In the fall of 2020, The New York Times published an article headlined “‘If No Tourists Come, I Have No Business,’” which centered on “jarring scenes from all around the city [that] lay bare the devastating impact of the absence of tourism.” No longer could taxi drivers rely on regular tourist traffic from the airports. Restaurants bled workers as their dining rooms sat empty. Retailers shut their doors.
Locals might convince themselves that tourist-centered businesses are not important to them. What New Yorker would go to bat for the souvenir shops in Times Square or for the restaurants in Grand Central? But visitors play an important role in creating demand for goods and services, generally, and therefore in creating jobs.
In 2019, 385,000 workers got most of their income from the city’s tourism industry. These workers have a median wage of just $32,000, are young, and are disproportionately immigrants. And they don’t just work in hotels and restaurants; they are taxi drivers and cashiers, janitors and customer-service representatives, maids and housekeepers. And although locals may not care if fewer we <3 nyc shirts are sold, they may start to worry if Broadway ticket sales dwindle: In the 2018–19 season, 80 percent of patrons came from outside the five boroughs, and 62 percent came from outside the greater New York metro area.
New York is hostile not only to tourists these days but also, arguably, to outsiders in general. Mayor Eric Adams said recently that asylum seekers would “destroy” the city. That’s a remarkable claim, given that more than 36 percent of his residents are foreign-born (the national average is about 13 percent). Adams then embarked on a four-day trip to “push back on the propaganda that is giving people false hopes and false promises” of a good life in America’s largest city—a far cry from 2021, when then-candidate Adams wrote, “New York City is, and has always been, a City of immigrants. We are a destination for diversity and a place where people from every nation seek refuge, raise families, and enrich our communities. Under my administration, our government will reflect that.”
If fewer tourists come to New York, or if they have to pay more to stay in a hotel or reserve a short-term rental, that is of course in no way equivalent to what asylum seekers are facing. But opponents of migrants and opponents of tourists often sound the same: Who are these outsiders? Are they safe? Why do they have to be in MY building/neighborhood/borough? That’s because their fears spring from the same place: that any space devoted to outsiders necessarily comes at a cost to the people already living there.
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