Every Monday and Wednesday, dozens of migrants converge on a block of 34th Avenue in eastern Jackson Heights as part of the work of the Jackson Heights Immigrant Center (JHIC). They sit on folding patio chairs and makeshift benches at a long table in the shade to fill out asylum applications. A handful of volunteers—many of them also migrants, who have arrived in the last few years—helps them complete the paperwork. The applications seek to order and make sense of complicated trajectories of migration and mobility, fractured family histories, and experiences of violence, predation, and dispossession.

Still, chatter is often lively, and children play on the other side of the cordoned-off street. In summer, they splash in inflatable kiddie pools and toss beach balls, careful to avoid cyclists as they cruise down the open street.

Indeed, migrant presence on 34th Avenue is made possible in part by COVID-era planning and grassroots organizing. As families were stuck home with fewer places to socialize, neighborhood advocates across the city sought to transform city streets into pedestrian-friendly open spaces. People were, after all, staying home and thus not relying on the automobile transport of the recent past. In Jackson Heights, a local coalition fought to transform leafy 34th Avenue, with its bike lanes and landscaped medians, into a permanently pedestrianized thoroughfare. Their advocacy was successful. Now the street hosts bikers and runners, skateboarders, and, to the consternation of safe streets activists, the occasional e-scooter or motorbike.

The site and sight of migrant sociability, mutual aid, and bureaucratic labor reflect New York City’s recent transformations. Since 2022, over 200,000 migrants have arrived. Often sent on buses northward from the southern border, people from Central and South America, West Africa, China, and beyond have sought new lives in the city. (JHIC mainly serves Spanish-speaking migrants, who represent a large portion of new arrivals.) Many sought to escape armed gangs, failing economies, political violence, and ongoing indigenous dispossession. Their journeys have been complex and dangerous, involving multiple means of transport (airplanes, buses, walking), dealmaking with coyotes, uncertainty, and the dangerous crossings of international frontiers.

Once in the US, they have also found hostility or malign indifference, the Kafkaesque nature of the contemporary immigration and asylum system, and the difficult realities of everyday survival in one of the world’s most expensive cities. Compounding these challenges are the rumors and fearmongering, the racism and xenophobia, that render those in need into objects of scorn or terror—look no further than recent (unfounded, untrue) stories of Haitian migrants eating pets in small-town Ohio.

Unfortunately, the move by Southern governors to send migrants to “Democrat” cities has shifted dialogue on immigration. Eight years ago, following the election of Donald Trump, New York declared itself proudly and loudly a sanctuary city, but now the discourse is quite different. Today, policy makers and politicians, everyday urban residents, and online spaces often espouse a politics of resentment and mistrust.

Of course, the city itself has pitted asylum seekers against long-term residents. The mayor, for example, has repeatedly stated that regular services like library hours must be cut to fund assistance to the newest arrivals. In areas across the city where people struggle with rising costs of living and shrinking social services, regardless of social class, neighbors have organized against migrants and their demands on the system. He has also signaled his willingness to go along with Trump 2.0’s revanchist immigration policies, contravening the city’s long-standing sanctuary statutes.

Echoes of a newer, antagonistic messaging on immigration have found a home within liberal spaces: the Democratic convention of 2024 featured numerous “tough on the border” moments. Any mention of the manifold benefits of migration—increased tax bases, labor supplies, our country’s tradition of diversity—were few and far between. As deportations and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests have ramped up under Trump, the party has struggled to counter-message on migration, even as public opinion condemns the administration’s actions.

Anti-immigrant discourse and sentiment are never completely absent even in the most multicultural urban spaces, including Jackson Heights. Long celebrated as one the city’s most colorful and ethnic neighborhoods, the area has also experienced its share of challenges. Its lively street scene and stately co-op complexes have drawn newer, wealthier residents to the area, contributing to ongoing gentrification. But the pressures of housing affordability also extend to the bottom of the market. Basement apartments, long inhabited by mostly low-income immigrants of color, have skyrocketed in price, creating new pressures for poor residents.

The massive influx, moreover, has driven down the price of labor. Immigrants with a little more time under their belt are frustrated to no longer be able to command the same wages. On 34th Avenue, I’ve heard neighbors make dismissive comments about the assembled asylum seekers. Accusations of littering and improper garbage disposal feed into long-standing tropes of the dirty foreigner, incompatible with the order and civility of mostly white Western spaces. That those making the accusations are themselves not very far removed from histories of migration and settlement is a casually cruel irony.

In Jackson Heights, the lively coexistence of numerous ethnic groups speaks to previous rounds of displacement, migration, and settlement, clear evidence that evacuation from one site can prompt the creation of place and community in another.

But such cruelties are not always visible on 34th Avenue. In fact, both the open streets initiative and JHIC itself are the latest iteration of the activism of Nuala O’Doherty-Naranjo, a former assistant district attorney from Indiana who never sits still. Stuck at home during COVID, she decided to turn her stir-craziness into action and created a neighborhood mutual aid network that provided for people’s everyday needs in the midst of isolation and crisis.

As the pandemic waned and migration waxed, O’Doherty-Naranjo pivoted to addressing the needs of the city’s newest vulnerable population. Married to an Ecuadorian, she began to use her self-taught Spanish to help migrants file asylum claims. Indeed, as O’Doherty-Naranjo’s story illustrates, not all is hostility and antagonism. The COVID era, in addition to inspiring the creation of open spaces of leisure replacing the primacy of the automobile, also revealed neighbors’ capacity for mutual aid. In the case of her COVID care network, she activated thousands in Jackson Heights looking to help one another.

The lessons and initiatives of that era, of neighbors helping neighbors, have not fully dissipated, even if we treat the pandemic as a distant memory. Activism often begets more activism. Thus, in the wake of the influx of new arrivals, both long-standing and newly formed groups across the city have provided care, resources, and assistance. Rather than rejecting migrants, these projects welcome them as our newest neighbors and actively work against the intolerance of certain segments of the urban fabric. In light of state incapacity and the overextension of public services, moreover, they fill an important void in meeting great need.

The volunteers of JHIC are a diverse group of fellow New Yorkers, including myself. Some of them are fellow migrants who’ve been here a little longer and perhaps already won their asylum claims. Others are from immigrant families and see within the heartbreak and struggle of the current crisis echoes of their own stories and experiences. And some are like me: relatively affluent urbanites, often white, who want to lend professional skills or simply an extra pair of hands. Through her robust circle, O’Doherty-Naranjo has enlisted neighbors of all ages to lend a hand. Teenaged boys will appear to provide tech help, and older retirees aid in setting up the children’s play area. In this way, 34th Avenue is a vibrant site of sociality and cooperation.

Both popular and academic tales of the city often talk about displacement. Our urban areas are seen as hubs of churn and transformation, often at the expense of the most vulnerable, the racialized, the itinerant other. Long-term residents face pressures to remain in place, while new arrivals struggle to obtain space that offers even a glimpse of semipermanence. Often lost in these discussions of displacement, banishment, mobility, and evacuation are the ways the city itself is made through displacements elsewhere.

Thirty-Fourth Avenue is a reminder that displacement from one location, perhaps at a far remove, can instantiate emplacement elsewhere. Indigenous dispossession in rural Ecuador, gang violence in urban Venezuela, and failing popular economies in exurban Senegal have shunted modest people into movement.

But those displacements have, in turn, transformed New York City. In Jackson Heights, the lively coexistence of numerous ethnic groups speaks to previous rounds of displacement, migration, and settlement, clear evidence that evacuation from one site can prompt the creation of place and community in another. Thus, we can read 74th Street, for example—a vibrant Indian thoroughfare choked with traffic—as evidence of postpartition dislocations and expulsions but also as the classic American immigrant success story: small, thriving businesses and popular restaurants in which to gather; ethnic supermarkets that cater to diverse clientele; and what the urban thinker Jane M. Jacobs has termed “edge of empire.”

This empire of the displaced claims space in the city despite hostilities and everyday bigotry. Such spaces need not be permanent and stolid. Rather, they can occur fleetingly, occasionally, at distinct temporal moments.

And so, two days a week—weather permitting—migrants make place on 34th Avenue. There they transform a leafy block with a school into an asylum clinic, where new arrivals help their even newer comrades navigate the bureaucracy and legalese of forms. For a few hours—amid the bustle and grind of the city—this small stretch becomes a place for mutual aid, children’s play, and solidarity.