On the Move
Many U.S. localities that are accustomed to St. Patrick's Day parades are now hosting Cinco de Mayo celebrations, thanks to an influx of immigrants from Mexico. And it's not just happening in big 'gateway' cities, says migration expert Susan Martin. Today, a growing number of immigrants, typically Hispanic and Asian, are moving to rural areas and small cities in the South and Midwest. The northwest Arkansas town of Rogers saw its Hispanic population grow from less than 5 percent in 1990 to nearly 20 percent a decade later. Attracted to jobs in local poultry processing plants, the immigrants changed the demographics of the town. Rogers and five other communities are featured in the book 'Beyond the Gateway,' co-edited by Martin and Elizbieta Gozdziak, scholars at Georgetown's Institute for the Study of International Migration. Associate University Editor Anne Glenzer recently asked Martin about the trends and research findings.
Q: What did you see in these new settlement areas?
A: What we found in each of these cases was that the communities were very ill-prepared to deal with large growth in immigrant populations. They didn't have the institutions you would have in New York City or Los Angeles or Chicago to help you with language differences, cultural differences, etc. But in almost all of the communities there also was recognition that the growth in the population presented a lot of opportunities.
Q: What services would immigrants find, for example, in New York or Chicago?
A: Those gateway cities would have people who could do translation and interpretation for the new population. So in a hospital, if somebody came in who didn’t speak English, there's a good chance that translation services were somewhere available. The school systems had English as a Second Language programs … and aides who spoke other languages. There would be traditional settlement houses, nongovernmental organizations that would be intermediaries between the immigrant population and the political and business elites. They would have ethnic entrepreneurs and businesses to serve the new immigrants. All of this was missing in the new settlement areas.
Q: So even basic communication presented a challenge?
A: In Rogers, Arkansas, there happened to be a bank manager who was Cuban-born. And because he spoke Spanish, he ended up being the person responsible for figuring out how to integrate the immigrants. New settlement sites often have to bring in people who have the skills to train school officials, police, city officials and others. The dynamics are quite different when you're starting from scratch. And the resident population doesn't necessarily understand or know what is happening to their communities, so some of the community tensions are quite understandable.
Q: How do they overcome language and cultural barriers?
A: What we found was that in some of the successful models, community groups began to develop to serve as intermediaries. ... One of the best programs we saw was in Winchester, Virginia -- the Latino Connection. It came about because there had been a number of cases of maternal and infant mortality. In today's day and age, for women to go into a hospital to deliver without ever having prenatal care just seems so strange. They realized there was this large and growing population -- mostly Latino -- that was not receiving health care, was not receiving education, was not receiving any kind of social service. The providers didn't even know they were there. So the Latino Connection was a way that the service providers who were concerned about this could come together, get the training they needed in order to respond to the new population and then be able to reach out to the immigrants and pull them into the services.
Q: How do social services deal with the newcomers?
A: They deal with it with great difficulty and a lot of challenges. It's not an easy process. There often is a lot of backlash within communities when the pace of immigration picks up so rapidly. ... It's a very tricky role for services agencies. It's hard when the newcomers are legally in the country. It's even more difficult when they're here illegally. The communities have very legitimate concerns that this is a violation of the rule of law. Some people may be benefiting financially from having cheap labor, but what is that doing to the fiber of the country when we tolerate large numbers of people in an underclass without legal rights? So it's a difficult tension -- between your desire to make sure that individuals don't suffer because of their lack of legal status, but then not necessarily validating an illegal process that can be harmful for a number of reasons.
Q: So do services differ depending on legal status?
A: From a social service point of view, particularly from a public health point of view, those distinctions are meaningless. Most disease doesn't say, 'I will infect you because you are here legally and I won't infect you because you're illegal.'
Q: How does the influx of new residents affect the community as a whole -- other than Cinco de Mayo parades?
A: A lot of the communities that saw new growth in immigration were cities that were losing population. … Take the demographics. If you have an aging community, you may be orientating your services and your businesses toward the needs of the elderly. If you have an immigrant population coming in, chances are that they have much larger families and children. Then you often end up with the dilemma: Will the older citizen taxpayers vote to have their tax dollars go to the schools for teaching immigrant kids? They may know it's the future of the town. But they need to get through what it means to be shifting the nature of the community, to be dealing with English not being spoken.
Q: And what fuels that shift?
A: The immigrants themselves need to begin to have a standing within the community. That they are a source of tax payments, not just tax benefits. But until they are able to exercise political power, they will be in a difficult situation.
Q: Rogers, Ark., tried an interesting approach. Tell us about the immigrants' experience there...
A: At first, it was mostly young, Latino men coming on their own. They got jobs, but they were very transient. Some community members resented the influx of Spanish speakers with no families or roots in the community. In the meantime, many of the immigrants lived in overcrowded housing due to a lack or affordable rentals. The Cuban-American bank official had an idea that addressed both problems, finding a win-win situation. If the workers could buy homes, they could then bring their families and settle down. Companies were very interested in this idea because they had built their recruitment strategies around cheap labor, but they found that the turnover was so very high. They thought that if they can get the population to settle down that would be beneficial. So they allowed the bank official to provide financial literacy classes for the immigrant workers on-site at the companies. They projected a message from the school system, from the bank, from the mayor, that, 'You are now a part of our community, and we want to welcome you and we want you to settle.' It was very controversial. The mayor who championed the program for newcomers lost the election, in part for these reasons, the next time around.
Q: But did the programs work?
A: It wasn't a smooth process, but a lot of the workers did buy homes when they had the opportunity. The turnover rates at the company dropped hugely. The families started coming in, which brought new challenges to the school system and other services. But in the process, they shifted from a foreign transient population to a welcomed, settled population.
-- By Anne Glenzer, Associate University Editor
Source: University News
July 7, 2008
