The Puerto Rican Problem

Puerto Rican immigration was different from European immigration, in that there wasn’t a specific time period in which the Puerto Ricans came to New York. It was much easier for them to emigrate, and they could return home whenever they pleased. It wasn’t that simple for the Italian and Irish immigrants. However, the immigration stories are somewhat similar, at least they started off similar. They resided in similar neighborhoods in which newcomers lived, they lived in poor unsanitary conditions, and they worked low-level unskilled and semiskilled jobs. However, this is where the similarities between European immigrants and Puerto Rican immigrants stopped.
Companies and factories in New York thought that the Puerto Rican immigration was important to save small firms with small profits, which they did by taking blue-collar jobs. The Puerto Ricans, being the latest immigrants to come to New York, would assimilate when the time came, as did the Italians and Irish before them, but the city officials did not give them this chance. Soon enough, city departments started to talk of the “Puerto Rican problem.”
The decline of manufacturing employment in the city hit the Puerto Ricans the worst, since so many of them w worked in this industry. All the other immigrants were able to rise up the economic ladder by starting off where the Puerto Ricans did, but now it was not possible. Structural limitations in employment and promotion opportunities froze the Puerto Ricans in a “permanent condition of semipoverty.”
Public discourse states that Puerto Rican immigration, not labor market instability or excess low-income housing, caused the reemergence of the slum. They blamed Puerto Ricans for the rise in juvenile delinquency rates and decided that the city should make efforts to discourage any further migration of Puerto Ricans.
All of this seems greatly unfair to me. Why were all of these blames thrown on Puerto Ricans? They were only one of the many groups of immigrants to come to New York, but New York apparently harvested a great hatred for these people. “The overcrowding, the filth, and the decaying physical environment, and juvenile crime, gang rumbles, drug abuse, and other deviant behaviors were rarely conceptualized as the possible consequences of exploitative housing conditions or structural conditions of poverty. Instead, a wide range of social problems and deviant behaviors were uncritically coupled to the slum and the character traits (or flaws) of its residents” (Mele 130). The worst part is that the Puerto Ricans were not even given a chance to rise up the ladder that all the prior immigrants had climbed. They were thrown off the ladder after they reached the first rung. If they were given a chance, they would have risen up and taken skilled jobs, moved to middle-class neighborhoods, and assimilated into the culture. However, city departments blamed the Puerto Ricans for all the things gone wrong, including the reemergence of the slum. Moses bore a significant detestation for them since he was the one trying to redevelop working-class and residential districts. He made it so that Puerto Ricans were kicked out of their homes and neighborhoods to redevelop the apartments, and when the immigrants came back, the apartments were way out of their price range. I find all of these things done by the officials and departments of New York to be wrong because the Puerto Ricans didn’t deserve any of the blame. They were the ones who came here when factories and workplaces needed workers following the war. They helped New York in its time of need, but New York didn’t help them.