This immigration had been different. The Puerto Ricans came not by ship, huddled in the steerage, but by plane. Being U.S. citizens, they beat at no immigration bars, never had their pictures taken in colorful native costume behind the wire enclosures of Ellis Island. They simply seeped in, landing by 20s and 30s from battered planes at La Guardia field, Teterboro and Newark, suddenly appearing beside their cardboard suitcases on the city's sidewalks outside a hole-in-the-wall travel agency.
Jobless, speaking a strange tongue, crowded into miserable tenements, thousands soon turned up on the relief rolls, costing the city $15,600,000 a year. Their children crowded the already crowded public schools. With shrill cries of outrage and alarm, the sensational journals gave tongue, blaming them for every civic woe. Feature writers found them living five and six to a room, two and three families to an apartment, in cellars and abandoned stores, even in coalbins. The average Puerto Rican was pictured heaving his disease-racked body off the plane and heading straight for a relief center. More sinister yet, he was herded about to vote for Communist-minded Congressman Vito Marcantonio.
Willing But Beset. There was some truth, but a lot of exaggeration in this alarming picture. Last week it was possible to get a clearer and cooler idea of the "Puerto Rican problem." Even Marcantonio's hold on the immigrants was not what it once was. Mayor William O'Dwyer's administration had done a lot to cut down Marcantonio's power, by installing Spanish-speaking teachers and relief workers in the neighborhood, thus convincing the new people that someone besides Vito Marcantonio took an interest in them.
Columbia University had just completed the first comprehensive study (which Harper will publish next month) of New York's Puerto Ricans. Columbia men surveyed 1,113 Puerto Rican families comprising 5,000 people. They found that one out of every three had been on relief at one time or another. They found a willing people, beset by all kinds of difficulty. "The opportunities for advancement seem increasingly narrow for the poor, the uneducated, and 'the foreign,' " said Columbia's report.
But the Puerto Ricans had also done better than anyone expected. Nine out of ten had found jobs. The percentage of Puerto Ricans on relief, authorities estimated, was now no more than other bottom-of-the-ladder groups, e.g., the Negroes.
"When you consider the language handicap and the economic position of these people when they arrived," said City Commissioner of Welfare Raymond M. Hilliard, "it is remarkable that the relief figure isn't higher than it is."
The Puerto Rican invasion began long ago, and slowly. But at the end of World War II, thousands of Puerto Ricans were seized with a sudden, simultaneous urge. In the four years-since V-J day, 122,935 Puerto Ricans have poured into the U.S. To them, the U.S. is New York City and 275,000 to 300,000 of them now live in its five boroughs.