Josh Barro, Columnist

What Jury Duty Taught Me About Immigration

In Queens, people from all over the world engage in an American pastime: weaseling your way out of jury duty.

May 9, 2013 at 2:44 PM UTC

Josh Barro is the lead writer for the Ticker, Bloomberg View's blog on economics, finance and politics. His primary areas of interest include tax and fiscal policy, state and local government, and planning and land use. Previously, Barro was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a commercial real estate banker at Wells Fargo. He holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Harvard and lives in Queens, New York.

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This week, I spent a day on jury duty at the Civil Court in Jamaica, Queens. I didn't get picked for a jury, but I did see what an American civic institution looks like in the most diverse county in the U.S.

Queens is full of immigrants: 1.1 million immigrants live there, just under half the borough's population, and they came from all over: 48 percent from Latin America, 37 percent from Asia, 13 percent from Europe and 2 percent from Africa. More than 100 languages are spoken there. So the crowd in the Central Jury Room in Jamaica on Tuesday was much more diverse than you would see in most courthouses, if equally grumpy.