Daniela Gerson: How migration transformed Martha's Vineyard
[Daniela Gerson is a journalist specialising in immigration. Reporting for this story was supported by funding from the Institute for Justice and Journalism]
One December morning in 1986, a Brazilian immigrant named Lyndon Johnson Pereira strode down the ferry dock of Martha’s Vineyard, an island south of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. A job tip had lured the young man with shaggy brown hair and blue Converse sneakers to leave Boston, where he had been working as a dishwasher for a little over a year. But as he took in the deserted streets and weather-beaten buildings, he worried he had made a mistake. “The island appeared poor, badly maintained,” a now middle-aged Pereira recalls. “I remember thinking, ‘What am I going to do here?’”
With those unsteady steps Pereira would forge a link between his home town in the backwaters of Brazil and what was, contrary to appearances, the holiday retreat of many of America’s richest and most influential citizens. During that first winter he had a hard time believing anyone would choose to live there. Then the sun emerged, turning the steely ocean a brilliant blue. Fudge shops, fried-clam shacks and chic boutiques opened their doors. And boatloads of vacationers arrived hourly, filling the old whaling towns with summer revelry...
... Today, Martha’s Vineyard – summer retreat for the likes of Bill Clinton, Harvey Weinstein, Spike Lee and now the Obamas – depends on thousands of Brazilians to do the hard labour. Unlike earlier influxes, these newcomers are mostly illegal (estimates are as high as 70 per cent); but until recently, their efforts were welcome and their legal status largely ignored. The immigrants build, garden and scrub the summer residents’ trophy homes – so that they can build their own trophy homes back in Brazil. Nobody, including the immigrants themselves, expected them to put down roots on the island.
But that’s what they did. An estimated 3,000 Brazilians live on Martha’s Vineyard, a considerable presence on an island with a winter population of 15,000 (rising to 100,000 in the summer). For the most part, the Brazilians have created a parallel society. They’ve built three evangelical churches, opened landscaping companies and moped shops, and started four small groceries that offer Amazonian fruit juices, cheese from Minas Gerais and manioc flour. But for all the speed of the change – realignments of local economies and identities over the course of a couple of decades – we are just beginning to see the repercussions. One telling indicator: of all the babies born on the island in 2007, nearly one-third were to Brazilian mothers...
...Communities across the US are facing similar challenges as they contend with the unintended consequences of illegal immigration. Unintended and unexpected. This was not supposed to happen. In 1986, the US congress granted an amnesty and attempted to put the brakes on the illicit flow of migrants with new enforcement measures. The plan failed. When the economy boomed, border controls proved inadequate and employers and immigrants exploited loopholes in the new law. As a result, the illegal immigrant population has roughly tripled in the past 20 years, to an estimated 12 million, and spread beyond traditional agricultural and urban hubs. And while Mexicans remain the main group, other nationalities have played a significant, and often overlooked, part in that growth. The Brazilians’ illegal immigrant population has jumped 72 per cent since 2000 to an estimated 180,000, according to the US government.
A migration network, legal or illegal, typically grows by word of mouth, starting with a small group of pioneers. When Lyndon Johnson Pereira’s time on Martha’s Vineyard was nearing its end, he told his childhood friends Manuel and Edilson, immigrants living in Boston, that a restaurant on the island was hiring. Word travelled fast: that tip resulted in more than 20 Brazilians, almost all young men from Pereira’s home state, showing up to work the following summer. Most arrived with Pereira’s same twist on the American dream: to make enough money to build a better life in Brazil.
According to Maxine Margolis, a US anthropologist, this is typical: “The majority of Brazilian immigrants to the United States – past and present – have always claimed they would eventually go back to Brazil after they saved a requisite amount of money,” she writes. However, in a pattern shared by other labour migrants, temporary moves often become permanent, and “many delayed the return home for years or even decades”. This has translated to a total Brazilian population in the US estimated between 345,000 and more than 1 million residents, with the largest concentration in Massachusetts.
The Vineyard’s summer pleasures had attracted a smattering of high-profile visitors for more than a century, but until around the 1970s, it was “a poor island”, according to Tom Pachico, a former “selectman” or councillor in the town of Tisbury. Then it was discovered, he says, and became “a rich man’s paradise”. Since the mid-1990s, when the Clintons holidayed on the Vineyard and visitor numbers were hitting new highs, countless Brazilians have been cleaning the homes of newscasters, actors and venture capitalists. One said he tended a golf course where, on different occasions, he watched rightwing shock-jock Rush Limbaugh; Vernon Jordan, an influential liberal lawyer and senior managing director of Lazard; and Barack Obama, when he was still just a senator, all tee off.
But not everyone stayed happy with this arrangement. Locals – who often refer to the Vineyard as “the Rock” and the mainland as “America” – are, for the most part, hardly affluent; they earn about 10 per cent less, on average, than other Massachusetts residents, while faced with a cost of living that is 57 per cent higher than elsewhere in the US. Some islanders began to gripe that there were too many immigrants; that they were using the hospital without insurance; that they were dipping into a local charity fund while buying homes fit for kings back in Brazil; and that they were getting into trouble, as evidenced by the monthly so-called Brazilian day at the courts, when a Portuguese translator was on call. By the time the credit crisis hit – affecting even this playground of the rich – the grumbling had grown to a steady rumble. “It’s a microcosm of the whole situation,” said Mike Bettencourt, an electrician born on the Vineyard who found himself at the centre of the backlash against the immigrants. “Here Brazilians are the target group, just like in California it’s Mexicans.”...
...In a few days, Barack Obama is scheduled for a holiday on the Vineyard. Like most visitors to the island, he’ll probably spend his time riding waves and eating lobster rolls without noticing the mostly unseen workers who make the island function. It is almost impossible to spend time here and not benefit in some way from illegal immigration, whether in the form of restaurant dishwashers or garbage-men collecting kerbside rubbish. When the summer’s over, the president will return to Washington and face a busy agenda – which will not include a promised overhaul of the US immigration system, now postponed until 2010 at least.
Read entire article at FT.com (Financial Times)
One December morning in 1986, a Brazilian immigrant named Lyndon Johnson Pereira strode down the ferry dock of Martha’s Vineyard, an island south of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. A job tip had lured the young man with shaggy brown hair and blue Converse sneakers to leave Boston, where he had been working as a dishwasher for a little over a year. But as he took in the deserted streets and weather-beaten buildings, he worried he had made a mistake. “The island appeared poor, badly maintained,” a now middle-aged Pereira recalls. “I remember thinking, ‘What am I going to do here?’”
With those unsteady steps Pereira would forge a link between his home town in the backwaters of Brazil and what was, contrary to appearances, the holiday retreat of many of America’s richest and most influential citizens. During that first winter he had a hard time believing anyone would choose to live there. Then the sun emerged, turning the steely ocean a brilliant blue. Fudge shops, fried-clam shacks and chic boutiques opened their doors. And boatloads of vacationers arrived hourly, filling the old whaling towns with summer revelry...
... Today, Martha’s Vineyard – summer retreat for the likes of Bill Clinton, Harvey Weinstein, Spike Lee and now the Obamas – depends on thousands of Brazilians to do the hard labour. Unlike earlier influxes, these newcomers are mostly illegal (estimates are as high as 70 per cent); but until recently, their efforts were welcome and their legal status largely ignored. The immigrants build, garden and scrub the summer residents’ trophy homes – so that they can build their own trophy homes back in Brazil. Nobody, including the immigrants themselves, expected them to put down roots on the island.
But that’s what they did. An estimated 3,000 Brazilians live on Martha’s Vineyard, a considerable presence on an island with a winter population of 15,000 (rising to 100,000 in the summer). For the most part, the Brazilians have created a parallel society. They’ve built three evangelical churches, opened landscaping companies and moped shops, and started four small groceries that offer Amazonian fruit juices, cheese from Minas Gerais and manioc flour. But for all the speed of the change – realignments of local economies and identities over the course of a couple of decades – we are just beginning to see the repercussions. One telling indicator: of all the babies born on the island in 2007, nearly one-third were to Brazilian mothers...
...Communities across the US are facing similar challenges as they contend with the unintended consequences of illegal immigration. Unintended and unexpected. This was not supposed to happen. In 1986, the US congress granted an amnesty and attempted to put the brakes on the illicit flow of migrants with new enforcement measures. The plan failed. When the economy boomed, border controls proved inadequate and employers and immigrants exploited loopholes in the new law. As a result, the illegal immigrant population has roughly tripled in the past 20 years, to an estimated 12 million, and spread beyond traditional agricultural and urban hubs. And while Mexicans remain the main group, other nationalities have played a significant, and often overlooked, part in that growth. The Brazilians’ illegal immigrant population has jumped 72 per cent since 2000 to an estimated 180,000, according to the US government.
A migration network, legal or illegal, typically grows by word of mouth, starting with a small group of pioneers. When Lyndon Johnson Pereira’s time on Martha’s Vineyard was nearing its end, he told his childhood friends Manuel and Edilson, immigrants living in Boston, that a restaurant on the island was hiring. Word travelled fast: that tip resulted in more than 20 Brazilians, almost all young men from Pereira’s home state, showing up to work the following summer. Most arrived with Pereira’s same twist on the American dream: to make enough money to build a better life in Brazil.
According to Maxine Margolis, a US anthropologist, this is typical: “The majority of Brazilian immigrants to the United States – past and present – have always claimed they would eventually go back to Brazil after they saved a requisite amount of money,” she writes. However, in a pattern shared by other labour migrants, temporary moves often become permanent, and “many delayed the return home for years or even decades”. This has translated to a total Brazilian population in the US estimated between 345,000 and more than 1 million residents, with the largest concentration in Massachusetts.
The Vineyard’s summer pleasures had attracted a smattering of high-profile visitors for more than a century, but until around the 1970s, it was “a poor island”, according to Tom Pachico, a former “selectman” or councillor in the town of Tisbury. Then it was discovered, he says, and became “a rich man’s paradise”. Since the mid-1990s, when the Clintons holidayed on the Vineyard and visitor numbers were hitting new highs, countless Brazilians have been cleaning the homes of newscasters, actors and venture capitalists. One said he tended a golf course where, on different occasions, he watched rightwing shock-jock Rush Limbaugh; Vernon Jordan, an influential liberal lawyer and senior managing director of Lazard; and Barack Obama, when he was still just a senator, all tee off.
But not everyone stayed happy with this arrangement. Locals – who often refer to the Vineyard as “the Rock” and the mainland as “America” – are, for the most part, hardly affluent; they earn about 10 per cent less, on average, than other Massachusetts residents, while faced with a cost of living that is 57 per cent higher than elsewhere in the US. Some islanders began to gripe that there were too many immigrants; that they were using the hospital without insurance; that they were dipping into a local charity fund while buying homes fit for kings back in Brazil; and that they were getting into trouble, as evidenced by the monthly so-called Brazilian day at the courts, when a Portuguese translator was on call. By the time the credit crisis hit – affecting even this playground of the rich – the grumbling had grown to a steady rumble. “It’s a microcosm of the whole situation,” said Mike Bettencourt, an electrician born on the Vineyard who found himself at the centre of the backlash against the immigrants. “Here Brazilians are the target group, just like in California it’s Mexicans.”...
...In a few days, Barack Obama is scheduled for a holiday on the Vineyard. Like most visitors to the island, he’ll probably spend his time riding waves and eating lobster rolls without noticing the mostly unseen workers who make the island function. It is almost impossible to spend time here and not benefit in some way from illegal immigration, whether in the form of restaurant dishwashers or garbage-men collecting kerbside rubbish. When the summer’s over, the president will return to Washington and face a busy agenda – which will not include a promised overhaul of the US immigration system, now postponed until 2010 at least.