishness at the US Labor Department, which must first issue
work certification, has delayed the application. As a result,
Ahmed was still officially undocumented when he showed up for
special registration. Now, if his papers don't come through within
a month or so, Ahmed may find himself on a plane to Islamabad
for no reason other than bureaucratic lassitude.
As
the NTA dates draw near for dozens of Midwood residents, a new
wave of anxiety has clutched the community again.
A
first-time visitor to the enclave might not notice anything amiss.
A handful of stores amid the travel agents, kebab houses, and
calling centers along Coney Island Avenue are shut up, but many
more are open, and there appears to be plenty of activity: A man
wearing traditional shalwar kameez holds forth with a man in an
Iverson jersey, shouting over the Pakistani music video blaring
out of a buffet restaurant; two women on a stoop argue in Punjabi
about which of them spilled garbage in front of the building where
they both live; toddlers and teens play on the sidewalks, squealing
away the last days of summer.
But
anyone who lives there will tell you that it used to be so crowded
on a late-summer evening that you had to weave like a running
back to get down the street. On Fridays, worshipers at Makki mosque
used to put prayer rugs down on Coney Island Avenue's sidewalk
because there was no more room inside; nowadays the mosque is
barely half full.
And
business is on a relentless decline. Cumin seeds and ground coriander
have not been moving at all at New Apna Bazaar, whose awning promises
"Pako-Hind" provisions as well as Russian and kosher
goods. (Midwood drew Pakistanis when they surged into New York
in the early 1980s— pushed by martial law and pulled by
US immigration policies favorable to South Asian engineers and
technicians—because the surrounding Jewish community had
plenty of kosher butchers that could serve Muslims observing halal
laws.)
"We hardly survive here," says Apna's owner, Mohammad
Iqbal, noting that business fell about 15 percent after 9/11 and
then plummeted 40 percent more after the special-registration
requirements were announced. Those selling less essential goods
have fared even worse.
Mahmoud,
the owner of Rani Fabrics—one of many such shops that were
for years a major
draw for South Asians from all over the metropolitan area—has
seen a 60 percent drop in sales. As for the once trendy gold jewelry
stores on the avenue, several have closed. Those that remain have
lost as much as 90 percent of their trade.
At
Pak Jewelers one day last week, the owner's teenage daughter Farrah
Alizai, filling in for a laid-off clerk, didn't see her first
customer until 6:30 pm. Beyond the fear and declining population,
those who remain in the area have less money to spend. When an
undocumented owner of a thriving, 10-year-old Midwood construction
business was deported earlier this year
(despite a pending sponsor application and an appeal for asylum),
25 local workers were suddenly out of jobs. Such events, repeated
on various scales, have affected the local economy all along the
food chain. In the face of declining demand, Iqbal no longer keeps
his grocery open 24 hours, so his three employees have seen their
hours, and thus their incomes, cut.
But
it's in the less visible, private realm where the desolation runs
deepest: Within traditional families, breadwinners are gone. Men
who gave up on, ran from, or have been kicked out by America typically
bring their wives and children with, or after, them. (One grammar
school in the
neighborhood saw some 50 Pakistani children disappear early in
the winter semester as they joined their fathers in flight from
special registration.)
But
families who have had to stay behind have little systematic support,
despite the charitable efforts of small local organizations. COPO
is trying to help such families apply for food stamps
and other benefits to which at least their US-citizen children
are entitled, but, says director Rizvi, many are afraid to engage
any official state agencies for fear of being turned over to immigration
authorities.
Rukhsana
Saeed, for one, has been struggling to get by with her three children—13,
12, and 1 1/2—since March 2002, when her husband was nabbed
for visa violations in a late-night raid just days after she'd
given birth to their youngest child. With support from the Coney
Island Avenue Project (CIAP), a local activist group, and from
some larger agencies, she managed to cover the $700 monthly rent
for her one-bedroom Midwood apartment for a while—but not
for long enough to avoid the eviction notice she was served recently.
Through
an interpreter, she expresses her anxiety and despair as her baby
sleeps, curled in her lap. Because of the violence in Pakistan,
she says, joining her deported husband is not an option. But in
Midwood, she feels isolated and ashamed: Her neighbors have shunned
her, fearing both that authorities might regard them as suspicious
if they are seen with the wife of a deportee, and more so, perhaps,
that Saeed might ask them for assistance they can't afford to
give.
Community
groups—from grassroots types like COPO and CIAP to old-political
ward-style organizations like Asghar Choudhri's Pakistani American
Federation of N.Y. Inc.—are assisting people as best they
can, albeit with little coordination among them. Still, they're
all the immigrants have got.
Even
the most localized parts of city government appear clueless that
there's a crisis in Little Pakistan. "These are uncertain
times for everyone," says Terry Rodie, district manager of
Community Board 14, dismissing the notion that Pakistani businesses
are suffering more than
anyone else's.
The
area's City Council representative, Simcha Felder, did not reply
to questions about what could be done for the neighborhood. Borough
President Marty Markowitz offered a statement through a press
aide asserting that he is "troubled by what is occurring,
since the Pakistani
community has played such an important role in making Brooklyn
what it is today."
When
asked what the borough office was specifically doing to support
Little Pakistan, the aide mentioned Markowitz's appearance at
the Pakistani Independence Day festival on Coney Island Avenue
last month.
Raza,
the newlywed whose folks are in Toronto, didn't bother attending
the festival himself. He's trying to work extra hours at his job
because he's been sending a couple hundred dollars to his parents
every month. And besides, he feels nervous about being out too
much. "I do have a green card," he says, not to mention,
as of two weeks ago, an American-citizen wife. Nonetheless, he
adds, "You have to be careful. Over here, anything can happen."
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Courtesy Voice. Writers's E-mail: a.solomon1@att.net
