Who is my neighbor?

Star Tribune Tue, 18 Mar 2008 04:37:29 GMT
More and more immigrants finding that suburbia offers best place to live

The Twin Cities have become an immigrant gateway, says a report, and it's happening mostly in the suburbs. These aren't your grandparents' immigrants. Once associated with teeming inner-city tenements, immigrants are now increasingly a suburban phenomenon in the Twin Cities and eight other so-called "gateway cities" identified Monday in a national report. The seven-county metro area has also emerged as one of the nation's fastest-growing immigrant gateways. Between 1980 and 2005, the region's immigrant population swelled from 72,000 to 267,000, an increase of about 270 percent. The Brookings Institution report, which carries implications for schools and employers across the area, shows that today's immigrants are chasing jobs and opportunities where they are more likely to be found: in the suburbs. "There's still a television sitcom image of the suburbs as lily-white, prosperous places with tidy lawns and families with two cars. That's certainly not accurate," said Katherine Fennelly, a professor at the University of Minnesota's Hubert Humphrey School of Public Affairs and co-author of the report's Twin Cities section. Nationwide, more immigrants in actual numbers came to the United States during the 1990s than in any other decade, especially in places outside traditional magnets like New York and Los Angeles. Drawn by jobs, housing and schools, one in five immigrants today lives in one of the nation's nine new gateway communities, including the Twin Cities. "There's a new geography of immigration and it's here to stay," said Audrey Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-editor of the study, "Twenty-First Century Gateways." "Most of the integration that we're talking about ... happens at the local level."

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