Certain steps in this direction are being taken today in Pittsburgh as well, where during the 1990s the population declined by 9.5% to 334,563 people, while the number of immigrants living in urban areas increased by only 9,000. Last month, four local groups received $800,000 in grants from special funds to attract immigrants by providing them with jobs, encouraging students not to return home after graduating from local educational institutions, and promoting the benefits of ethnic diversity in local communities. In Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, a special commission was formed to consider ways to attract more immigrants. In Philadelphia, where the population has declined by 4% since 1990, a project is currently being considered to create a so-called "Office of New Philadelphia Residents," similar to such offices in New York and Boston. The goal of the "Office" is to assist newly arrived foreigners. Among the supporters of this project is Philadelphia City Council member James F. Kenney. Implementation of the project will provide the city with advertising in American embassies abroad and will allow for an increase in the number of gates at Philadelphia's airport for flights from both Asia and Latin America.
– We have a problem with human resources, – said Grant Oliphant, director of planning at the independent Heinz Endowments, which awarded the grants. – Today, regional economies are highly dependent on the human factor and people's professionalism, and it is very difficult to attract new businesses to regions that are losing people.
Not long ago, officials in many cities viewed immigrants as a significant problem for the public services sector, and local workers considered them competitors. However, the rapidly growing economy of the late 1990s made immigrant labor (at all skill levels) a very valuable commodity, and foreigners, who typically have younger and larger families, filled local neighborhoods that had emptied after many native middle-class residents chose to move to the suburbs.
Most American cities have only recently begun taking steps to attract immigrants. These measures are all part of broader projects aimed at increasing the population. To some extent, their implementation has contributed to certain demographic trends: 2000 census data shows that the influx of immigrants into growing cities – such as Charlotte and Las Vegas – compensates for the outflow of native-born residents from Chicago and New York to the suburbs.
It is still too early to predict how successful these projects will be, and their organizers are closely watching how other cities retain newly arrived foreigners. For example, in Louisville, where the population declined by 5% during the 1990s, the new city Office of International and Cultural Affairs plans to publish online by the end of next month a list of translators that public service workers can use. As Louisville officials assure, the city's population would have been even smaller if not for the approximately 20,000 immigrants and refugees who arrived at the end of the last century from Congo, Somalia, Vietnam, and other countries and tripled the number of immigrants living there.
The Albuquerque City Council passed a law last December making the city 'immigrant-friendly' and allocated $50,000 to create a fund for the needs of arriving immigrants. Thanks to the influx of Latinos, Albuquerque's population has recently increased by 16%.
However, while city administrations ponder the problem of population decline, demographers express concerns about whether city authorities can influence immigration-related issues.
– The research does not clarify cause and effect. Does the influx of immigrants lead to the creation of new jobs, or vice versa – do jobs attract immigrants? – asserts Jeffrey S. Passel, a demographer at the Urban Institute, which conducts social policy research in Washington.
However, even if cities are attractive enough for immigrants due to jobs, housing, and established ethnic communities, critics of such programs still fear that the influx of foreigners could create significant problems for local social services.
– Politicians who believe that immigrants can solve the demographic problems of their regions are shortsighted, – believes Sharon McCloe Stein, executive director of Negative Population Growth Inc., a population advocacy group in Washington. – Our country is already overpopulated. What we really need is a carefully thought-out dispersal of the people living in the country.
Pittsburgh city officials reject this criticism, but at the same time acknowledge that hiring immigrants is a significant problem for them, as Pittsburgh is the city with the least pronounced ethnic and racial diversity in the country. Among the country's municipal centers, Pittsburgh ranks 25th according to census data in terms of the number of immigrants who settled there over the past decade; the number of immigrants during this period increased by only 8,935 people (or 0.4%).
At the same time, between 1990 and 1999, the number of immigrants who remained in Miami and New York increased by 337,174 and 974,599 people, respectively. Overall, in 1999, such an influx of foreigners accounted for 15.5% of population growth for Miami and 11.2% for New York.
Once associated with the steel industry, supported by a wave of workers arriving from Italy, Ireland, Germany and Eastern Europe, Pittsburgh managed to transform its economy after steel mills began to declare bankruptcy in the 1980s. However, according to city officials, the city's polluted image has scared away many immigrants and businessmen, and now thousands of vacancies in healthcare, biotechnology, and computer programming remain unfilled.
Moreover, demographers say it is very difficult to attract immigrants to settle permanently in a city where sufficiently large foreign communities have not yet formed. Only 2% of Pittsburgh's population and its surroundings are foreign-born residents, and many of them are elderly. Among the most populous places in the country, Allegheny County ranks second in the number of elderly residents, second only to Palm Beach.
Ethnic communities cluster in certain neighborhoods. For example, the Squirrel Hill area has become home to many of the 3,000 Russian speakers who immigrated to the city from the former Soviet Union. There is also a vibrant Indian community, mostly professionals in medicine and high technology. Latinos, according to the 2000 census, make up only 1.3% of Pittsburgh's population. That is far below the corresponding figures for Pennsylvania (3.2%) and the United States as a whole (12.5%).
Immigrants living here say that the decline of the steel industry, often blamed on foreign competitors, has made many Pittsburgh residents prejudiced against foreigners.
“People at the top, businessmen and authorities, are quite attentive to us, but the general population is still not very friendly toward immigrants,” says 32-year-old Anju Chopra, who came to the U.S. as a student from India in 1992 and moved to Pittsburgh from Florida with her 33-year-old husband Sanjay, an employee of a small software firm. “But anyway, we are very happy here.”
The Heinz Endowments gave $150,000 to Pittsburgh's World Affairs Council to strengthen international understanding; $200,000 to El Centro Hispano-Latino (a group that helps Hispanic workers and their families find jobs); another $200,000 to Pitsburgh Council for International Visitors to encourage 4,000 foreign students to stay after graduation; and $250,000 to the Center for Competitive Workforce Development at Duquesne University to identify ways to quickly adapt immigrants to new jobs.
Community leaders acknowledge that considerable effort will be required to create new incentives and overcome the atmosphere of distrust.
“It won’t happen overnight,” says Linda Ehrenreich, executive director of the Jewish Familly and Children's Service of Pittsburg, which has resettled two thousand refugees here over the past ten years. “It’s a long and contradictory process.”
_