In Little Guyana, Proposed Cuts to Family Immigration Weigh Heavily

Richard David’s face is plastered around the Richmond Hill neighborhood of Queens. Along Liberty Avenue, on posters in the windows of sari shops and roti restaurants, Mr. David advertises his campaign for City Council, which, if successful, would make him New York’s first city councilman of Guyanese descent.

One of Mr. David’s campaign promises: securing money for resources like immigration lawyers or language assistance for the diverse neighborhood that includes Little Guyana, a hub of the largest Guyanese community outside of the country itself.

It is also the community in New York City that could lose the most from a new federal effort to cut legal immigration in half, in part by limiting what are known as family preference visas, which go to the siblings, grandchildren, in-laws or adult children of United States citizens, as well as the spouses and children of legal permanent residents. That is exactly the kind of visa that allowed Mr. David to immigrate from Guyana in 1995, and that helped bring other members of his family into the country, too, as recently as last month.

“Eight family members of mine just came through family sponsorship on the Fourth of July,” Mr. David said. His grandmother sponsored two adult daughters, who also brought their children. Of the proposed immigration bill, which was endorsed by President Trump last week, Mr. David said, “This could cease or significantly reduce Guyanese migration to the country.”

It is unclear if the bill will ever become law.

The Guyanese community brings in more people through family preference visas than any other immigrant group in the city. Of the Guyanese in New York City who received legal permanent residence between 2002 and 2011, 60 percent entered on family preference visas, according to a 2013 report by the Department of City Planning. Thirty-seven percent entered as immediate relatives, an uncapped visa category that includes the spouses, parents and minor children of citizens.

Foreign-born Guyanese people make up a tiny share of the United States as a whole — just over 280,000 people in 2015, or 0.09 percent of the total population — but a hefty share of New York City’s immigrant population. More than half of the Guyanese population in the United States lives in New York City, according to city data, making it the fifth-largest immigrant population in the five boroughs and the second-largest in Queens.

“Their propensity to come to New York City is very high,” said Joseph J. Salvo, chief demographer at the Department of City Planning. “And they are heavily reliant on family preferences — and reliant on categories that, under this proposal, would disappear. There’s no question that they would be affected in a dramatic fashion.”

The bill, sponsored by Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and David Perdue of Georgia, seeks to reduce the number of people granted legal permanent residency each year — currently more than one million — by 41 percent in its first year and 50 percent by its 10th year, according to its sponsors’ estimates.

To do that, it proposes narrowing the definition of immediate relatives, removing parents from the list and lowering the age of qualifying children to 18 from 21. Siblings of citizens, as well as the adult children of citizens or permanent residents, would no longer be eligible for family sponsorship. The total number of family preference visas would be cut to 88,000 a year, a 60 percent reduction from the current 226,000.

Of New York City’s Guyanese immigrants who became legal permanent residents from 2002 to 2011, 45 percent were the parents, married children or siblings of citizens, or their spouses or children, according to the city’s data — meaning that, if the proposed bill had been law at the time, nearly half of new Guyanese immigrants to the city would have been ineligible.