It would be tragic enough if the sorry results were the consequences only of desperate displaced persons fleeing to a haven of hope from the circumscribed possibilities of their birthplace. But the story is far more sordid. A majority of these people were lured here deliberately, because, as American citizens, they can vote. They are a power behind ex-Congressman Vito Marcantonio, until recently the only American Labor Party member of the House, who rules the wretched section into which a majority of the 600,000 have poured from leaky ships and from miserable chartered planes which are almost beyond description. The Puerto Ricans at this moment are costing New York City $12,000,000 a year in relief. There is no residence-period requirement, that having been knocked out during the LaGuardia administration, when Marcantonio's word could wipe out law. Not only are many of these Puerto Ricans on relief within an hour after their feet land on a dock or a secondary airport, but some are already booked on the dole in advance, while they are in the air or on the water. Until recently Marcantonio maintained a full-time representative in the office of the Welfare Department, whose business it was to get his constituents not only registered on the rolls but also provided with fat and flowing allowances, using broadly every channel created for emergency cases. Now it is done surreptitiously, but still done. For voting, the law requires one year in the state, four months in the county, one month in the district. But it is impossible to check, even if the holdover handout officials would want to. The Puerto Ricans all look alike, their names all sound alike and if an inspector calls in one of the swarming flats in the teeming tenements, nobody speaks English. Travel agencies whip up the movement through agents in Puerto Rico. The newspapers and the bill-boards and even signs stuck beside the dirt roads of the remote regions shout with bargain rates as low as $20 for a flight to New York; ship transportation is sometimes even cheaper than that. Very few Puerto Ricans at home have or ever have had $20. But the money seems to come from somewhere. Privately, these poverty-numbed, naïve natives are sold a bill of the tremendous possibilities in the great New York which they have seen in the movies and in the patent insides of their local sheets. They are told that here fortunes await many and the rest can quickly go on relief for sums undreamt-of by them or their fathers' fathers. The result is a sullen, disappointed, disillusioned mass of people, alien to everything that spells New York. The children quickly learn to resent the fact that, though they are Americans, they are foreigners who cannot speak the language and are thus teased and humiliated in schools and on the streets.