A Mathematics of Migration
Shortlisted for the 2015 FT/McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize for the best Business Proposal from an author under 35
November 2015
EXCERPT from the Shortlisted Proposal.
It's not even been an hour since Hicham asked -- kindly – if the young men hanging about in front of his store could – kindly – move. And yet, here they are, back in their original spot, laughing and chatting in the inscrutable patois of the adolescent American male. Outside, a white sun bleeds along the edge of a tired-looking warehouse, staining the barred windows, spilling light onto the shiny awnings of the stores across the street – a 24-hour deli, a Korean beauty shop, a West African law office. Hicham’s English is not so good, he reminds me, but it is clear from his tight expression that he is annoyed by his regular visitors. ‘What can you do?”
He sighs and stares out the window of his large, tidy corner store in this large, tidy corner of the Bronx.
When most people think of the Bronx, what they really have in mind is the South Bronx: the graffiti, the grime, the ghettos of the 1980s. But the northern precincts, where Hicham has settled with his family and manages a trio of successful corner stores operated by various pseudo-relatives, are an oasis by comparison. Wide, hilly boulevards are lined with compact Italianate houses, arrayed in hypnotic shades of alternating red and burgundy and brown. In this borough that development and gentrification have bypassed, the mid-century houses and buildings stand at their mid-century heights – no more than 3 stories high. There are trees and birds and clear views onto poor, gray Manhattan, whose pale-faced residents are kept paler by an SPF of unceasing skyscrapers, which grow ever taller every year, feeding unchecked on an endless supply of leverage, ostentation, foreign cash, and brutal lawyering. Here in this patch of the Bronx, the genteel front yards teem with flowers and shrubs that scarcely seem native to the country, let alone to the city. Plants that are vestiges, perhaps, of some green-thumbed game of colonial telephone whereby the Caribbean homeowners recreate in America the luscious gardens that the British tried to recreate in the Caribbean.
Outside the subway station — the last stop on the line, the first stop of many new arrivals — the country’s melting pot bubbles fervidly: thin-shirted, paint-splattered Albanians and Brazilians set off for construction jobs where they will water the skyscrapers with their sweat; Guatemalans and Mexicans, wearing baseball caps and thick cotton polos with the names of Italian-American landscaping firms on their fronts, head to nearby Westchester to tend to gardens beneath the torching sun; middle aged, professionally-dressed Caribbean women board downtown express trains to offices in Manhattan; baby-faced Hispanic and African-American kids in an assortment of uniforms, walk in slow, bleary-eyed procession towards Catholic and now, increasingly, charter schools; a young White woman in a black hijab and purple ballet flats buys a bottle of water from the Egyptian food vendor, who, though it is only 9AM is already preparing rice and gyro dishes, leaking smells of lamb and curry into the atmosphere.
In this de-Uberized zone, where any discretionary income is saved or sent back home, handfuls of Jamaican men call out “Cab, Madam? Taxi, Sir?” They stand expectantly besides their unlocked BMWs, smiling placidly, hands outreached, as though hoping to catch in their arms the desperate manager running horridly late for a meeting and willing to bear an early-morning extortion if it will get them into ‘the city’ right now.
Meanwhile, our teenaged friends remain in their exact same spot, having calculated via some male mammalian sonar that the location where they are huddled is the single most efficient one for the breeding of their friendship. I turn towards Hicham and he shakes his head slowly, exasperated, like someone who has a good deal to say, none of it politically correct. Instead, he smiles.
“You know,” he starts, “in my country, I was a jurist and every day you fight with someone – the police, the driver, the security guard. In Yemen, you can’t live an honest life. It’s not possible…”
“These boys,” he continues, “they are like baby stress. I don’t worry. I don’t bother nobody and nobody bothers me.” Thinking to myself that, actually, he appears quite bothered, I suddenly spy the boys – baby stresses 1, 2, 3, and 4 – exchange fraternal hugs and pats, then split, half entering the subway, the other half walking up the hill towards 233rd Street.
“America is stress stress stress,” he picks up, “but, I am free, yeah? Nobody bothers me in America.”
Excerpt from the Shortlisted Proposal.
Links:
To enter next year's Competition
Announcement of the Shortlist in the Financial Times
Announcement of the Winner in the Financial Times: Christopher Clearfield + András Tilcsik for their proposal on Rethinking Risk.
Good luck + Many congratulations to all the nominees.