Trump Wants America to Revert to the Queens of His Childhood

During President Trump’s formative years, Queens — the New York City “outer borough” in which he grew up — was transformed from an all-white enclave into a racial and ethnic battleground. The forces unleashed in those struggles shaped Trump’s current policies on both immigration and racial integration.

Trump was born on June 14, 1946. Until he was four, he lived in a two-story mock Tudor home built by his father, Fred, just south of Grand Central Parkway in Jamaica Estates.

In 1950, Donald and his family moved around the corner to a grander 23-room, 9-bathroom redbrick — also built by his father — at 85-14 Midland Parkway.

“The Jamaica Estates of Mr. Trump’s boyhood was an exclusive and nearly all-white place, resistant to outsiders and largely impenetrable to minorities,” The Times reported in 2015. In fact, the 1950 census found that at that time, 96.5 percent of the 1.55 million Queens residents were white.

Taken together, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 — with attendant white flight — drove the upheavals that converted Queens into one of the most diverse counties in the nation. To those who love it, it is a vital, dynamic, multicultural community of people who enrich one another’s lives in myriad ways. To Trump, residents of modern American inner cities are “living in hell.”

In 1960, when Trump turned 14, there were so few Hispanics that the census did not keep count; by 1970, when Trump turned 24, 153,691, or one out of 13, Queens residents were Latino. From 1960 to 1970, the black population of Queens grew from 145,885 to 258,006. ...