An Inconvenient Truth

The New York Times tells the story of one suburbanite's battle against the injustices of immigration as they play out on his block in Elmont, on the Nassau/Queens border on Long Island. Patrick Nicolosi is an idealist posing as a realist: he wants immigration and housing laws enforced strictly, in order to keep a lid on school taxes, which have risen 57 percent in four years to accommodate, in part, illegal immigrant families. The article does a good job of showing how the injustices cut several ways, and of portraying the divided sympathies of the neighborhood—which was first settled by European immigrants last century. If the point of the piece is the fruitlessness of trying to solve the immigration problem one block at a time, it also impartially shows the frustrations of homeowners who want to keep the suburban nature of their neighborhoods intact.