Thread: Can Immigration Save the Cities?

http://www.emagazine.com/view/?2866

Can Immigration Save the Cities?
By Jim Motavalli

Wausau, Wisconsin may seem like the furthest thing from a global mega-city, but the forces in play in this small city are echoes of the worldwide issues of population and immigration. Over the past decades Wausau has received a large influx of Hmong, a nomadic Laotian hill people who fought under the direction of CIA advisors during the Vietnam War era. After their communist enemies won control of Laos in that country’s civil war, the Hmong were largely abandoned by the international community, and many fled for fear of being killed in retribution of their pro-American efforts.


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With 5,000 Hmong now living in Wausau’s Marathon County, and 400 more in the pipeline in 2004, the Wausau Daily Herald paints a rosy picture. “Health systems are in place to accommodate the newcomers,� the paper wrote. “Residents have donated enough household goods to satisfy the initial material needs of a majority of incoming refugees.� The article offers encouraging statistics about Hmong integration, employment and home ownership.

But not everyone is pleased with the steady stream of refugees. The Stevens Point Journal attended a stormy meeting of a tri-county consortium last year. “We need to be rattling some cages in Madison because of the fiscal impact of this,� said consortium chairperson David Pagel. “We need to be talking about how we will pay for increased services and workloads.�

The first influx of Hmong from the late 1970s to the early 1990s created strains in Wausau. When the CBS program 60 Minutes visited, three quarters of the 4,000 Hmong then in the city were on welfare, and their children made up a quarter of the city’s elementary classes. Writing in the Atlantic Monthly, Roy Beck noted that the Wausau school district’s property tax rate rose 10.8 percent in 1992 alone, partly because of costly bilingual education programs. “Now we’re beginning to see gang violence and guns in the schools,� said former Wausau school board member Fred Prehn. Many of the tensions have since eased as the Hmong have left the welfare rolls and integrated into Wausau’s mainstream, but some say a new influx has strained resources (and led to what some Hmong say is a new pattern of discrimination, including a “parking ban� at a downtown park).

The issues in Wausau are a microcosm of the growing pains many American cities are experiencing as they try to cope with large immigrant populations. Many Midwestern states would not be growing at all if it were not for immigration. According to the Midwest Coalition to Reform Immigration, two thirds of the 1.5 million new residents of Illinois by 2025 will be immigrants. Los Angeles (13.1 million population in 2000) is the destination of 41 percent of California-bound immigrants, and must service the needs of more than 500,000 school students with Limited English Proficiency (LEP) and provide services for the immigrants who make up nearly half the welfare population. California’s net cost for providing government services to illegal immigrants approaches $3 billion per fiscal year.

“As their populations grow,â€? says Bill Ryerson, president of the Population Media Center, “cities like Los Angeles are already finding that the cost of keeping their educational, industrial, commercial and transportation infrastructureâ€â€

Many Midwestern states would not be growing at all if it were not for immigration.

Exactly, genius! That's the point. Americans intrinsically realize the value of stabilizing population growth. Yet for some reason, our elected officials refuse to.

Exactly!!

Citizens do not want their communities to grow in population. Citizens want their communities to grow in manufacturing with good jobs which is called Prosperity.

Developers want communities to grow in population so they can level more trees and build more houses.

Banks want communities to grow in population so they can make more home loans and issue more credit cards.

Local governments want communities to grow in population so they can tax more homes; collect more property taxes; and give pay themselves Big Fat Cat Salaries and Benefits.

The result of these misguided objectives is our present economic woes including massive illegal immigration undeterred if not encouraged by local officials in most areas across the country in direct conflict with the will of their citizenry.