Visit Coney Island Avenue in Midwood on a Friday afternoon and you'd hardly know this is a community recovering from crisis. A stream of Pakistani immigrants file past Punjab Sweets Restaurant and into the gleaming white-and-green-tiled Makki Mosque. Men in loose fitting, light-colored traditional dress joking with teenage boys in sports jerseys and flip-flops, and women adjusting headscarves all jostle against each other as they duck out of the midday sun
and through separate entrances for afternoon prayers.
Despite the seeming normalcy in Brooklyn's "Little Pakistan," signs of trouble lie just below the surface. Two full-blown photographs adorn the doorway of Punjab Sweets, one portrays the Islamic holy city of Medina and the other the World Trade Center. An NYPD patrol car is parked outside Makki Mosque surveying the services, and a building with mirrored windows labeled "Immigration Services" in large block letters is across the street.
"This place, Coney Island Avenue, after ten o'clock now it looks dead. It looked like Manhattan before. Twenty-four hours a day there were people here; people now are scared," says Jhaved Chaudry, the owner of Lazzat restaurant across the street from Makki Mosque, where you can order a slice of pizza or a huge plate of spicy curry.
As for so many Americans, "before" means prior to September 11, but along Coney Island Avenue it also refers to a time when this community was just another bustling and expanding
immigrant neighborhood in New York City.
A time before deportations
The numbers are hard to pin down. The U.S. government offers some numbers on how many people were registered under the National Security Entry and Exit Registration System (NSEERS), which required immigrants from 25 countries (almost all predominately Muslim) to register with the government. NSEERS has led to many deportations, but there is little information on how many Pakistanis have been deported and even less on residents of Midwood specifically.
As of May 2003, the U.S. government reported that is had collected information on 82,581 people, at least 13,153 of whom faced deportation hearings. According to the New York Civil Liberties Union, the Pakistani government estimates that 15,000 Pakistanis have left Midwood since September of 2001, either due to deportation or fear of it. The community was once estimated at 120,000.
Jagajit Singh, programs director at the Council of Pakistan Organization (COPO), which was founded in the wake of September 11, estimates that Brooklyn's Pakistani community may have lost as many as 25,000 people over the past two-and-a-half-years. "They panicked and they fled," he said. "They fled the land of freedom to seek asylum in Canada. The Pakistani community was caught by surprise. They heard from the president of the United States that Pakistan was the first ally of America in the War on Terror, and then the Pakistanis were told to register, singled out as though they were the terrorists," commented Singh.
Though the NSEERS program ended in April of 2003, many still fear the "Notice to Appear" from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The deportations have abated, but the impact on Midwood continues to be felt. Horrific stories of midnight raids and government-chartered jumbo jets full of deportees headed back to Karachi or Lahore are still fresh in the minds of many here, and everyone knows someone who was sent back.
"One of the chefs here, he was deported," says Chaudry. "We expected him to come back around 9:00 a.m. for work one day and then he didn't come. He called me around 10:30 [and] told me that six or seven people had come to his house, broke the door and took him away."
While fear is still palpable, perhaps the impact of these deportations is best expressed in the nostalgia already present here, a desire to reminisce about a time when Little Pakistan was not a causality of the "war on terror," but a symbol of hope for many new immigrants.
If anyone can speak to the history of Little Pakistan it is Asghar Chaudry. Up two flights of stairs in a hallway heavy with the smell of curry, "Mayor Chaudry" divides his time between accounting and community work, as he's done for most of the three decades he has been in Midwood. Chaudry is also eager to describe a different time and a different neighborhood. "I said to a friend yesterday that once this area it was full of people walking; people came to this free country, they cut their hair and they were walking around like free Americans. All of these women and people came from small villages and the stores they opened here were brilliant, you know? The streets were full of people like a European city, walking arm in arm, shopping, and now it is all gone." Chaudry gestures past his office, adorned with American and Pakistani flags and photos of himself shaking hands with local politicians, and down to the street just beyond his shaded window.
Chaudry is quick to acknowledge that every country has a right to defend itself and even to deport illegal immigrants as it sees fit. However, like many others in Midwood, he feels betrayed that Pakistanis were so directly targeted. "There is every ethnic group here in the United States; they have Russians, they have Chinese, they have Spanish. Why should these people not be deported too? They are not all here legally. But they deported Pakistanis because they are Muslims, because, for shame, they think they are part of this terrorism."
Many businesses report a slight upturn in activity in the past few months. At Lazzat business has increased 5 percent following a 70 percent decline during the year after September 11. But the trauma of the past three years still lingers, and Chaudry worries that Midwood's Pakistani residents might never entirely recover their enthusiasm for a country they were once clamoring to enter.
"These people, they told their children when they were back in Pakistan: 'We are going to take you to a country where there is justice, where no one will touch you, where you will have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of everything.' And then at two in the morning the FBI and the INS are breaking down their door and arresting their father and they cry and say: 'Is this the country, father?'"
