Immigrants Are The Best Thing to Happen to Cities

Immigration is a loaded word, and in Hazelton PA, the mayor is on the warpath against what he sees as the biggest problem the scrappy town has ever faced. But in a thoughtful column by Julia Vitullo-Martin in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday, a cogent argument was made for how much better cities are with large immigrant populations.

Take Flushing Queens, for example. This was once a virtual urban wasteland, with boarded up businesses, empty sidewalks. No one wanted to live there or open businesses there…but immigrants have poured in and revitalized the streets with their shops, ethnic restaurants and pizazz.

Again and again, the most vital and booming American cities are those with high immigrant populations, she says. “Jewish diamond cutters, Korean green grocers, Chinese restauranteurs, Russian massage therapists, Irish bartenders, and Greek coffee-shop owners aren’t stereotypes. They are reflective or a real economic phenomenon. Immigrants sell goods an services to their own group,and, once successful, to everybody else. Armed with little capital, they start labor-intensive businesses that employ friends and neighbors. The settle in neighborhoods that are decrepit and manage to change that after they make the area their own.”

She cites the Dominicans as the people driving the next big wave of revitalization, who no longer stay just in the big cities but have spread out across the US. They are opening businesses in downtrodden population-losing cities like Reading, PA and Grand Rapids Michigan. The question is whether the hard-working upwardly mobile immigrants there ‘be able to reap the rewards of American society fast enough to get their children educated and keep them out of trouble?