For Release Sunday, March 30, 2008
© 2008 Washington Post Writers Group
By Neal Peirce
WASHINGTON -- Whatever our emotional reaction to the tide of immigrants flowing into America, it’s time to reevaluate.
That’s the short message of “Twenty-First Century Gateways,” a just-released Brookings Institution book focused on the numbers of immigrants and the remarkable geographic distribution of newcomers -- legal and illegal -- that the United States has been experiencing since 1990.
A century ago, immigrants were mostly a big-city phenomenon. As quickly as they arrived at Ellis Island or California ports, most headed immediately to ethnic enclaves in such cities as New York, Boston, Chicago, or San Francisco. Then they assembled in Little Italies, Chinatowns, Irish neighborhoods, Lower East Sides. Only a minority headed straight to the Midwest for farming.
But these aren’t your grandparents’ immigrants, notes lead Brookings author Audrey Singer. True, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago still accommodate the most arriving immigrants.
And a whole new set of major immigrant gateway regions has opened. Among them are Seattle, Dallas, Denver, Phoenix, San Jose, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Atlanta, Sacramento and Portland. And Washington -- up from 255,000 foreign born in 1980 to over 1 million in 2005. Coming on, though not yet fully flowered as major immigrant destinations, are Austin, Texas, the North Carolina cities of Charlotte, Greensboro, Raleigh, Winston Salem, and even Salt Lake City.
What’s significant is that most of the new immigrants aren’t sticking to the city proper. Instead they’re heading out to suburbs where most new job openings occur and housing (often in older inner-ring suburbs) is relatively affordable. That spells geographic dispersion -- far from the immigrants of the early 20th century.
Also worth noting: the last century’s immigrant destination cities that aren’t today drawing many immigrants turn out to be regions in some economic trouble -- Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia, for example.
Today we have some 35.6 million immigrants-- of whom some 12 million are here illegally. But another surprise: fully 40 percent of the “illegals” arrived legally. They came on legal temporary visas -- most arriving by air -- and then just stayed. So if we end up building the proposed mega-fence along the Mexican border, it may be just fractionally effective.
Most public focus is on a possible congressional immigration bill, close to the compromise measure that stalled last year. But even if it passes, it won’t be a silver bullet. Life in our communities, where the immigrants in fact live, depends heavily on state and local decisions.
This is a hot issue. As of last November some 1,560 immigration-related bills, three times the prior year, had been introduced in the 50 states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Topics ranged from IDs to employment rights, driver’s licenses to restrictions on employment of undocumented workers.
Plus, countless cities and counties are debating laws to address day-labor sites, loitering, language, employment, rental housing occupancy rules and the like. Many measures are anti-immigrant, motivated by decline in the economy, job competition and general suspicion of foreigners.
Farmers Branch in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex voted to make it illegal for landlords to rent to illegal immigrants. Hazleton, Pa., won national attention for an ordinance penalizing employers that hire illegal immigrants and landlords who rent to them. Arizona, Oklahoma and Georgia passed laws to discourage hiring illegals. The sheriff of Mecklenburg County (Charlotte), N.C., Prince William County (Va.) and some other locales are openly cooperating with federal immigration officials hunting down illegal entrants.
But mayors of several cities (including New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco) have declared their towns “sanctuary cities,” forbidding their police to report undocumented immigrants. Singer reports that police often oppose identifying illegal immigrants for fear the newcomers will then be afraid to communicate with the police about local crime incidents – the polar opposite of successful community policing.
Many communities print materials in immigrants’ native tongues. Plano, a thriving suburb north of Dallas, is a national model on the “assimilation” side with a multicultural “roundtable” to discuss issues, a citizens academy to teach about the local government, a festival to celebrate the town’s many nationalities, and major outreach to new immigrants through its libraries.
Illinois has a public-private state-level task force focused on immigrants. It’s urging programs to help immigrants learn English, establish state welcoming centers and put legal immigrants on a path to citizenship.
Should we welcome the welcomes? Yes, yes, says Maryland Labor Secretary Thomas Perez. Without immigrants, he says, there’d be massive shutdowns, from hotels to hospitals. In Maryland, a quarter of scientists and a third of doctors are foreign-born -- critical to the state economy’s ability to grow and add value jobs. Places that try to exclude immigrants will only hurt themselves, Perez argues. And, he argues, immigrants’ payments are sustaining the nation’s Social Security system to the tune of billions of dollars.
Indeed, the “greying of America” argument may be the clincher -- Who’ll do the work, who’ll pay the baby boomers’ huge retirement bills if it isn’t a fresh supply of immigrants?
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