More than 1,500 Puerto Ricans arrived in the U.S. last week. The majority were beggar-poor, had no prospects of jobs or any training. They were the 1947 version of the Okies who had fled from the Southwest's Dust Bowl. Instead of riding the highways, the Puerto Ricans rode the skies. Most of them arrived in the bucket seats of converted Army transport planes, operated by charter airlines at bargain rates. By last week, the migration from their crowded, poverty-stricken land to the U.S. was at flood tide.
Puerto Rico's sugar economy cannot support a population (2,045,000 in 1946) which has more than doubled since the U.S. took the island as a dependency after the Spanish-American War. About one in eight employable Puerto Ricans has no job. The average family wage: $20 a month (about one-third of minimum needs by Puerto Rican standards).
Many of the migrants are young ex-G.I.s and merchant seamen, who got a taste of U.S. living during the war and turned their wartime savings into plane tickets for their families. But thousands are middle-aged and elderly Puerto Ricans, who sold all their possessions to raise the plane fare. Said one Puerto Rican, a university graduate who left a shoeshining job in San Juan: "If they could swim, the chickens would leave."
"Spanish Harlem." The Okies were mainly California's problem. The problem of the Puerto Ricans is chiefly New York's; more than 90% of them land in New York City. Estimates are that 350,000 are now in burgeoning colonies in Manhattan, Brooklyn and The Bronx. The worst congestion is in "Spanish Harlem," a slum of old, dark, dirt-crusted, cold-water tenements on Manhattan's upper East Side.
Spanish Harlem has become one of the most densely peopled places in the western world. Social workers have often found as many as 20 men, women & children living in a single four-room flat. Beds are used in shifts. By day, the area's streets teem with children. In almost every block there is a sidewalk gambling game. By night, the streets crawl with idlers and men & women back from jobs as dishwashers, laundry helpers, needle-workers. The average wage for Spanish Harlem: about $30 a week.
Some of Puerto Rico's economic D.P.s have already gone back to their land, discouraged by what they find in the U.S. But the great majority hold on; bad as Harlem is, it is better than life in Puerto Rico. Hundreds of the migrants save enough in a year to make bargain-rate flights back to San Juan, only to return to New York with their relatives.*
High Price of Slums. Unemployment in Spanish Harlem has risen with each packed plane's arrival, and New York's state and city authorities have begun to worry about the area's rising relief costs, crime, the swift rise in tuberculosis and venereal disease.
Puerto Rico's home government, which knows that migration is the best and easiest solution to the island's unemployment, hopes that somebody will work out a plan to channel the migrants to U.S. farm and industrial areas. Any diversion of the flood would take a lot of doing; the Puerto Rican in New York or San Juan is subject to no more restrictions or compulsions than any other U.S. citizen.