We Should Not Deport Transplants

And it is increasingly confusing to me why NIMBYs and Establishment Democrats want to.

Adriano Espaillat (NY-13) recently said that,

“Those that choose or want to parachute in, after the men and women of this city, the working men and women of the city, have built our neighborhood. We’re gonna send them back home packing wherever they came from.”

This was in the context of the viable primary challenge represented by Democratic Socialist Darializa Chevalier, who with a massive ground-game operation and the support of Zohran Mamdani is hot on the incumbent’s heels. However, this comment, where he expresses a desire to deport all transplants from Upper Manhattan, hasn’t gotten much pushback on the left, even though it is obviously insane.

The idea that people who move to a neighborhood are displacing or taking advantage of its ‘original’ inhabitants is a reactionary localist delusion. It redirects tenants away from the enemy from landlordism and the constellation of rent-seekers that prevent the expansion of the housing supply and towards their neighbors, which is why it has been deployed by Hakeem Jeffries against Chi Osse (“Team Gentrifier”), as well as a host of other progressive insurgent campaigns in major cities. As the downwardly mobile professionals driven by extortionary rents in urban cores move to predominantly minority residential neighborhoods, and bring their left-wing politics with them, this nativism will become an ever more salient attack against left-wing insurgent candidates.

Importantly, this is the exact attack used against YIMBYs, unfortunately, often by the left. People even call poor Basil a transplant even though their family’s presence in New York City predates the existence of some states. Even some YIMBYs, such as Scott Weiner¹, have tried to make long-term residence an issue in their primaries, even though the desired impact of their policies is mass inflow of new residents to their cities! Both socialists and YIMBYs need to recognize that their class basis is currently essentially the same, and thus we will continually face this attack from our common antagonist: the network of political machines, interest groups, and incumbents that has delivered more than a decade of governance failure in every American city.

Of course, new entrants to cities make those cities stronger, and make incumbents better off. They are consumers and tax-payers! Even if you are a homeowner, an influx of new residents will drive up your property values and make you much richer.

I do want to discuss an element of this line of argument that I continue to find simply absurd. I do not see a way to differentiate new residents in cities from within the United States from immigrants.

Adriano Espaillat was the first undocumented member of Congress. He calls for the abolition of ICE, and is running much of his campaign on protecting residents from deportation. His record is, in actuality, enormously inconsistent on the issue, but it is insane to me to believe that every single person on Earth has a right to live and work in the United States of America, but also that everyone who moved to Inwood in the last five years should be expelled to Morris County.

To be clear - every single person on Earth does have the right to move to the United States of America, especially New York City and that is why we put a statue in our harbor with a big sign saying “WELCOME, THANK YOU FOR PARACHUTING IN.”

There is no way to generate this cut with any moral consistency. Perhaps one could argue that immigrants are more impoverished than the average professional transplant coming in from Texas. However, it seems less than obvious to me that the people making this argument would exclude high-income immigrants from moving to the United States, and if they did it would be one of the most counter-productive policies imaginable.

Even if you bite that bullet, many thousands of people who move to New York City from other parts of this country are leaving repressive states, fleeing laws restricting their sexuality, or their reproductive freedom. Like the millions who left the Jim Crow South during the Great Migration, they are realizing one of the fundamental rights that our republic guarantees through its federal structure - the right of exit. Would activists and politicians demonizing their more recent neighbors like to say into the microphone that they would prefer if transgender women stayed in Tennessee?

Urban localist nativism often does spill over into actual nativism. In 2024, Chicago saw protests where some Black residents protested the construction of migrant shelters. By whipping up this artificial division for electoral gain, whether to protect the rents of incumbent homeowners or to beat back progressive challengers, establishment Democrats are making a cut that they cannot maintain, and opening the door to the anti-immigrant politics that has annihilated their coalition.

And yet it continues! It feels rather strange to me for the left in Barcelona to be protesting tourists for similar reasons, and this does appear to be an international ideological failure. At least Claudia Scheimbaum at the consistency to call the anti-gentrification protests in Mexico City xenophobic. I guess that’s the type of moral clarity you get from a left-wing leader actually at the head of a mass popular movement.

I once got into a bit of a spat about housing policy, and my interlocutor told me I could never understand what it is actually like paying rent in this city because I wasn’t born here. I would later find out she is of Russian origin, born in Central Asia. What series of moral commitments could possibly generate this distinction?

What ever happened to the workers of the world, or even all men are brothers? At the core of my socialism is my cosmopolitanism, that overwhelming feeling one gets when you, struck by Kwame Appiah or Jean Jaures or Jesus Christ, suddenly realize that we are all human beings worthy of moral consideration who share a common project of steering our civilization away from Scylla. It holds for a Colombian refugee, an Indian software engineer, or even a gender-queer art director looking to make Spanish Harlem their home. It holds, even if our formerly undocumented AIPAC-backed Democratic establishment incumbent would like it not to.

I’ll be voting for Chevalier, for democratic socialism, for realigning American foreign policy, and for not having to be deported back to Scottsdale - a fate worse than death.

1. While we are disappointed by the result in CA-11, our vote would go to Scott Weiner in the general election. If forced to choose between a progressive YIMBY who is plausibly one of the most competent legislators in the country, and a ‘progressive’ paragon of the SF establishment endorsed by Pelosi and opposed to growth, our decision is obvious, even if our preference was for a socialist.