We Are The World

Bergen's long history of immigration has shaped and enriched the county in innumerable ways.

Fearing for her life, Gloria Vasquez fled to the U.S. from her native Guatemala in 2009, leaving her three children with her mother. She tells her story in simple declarative sentences—her English is good but not perfect—that belie the emotion underlying them. “My husband drank too much, and he beat me,” she says. Vasquez, who asked us not to reveal her real name, joined her sister in Bergen County, home to some 5,000 Guatemalan immigrants—now tied with Indians as the second-largest immigrant group in the county, after Koreans. Though her undocumented status has made it hard for her to find steady work, and though she doubts she’ll be able to bring her children here, she’s happy enough in her adopted home of Palisades Park. “The people,” she says, “are nice here.”

WHAT DRAWS NEWCOMERS
Like many immigrants who’ve settled in the county, Vasquez came to Bergen because she has relatives here. Typically, once immigrants from a particular region establish a community, others follow, sharing experience and finding strength in numbers as they deal with the intimidating strangeness of a new culture. That trend, for instance, has helped make Bergen in general, and Fort Lee and Palisades Park in particular, a magnet for Koreans—though, in fact, the earliest Korean immigrants may well have also been drawn here by Asian communities already established by Japanese immigrants. Noriko Matsumoto, Ph.D., is the author of Beyond the City and the Bridge: East Asian Immigration to a New Jersey Suburb, about the remarkable immigration story of Fort Lee, where nearly half the residents are foreign born. She notes that in the 1970s, Japanese companies with branches in the tristate area brought in workers, mostly men, from Japan. They settled in Queens, but as they prospered, they were joined by their families and moved across the river, to the leafier suburbs around the George Washington Bridge. Inevitably, some of them founded Asian-oriented businesses and community organizations. “The fact that there were Japanese stores and other institutions in Fort Lee was a major impetus for further migration for Koreans,” Matsumoto says. Though a long history of colonization and war has created antagonism between Koreans and Japanese, Matsumoto describes that antagonism as “variable, complex and not monolithic.” While she did witness some of that animus during the research for her book, she notes, she also observed “partnership and friendship.”

Bergen’s proximity to New York City, with its abundance of nonprofit immigrant services and potential employers, has made it something of a beacon for immigrants. The fact that, for three decades ending in 2021, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) used the Bergen County Jail as an immigrant detention center also brought immigrants here, and those whose lawyers got them released often stayed in Bergen. Some immigrants, says Jon Moscow, cochair of the Bergen-based advocacy group Northern New Jersey Sanctuary Coalition, were referred here by agencies along the U.S./Mexican border, “but,” he adds, “why and how it came to be New Jersey or Bergen specifically, I’m not sure.”

Whatever Bergen’s attraction for immigrants, it’s now home to the second-largest immigrant population in the state and the fourth-largest undocumented immigrant population. In 2021, nearly a third of Bergen’s residents (30.9 percent) were foreign born, versus a national average of 13.6 percent. And one Bergen municipality, Palisades Park, boasts the state’s highest percentage of immigrants at 64 percent. This is nothing new, of course. Bergen has been a home to immigrants since it became the first permanent Dutch settlement in North America in 1630, and in subsequent years it has welcomed (sometimes grudgingly) new waves of immigration, from French Huguenots in the late 17th century to Italians in the 19th and early 20th centuries to Japanese starting in the 1970s.

Bergen was also a destination for American Blacks from Southern states between 1910 and 1970—though the county’s first Black residents were enslaved Africans, brought here by early Dutch settlers. Since well before the United States was a country, immigrants and migrants have been shaping and reshaping Bergen County.

“Immigrants add a cosmopolitanism to Bergen that you don’t often see in suburban counties,” says Christine Eubank, a professor of history at Bergen Community College. “Immigration has made us a kind of world county.”

REASONS TO PULL UP ROOTS
Whether arriving on a steamship, a bus or a Boeing 777, immigrants have been coming to America for centuries seeking a chance to better themselves and their families and, at the same time, fleeing those things that have threatened their lives and/or livelihoods, including poverty, famine, lack of educational or employment opportunities, persecution and fear of violence, either personal or political. For example, Yaumel, who now resides in Bergen County (and asked that we use his first name only), fled his native Cuba in 2019 for fear of political reprisals against his family for his outspoken criticism of the government.

“I was many times attacked by the dictatorship,” he says. “They did not accept me in the workplace, and they threatened that if I did not change my mind, my family would also be expelled from their workplaces. I decided to take the risk and leave my country so my family would not have problems.”

Moscow notes that in recent years, LGBTQ immigrants from Uganda—which has the world’s most draconian “anti-gay” laws—have fled their birth country for fear that they could be arrested and put to death for their sexuality.

Some immigrants come to the U.S. through legal channels, obtaining the visa known as a green card, the first step toward U.S. citizenship. But the number of people seeking to immigrate far exceeds the limited number of green cards issued annually, and many enter the country as asylum seekers or simply make their way here outside of legal channels.

WHAT IMMIGRANTS FACE HERE
Living in a world county may well have increased Bergenites’ tolerance for immigrants. We certainly haven’t experienced the kind of overt opposition to immigration, or criticism of immigrants as a group, that’s prevailed in other parts of the country. When asked about vocal opponents in the county, for example, officers of Bergen’s immigrant-aid organizations were hard pressed to name any. “I don’t know of anybody,” says Carolyn Sobering, cochair of Community of Friends in Action, the Leonia-based immigrant-rights network, “and I think I would’ve just because I’m so active in that community.” Even so, the immigrant experience today in Bergen isn’t an easy one—and it’s even less so for those who arrive here without papers. The greatest initial challenge may be language.

“The language barrier,” says Sobering, “leads to a lot of problems: problems finding housing and employment, accessing services, registering their children in school.” It also affects those children, whose educational needs and abilities aren’t easy for schools to assess thanks to language limitations.

Another challenge is affordable housing. Bergen’s long immigrant history and proximity to New York City may make it more welcoming in terms of access to nonprofit organizations that work with immigrants and, among other things, help them find a place to live. But that proximity to the city has also made Bergen’s real estate among the country’s priciest, with little in the way of affordable housing—for immigrants and American-born residents alike.

For the undocumented, challenges are more acute. If they find employment, it’s more likely that employers will take advantage of them, knowing that they’ll be less likely to complain for fear of arrest or deportation. Moscow tells the story of one immigrant worker who was let go without ever having been paid. He advocated for the man, who was eventually paid a portion of those wages—Moscow notes that it’s illegal to withhold wages, even from an undocumented worker—but the worker in question was afraid to push the situation any further. Even when asylum seekers have received the legal authorization to work known as an Employment Authorization Document (EAD), they may not be home free, since EADs need to be renewed, and in our overburdened immigration system, that often doesn’t happen in a timely manner.

Finally, although Bergen tends to be tolerant toward its immigrants, they often face discrimination, for their ethnicity, their difficulties with English, their legal status—sometimes even their success. When Korean businesses began to proliferate in Fort Lee in the early 2000s, residents complained that their business signs were only in Korean, an apparent affront to non-Asians who, Matsumoto says, “felt alienated.” The town government ameliorated the problem when they mandated bilingual (English-Korean) signage.

As of this writing, no immigrants have been bused to Bergen in circumvention of New York City regulations, as they have in towns like Edison, Trenton and Secaucus. But in those localities, officials have often been vitriolic in their denunciations of the undocumented. If those buses were to terminate in Bergen, they could reawaken the kind of anti-immigrant sentiment that emerged in the early 2000s when a group known as the United Patriots of America regularly protested in Bergen, scapegoating immigrants as destructive to the U.S. economy.

THE BENEFITS TO THE COMMUNITY
Immigrant-owned businesses are one of the critical elements that have helped make Bergen more cosmopolitan than many suburban counties—a place where a pan-Latin meal, a cup of bubble tea, or a Korean spa treatment is often literally just around the corner. Immigrants have brought more tangible benefits to the county as well. Importantly, they’ve been a counterweight against the loss of residents that’s plagued many New Jersey suburbs. In 2022, for instance, Bergen experienced a net loss of 3,350 residents, most of them leaving for less congested, less expensive locales outside the state. That number would be significantly higher—closer to 4,300—without the influx of new immigrants.

And their economic impact is significant. The nonprofit Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy determined that Bergen’s undocumented immigrants pay more than $68 million in state and local taxes annually. And, as they do elsewhere, immigrants in Bergen often take jobs that are difficult but integral to infrastructure and daily life. “People don’t realize how much they depend on them,” says Sobering. “When they go into a restaurant in Bergen County, they don’t see behind the swinging doors who’s doing the dishes, who’s cooking some of the food.” Latina immigrants, for example, make up 5 percent of New Jersey’s entire workforce, cleaning homes, laboring in factories, picking produce, and doing other jobs that might otherwise go unfilled.

As a group, immigrants tend to be highly motivated. “You don’t leave your country, go to another country, especially one where the dominant language may not be yours, and figure you’re not going to do anything,” says Moscow. “Immigrants work their butts off.” Many become entrepreneurs, as the proliferation of immigrant-owned downtown businesses attests. In fact, the richest person in New Jersey is an immigrant: Rocco Commisso, a Bergen resident who founded the cable company Mediacom and is among the 100 wealthiest Americans.

If immigrants are hardworking, they also pass that work ethic onto their children. “There’s documentation that the children of immigrants, that first generation born here, tend to do very, very well,” says Moscow. They also do very well in school, he says, if the schools are supportive of the needs of children who begin their educational journey in Bergen with minimal, or no, English.

In Bergen, support encompasses celebration. Last year, the county sponsored its first-ever Pakistani heritage festival, along with festivals celebrating the ethnic traditions of two other significant immigrant groups here, Indians and Koreans. The celebrations offer residents an opportunity to learn more about some of the people who’ve brought the world to Bergen. They’re also an acknowledgment of Bergen’s rich, multicultural milieu. And they stand as a thank-you of sorts to the people who continue to enrich us, with their past and their presence.

A VOICE FOR BERGEN’S IMMIGRANTS

Are you an immigrant or the child of an immigrant? If so, Christine Eubank and her colleagues at Bergen Community College hope you’ll share your story through East80West, an oral history project launched this past fall. They’re seeking the experiences of immigrants both documented and undocumented. Of the latter group in particular, Eubank, a history professor, says, “We would like to help make them visible, in ways that won’t put them at risk.” The stories will be used to create a verbatim theater production in September of 2024, and the plan is to incorporate them into a permanent local history archive at Bergen Community College. Stories will be collected through June 2024. To learn more, go to east80west.com.