Views as Diverse as New York
Concerns About Terrorism, but Also About Xenophobia

By Michael Powell and Michelle Garcia
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, February 25, 2006

NEW YORK, Feb. 24 -- The look and feel of a tempest depend very much on where you sit.

Kathryn Wylde, chief of the Partnership for New York City, a gold-plated chamber of commerce, sat in an office in Lower Manhattan and talked with two fellows from prominent global investment banks about the political effort to block a state-owned company from Dubai from running much of the Ports of New York and New Jersey.

They just shook their heads.

"We are a global capital, and if this sort of craziness prevails, it would be suicidal for our economic health," Wylde says, summing up the sentiment. "But here's the good news: We don't think this country is crazy enough to cancel the contract."

Now travel 30 blocks north, to the cruise piers along the Hudson River, where the seven-tiered Norwegian Dream has just slid into its berth. The dock is a frenzy: longshoremen tossing ropes, porters hauling luggage, passengers sitting on their bags awaiting taxis. The view from here was pretty sour.

"Am I concerned? Yeah, it's nuts ," said white-mustachioed Joseph Cialone, 58, just back with his wife from a cruise through the eastern Caribbean. "I spent 30 years in the military, and I have a very big problem with turning port operations in my city over to a country where two of the 9/11 hijackers came from."

Cialone is not finished. "You want to say we're allies?" He snorts. "Right: We buy their oil and they buy our companies. That's not the same thing."

The political tumult stirred up by the port deal has left complications and confusion in its wake. Senators, House members, the governors of New York and New Jersey, and a mayor declaimed against the contract; President Bush parried; and in the end many New Yorkers appeared not entirely sure what to make of the furor. The most global city in the nation, blessed with a large and busy harbor, New York also nurses memories of enduring the worst terrorist attack in the nation, in 2001, an attack staged by 19 hijackers from the Middle East.

Those two facts are ingrained in this city and not easily reconciled.

"I remember when the Japanese bought Rockefeller Center and people were happy," Yvonne Swan, a recently retired ad saleswoman, said as she sat in the Second Wave Laundromat in Midtown. "This port contract wouldn't be a big thing if 9/11 hadn't happened."

Like a lot of people in vastly Democratic New York, she added, she feels it might not be such a big deal if "the president wasn't such an embarrassment."

Foreign newspapers have reported this story as a straightforward narrative of nativism vs. urbane internationalism, a struggle accompanied by more than a tinge of racism. And one can hear in some New York voices a touch of xenophobia, the sentiment that American ports should be run by American companies with American labor. Arab managers should stay away, according to this view.

"It doesn't take a brain surgeon to think that you want to keep the Arabs away from the controls to our harbor," Bill Glover, a former police officer, said as he watched the green-blue Hudson flow by.

In fact, U.S. companies began ceding control of the New York waterfront more than half a century ago. From 1900 to 1950, New York had the busiest waterfront in the nation. Vincent Montalbano, a veteran labor consultant, recalled that during the 1991 Gulf War the U.S. military did not want to ship supplies to Kuwait aboard anything other than American-flagged ships. But there were no U.S.-flagged ships available, even when the Defense Department turned to the seafarers union for help.

"It's even worse now," said Montalbano, who lives on Staten Island and is none too pleased about a firm owned by a foreign government running two ports within view of his house. "Everything is privatized or turned over to other flags."

That said, it is also too easy to attribute base ethnic and racial prejudices to those who oppose the deal. Immigrants from 100 nations make up half the population of Queens, yet several of that borough's leading politicians have raised loud voices against the Dubai contract. As Montalbano noted: "Either we are in a global war on terror or we're not, and that war is being fought out in the Middle East. It's not racism to raise concern about who runs our ports."

In Brooklyn, along Coney Island Avenue, 40,000 Pakistani immigrants tend their sari shops, halal chicken stands and real estate offices, and they still talk about the harshness of the post-Sept. 11 crackdown. But they are leery of too quickly attributing this current brouhaha over the ports to anti-immigrant sentiment.

"Maybe not everything is right with that contract. Remember, we suffered in those 2001 attacks, too," said Mohammed Razvi, executive director of the Council of Peoples Organization, a group that tried to protect Muslim immigrants in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks. "Still, naturally, we wonder if there's a subtext. And we worry it might lead to more discrimination."

There was, as this week wound down, confusion about the actual risk posed by letting a Middle Eastern company control terminals at the New York and New Jersey ports, which cover 20 square miles in two states. Few argue that the history of the New York docks is an advertisement for a good-management seal of approval: The toughest mobsters and racketeers in city history passed much of the 20th century competing for the best trucks to hijack and the most jobs to control.

"I'll take Dubai over the mob any day," said Mitchell L. Moss, a New York University professor who has studied the economy of the city's docks. "The Arabs will know how to deal with the eye for an eye on the waterfront."

Some counter that this is too easy a take. Joseph King, a John Jay College professor and former counterterrorism chief of the Customs Bureau in New York, described port managers as akin to kings.

"They have access to the computers for the Coast Guard and customs; they can track containers; they oversee security contracts," King said. "New York's ports are badly enough defended because Bush has ignored us. This is just another nail in the coffin."

The one place in New York, curiously, where the debate sounded almost muted was on the docks. Many workers in this world of giant cranes and grappling hooks and trucks that roar by night and day took the age-old view that a boss is a boss and a contract is greased.

What's to worry?

"It's a business deal beyond our comprehension," said Joe Mattio as he grabbed a meatball sandwich outside the Port Newark gate. "There's no patriotism involved. This is a business deal."