The NYC City Council will debate this question beginning on Thursday, May 9, in connection with Intro 410, which would allow pre-citizens to vote in New York City municipal elections.

It wouldn’t be the first time noncitizens could vote in New York elections. School board elections, before they were abolished, were open to all parents of children in New York City schools, regardless of citizenship or immigration status.

To provide some context to the debate, the Fiscal Policy Institute prepared this data table.

It shows that of the city’s 6.5 million voting-age residents, a little more than half (55 percent) were born in the United States, automatically making them citizens. Another quarter (24 percent) are immigrants who have become naturalized citizens.

That leaves 21 percent of the city’s residents 18 years and older who are outside of the voting process. Altogether: 1.4 million people.

The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that there are about a half-million undocumented immigrants living in New York City—not all of them, of course, over 18 years old.

So, although we cannot give an exact estimate of how many non-citizen immigrant New York City residents are legally present in the United States, a good guess is about a million. That is a lot of people to be living here without political representation.

Commitment to citizenship seems like a fair condition of voting—this is, indeed, one of the central rights of citizenship.

However, many of these immigrants are already in the process of becoming citizens, a process that can take many years. In the meantime, they send their children to New York City schools, ride the New York City subways, and pay New York City taxes.

The attached data provides some sense of the reason for concern. The debate on this issue will start on Thursday.

Low-skilled immigrant workers allow Americans to engage in more productive endeavors. For example, the Fiscal Policy Institute found that immigrants operate 75 percent of New York City child care businesses. This allows American mothers to work and implies that these child care workers should get some credit for the tax revenues that those working mothers pay, but Heritage ignores this effect.

“It’s utterly unprecedented in the United States,” said Paul Sonn, legal co-director of the National Employment Law Project in Washington, D.C. “We’re not aware of any state that has adopted a tax credit remotely resembling this one, which will have the taxpayer pick up the tab for the cost of the minimum wage increase for a certain category of worker.”

….

Cuomo’s office estimates the cost to taxpayers at $230 million for the first four years of the credit, 2014 to 2017. But a Post-Standard review of statistics from the Census Bureau and the Fiscal Policy Institute show the cost could be more than $440 million.

The higher estimate relies on Fiscal Policy Institute data – drawn from the U.S. Census Bureau — that shows teens work 52 weeks a year, rather than the 35 weeks a year assumed in Cuomo’s estimates. In addition, the higher figures reflect an increase in the number of teens who earn more than $8 but less than $9 an hour who would be available for the credit in succeeding years as the wage and credit rise.

And that doesn’t factor any increase in the numbers of teens that employers may hire instead of adults 20 and older.

“The magnitude of the taxpayer cost depends heavily on how employers react in terms of substituting student teenagers for older workers,” said James Parrott, deputy director of the Fiscal Policy Institute.

A 2009 report by the Fiscal Policy Institute found that between 1990 and 2006, “the metropolitan areas with the fastest economic growth were also the areas with the greatest increase in immigrant share of the labor force.”

Here is New York in 2013: a city of dazzling resurrection and official neglect, remarkable wealth and even more remarkable inequality. Despite the popular narrative of a city reborn—after the fiscal crisis of the ’70s, the crack epidemic of the ’80s, the terrorist attack of 2001, the superstorm of 2012—the extraordinary triumph of New York’s existence is tempered by the outrage of that inequality. Here, one of the country’s poorest congressional districts, primarily in the South Bronx, sits less than a mile from one of its wealthiest, which includes Manhattan’s Upper East Side. And here, a billionaire mayor presides over a homelessness crisis so massive that 50,000 men, women and children sleep in shelters each night. More New Yorkers are homeless these days than at any time since the Great Depression.

The numbers tell the story. Between 2000 and 2010, the median income of the city’s eight wealthiest neighborhoods jumped 55 percent, according to the Fiscal Policy Institute. Meanwhile, as the cushy precincts got even cushier, median income dipped 3 percent in middle-income areas and 0.2 percent in the poorest neighborhoods.

Image: Susie Cagle. Source: Fiscal Policy Institute. High income neighborhoods defined by median family incomes $91,000 and above, low-income neighborhoods defined by median family incomes between $24,000 and $47,000.

New York, of course, has always been a city of striking contrasts, but its wealth gap is growing ever more extreme. The richest 1 percent of New Yorkers claimed almost 39 percent of the city’s income share in 2012—up from 12 percent in 1980. The money pouring in at the top of the income brackets has simply pooled there, without trickling down to the bottom or even the middle. This great pooling has occurred as median wages have fallen, the cost of living has increased, and the poverty rate has risen to 21 percent—as high as it was in 1980. As a result, America’s most iconic city now has the same inequality index as Swaziland.

This isn’t entirely New York’s fault. Over the last three decades, the whole country has experienced similar tectonic shifts, thanks in part to the national economy’s increasing tilt toward finance—a sector that has an outsize presence in New York, which helps explain why the city has not only mirrored but exceeded the nation’s rush toward inequality. “To the extent that New York is the home base for a lot of financial institutions, we have a lot of people who are able to pay themselves very well,” explains James Parrott, chief economist of the Fiscal Policy Institute in New York.

But, Parrott adds, the stewards of New York City—its mayor, legislators and other influencers—could have made choices to counter this trend: “New York City’s government is significant enough in its breadth…that the policy tools exist and the wherewithal exists to do something at the margins to lessen inequality.” The choices, however, that might have corrected some of the skew—within education, economic development, labor rights, poverty policy, budgeting—have largely been ignored in favor of creating a very different model of metropolis.

Image: Susie Cagle. Source: Fiscal Policy Institute, based on Pilketty and Saez’s top 1% income share for the US and FPI analysis of NYS Department of Tax and Finance and Division of the Budget data for NYS and NYC top 1% income share, 2010-2012 projected.

In “Bloomberg by the Numbers“, Aileen Brown cites several pieces of FPI research on the increase in business tax expenditures, the decline in city funding for human services, the decline in median wages, and other measures of well-being in NYC.

In “Interactive Map: Bloomberg’s New York”, graphic artist Susie Cagle also draws heavily on FPI research.

Date: May 2, 2013

Time: 9-11 a.m.

Location: New York Times Building, 620 Eight Avenue, 15th Floor. Due  to security protocols at the New York Times Building, RSVP’s for this  event are required.

In 2010, 27.9 million small businesses employed less than 500 people while only 18,500 firms had 500 employees or more, according to the Small Business Administration (SBA). Moreover, they represent 99.7 percent of U.S. employer firms and create 64 percent of net new private-sector jobs with an impact on over 44 percent of the total U.S. private payroll.

Sharing the impact in the new economy, Latino entrepreneurs make up 28 percent of small business owners, according to a new study by the Fiscal Policy Institute, and it is the fastest growing trend among all new businesses.

The number of millionaires in New York bounced back in 2010 after falling off in 2009, state records show.

The number of millionaires in New York reached nearly 33,000 in 2010, up 19 percent compared to 2009. Overall, the number of people with taxable incomes above $200,000 returned to the level in 2008, a review of records from the state Department of Taxation and Finance by Gannett’s Albany Bureau showed.

“The long-term trend has been to greater income inequality, more growth at the top,” said Frank Mauro, executive director of the Fiscal Policy Institute, a labor-backed think tank near Albany.

New York’s new MWRC will provide employers a tax credit for the hours worked by students between the ages of 16 and 19 who are paid at exactly the minimum wage. As our earlier explanation and assessment of this truly perverse measure explains, it would pay employers 75 cents an hour for each such student employed at the minimum wage of $8 an hour in 2014, $1.31 an hour for each such student paid $8.75 an hour in 2015, and $1.35 an hour for each such student paid $9 an hour in 2016, 2017 and 2018. Employers would get these credits even if the jobs involved had been previously filled by adults or non-student teenagers, and even if the jobs involved had been filled at higher wage rates in 2013. The resulting “bonus” for employers who hire one or more students in place of a full-time adult worker would be substantial, rising as high as $2,808 a year per worker. ($2,808 is the $1.35 tax credit times 40 hours a week times 52 weeks.)

Even though there’s no compelling evidence that a moderate minimum wage increase harms any business, the new MWRC has been made available to all employers, even the largest ones. Large employers of low-wage workers, such as Walmart, will reap the greatest windfalls from this credit.

Walmart has over a hundred stores in New York State and employs an estimated 28,500 workers. Government data for New York indicate that for discount retailers like Walmart, teenagers who are in school account, on average, for 11.3% of their workforces, and that these teenagers work an average of 18.7 hours per week, or 972 hours on an annual basis. Thus, if Walmart followed the broader employment pattern in the state, and if it paid all its teenage student workers at exactly the minimum wage, it would get a subsidy of $19 million over the next five years.

But a large multinational corporation like Walmart knows a thing or two about extracting subsidies from state and local taxpayers. By one estimate, Wal-mart has gotten $1.2 billion in subsidies from state and local taxpayers around the United States. So there is every reason to believe that they will seek to maximize what they can get from this new pot of taxpayer largesse.

About 18% of the teenagers that discount retailers employ are not students. Businesses like Walmart might start hiring just student teenagers because non-student teenagers wouldn’t generate a dime in MWRC subsidies. And they might also decide to hire student teenagers in place of adults. The legislation establishing the MWRC says an employer “shall not discharge an employee and hire an eligible employee solely for the purpose of qualifying for this credit,” $2,800 per year per full time equivalent position might tempt a large company to gradually replace adults and non-student teenagers in ways that stay on the right side of the law.

If a large employer like Walmart managed to hire 10% fewer adults and hire more teenaged students in their place, the five-year taxpayer subsidy would jump to $53 million. Hiring 20% fewer adults and more teenaged students in their place would boost the potential subsidy to $85 million over five years.

New York State’s new MWRC requires close scrutiny, not only because it is a huge new tax break for businesses, but because it could have adverse effects on the employability of struggling adult workers and because it incentivizes keeping wages right at the minimum. Public disclosure of how much individual companies receive under the new MWRC is essential if New York is to effectively evaluate the MWRC’s fiscal and economic impact.  New York’s much more accountable Youth Works tax credit already requires participating employers to agree to the disclosure of their participation and disclosure of the credits that they receive. Albany needs to require such disclosure under all business tax credits including the new Minimum Wage Reimbursement Credit.