An important division is emerging between the rapidly growing, business-friendly “aspirational cities” like Reno, Boise, Orlando, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Salt Lake City, and the declining “Euro-American cities” like Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco, author Joel Kotkin argues in the current issue of the Weekly Standard. His article, picked up over the weekend in a column by George Will, lumps New York among the Euro-American cities and offers some unflattering quotes and anecdotes about our home.

Mr. Kotkin quotes Rick Szatkowski, senior vice president of an Internet marketing company based in Ft. Myers, Fla. “We have been able to grow and expand here in a way that would have been impossible in New York, where people can’t afford to live and smaller businesses have a hard time operating,” Mr. Szatkowski is quoted as saying. Mr. Kotkin reports that New York has fewer private sector jobs today than it had in 1969. He chides “Euro-American cities” for their “very low birth rates” and says that they “fail to create opportunities for their working and middle classes” and have “all but given up on improving education for middle class families.”

Well, we’d be the first to acknowledge that New York City’s tax and regulatory regime could be more conducive to small businesses, and that the city and state could make housing here less expensive by easing taxes and regulations. But with all due respect to Mr. Kotkin, we do think that, in lumping New York in with the other declining cities, he is missing something. For there are important ways in which New York, as a city of immigrants, has much more in common with the Sunbelt boom towns that Mr. Kotkin labels as aspirational.

For one thing, the birth rate distinction Mr. Kotkin makes just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, as any resident of Boro Park, Brooklyn, could have told him. New York City’s birth rate of about 1.57 new New Yorkers a year for every 100 residents is a lot closer to Clark County, Nev. (home of Las Vegas), where the rate is 1.59, than the 1.18 rate of San Francisco. The claim that New York is more “Euro-American” than Las Vegas, or than Phoenix, doesn’t hold up on demographic grounds, either. Percentage-wise, New York City has more Asian-born (9%) and Latin-American born (19%) residents than either Las Vegas or Phoenix, according to the Census Bureau. What could be more “aspirational” than to immigrate to a new country?

There are parts of Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island – even Manhattan, for that matter – that are dense with immigrant-run small businesses. If New York isn’t creating opportunities for the “working and middle classes,” no one seems to have gotten word to the working and middle classes who are choosing to make the city their home. As for giving up on improving education for middle-class families, what about the 50 new charter schools in the city being set up under the leadership of Chancellor Joel Klein and Mayor Bloomberg? What about Stuyvesant High School, where 51% of the student body is Asian-American?

Our own sense is that while New York went through a period of decline in the 1970s and 1980s, a comeback began in 1993 with the election of Mayor Giuliani. Much is yet to be done to consolidate the gains made under the Giuliani administration. But the immigrants settling in New York and the parents bringing new children into the world here are a sign that, when compared with residents of Phoenix or Las Vegas or any other Sunbelt city, New Yorkers are every bit as American and aspirational and most importantly optimistic as them all. And they will be only more so if the Republicans can muster the will to put through tax and spending reforms, and deregulation of business, that will make it easier for aspirations to be realized.