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Opportunity knocks in 'El Norte'

Region attracts immigrants from all over, and their ways of life are as diverse as they are

11:34 PM CDT on Saturday, October 22, 2005

By PAULA LAVIGNE / The Dallas Morning News

From a theater in Las Colinas that screens Indian films to a Sunday Mass in Spanish at a Rockwall church, the changes spurred by the 1 million immigrants who have settled in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in the last 15 years are obvious.

The region remains one of the fastest-growing major metropolitan areas in the nation, with at least a third of its growth fueled by people moving here from outside the U.S. But its emergence as one of the country's major gateways for immigrants holds a few surprises, according to a Dallas Morning News analysis.

The suburbs of North Texas offer a greater mix of backgrounds than do the two major cities.

While immigrants in the inner cities tend to be predominantly of Mexican descent, roots in the suburbs are spread more evenly among Mexico, India, China and other places abroad. And though they came to the suburbs for similar reasons – work, schools, family ties – not all of them share in suburban prosperity.

The area has seen two very different streams of immigrants: the highly skilled who arrive with the help of local employers, and the unskilled who come seeking any available job because the alternatives back home are bleak.

"People think all immigrants start out the same," said state demographer Steve Murdock. "They start out with different skill sets ... and those will transfer from one society to another."


Different paths
Outside North Texas' big cities, the immigrant population is still relatively small, making up 10 percent or less of the total population of most Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs.

For example, Mexicans make up just a third of the new immigrants in Collin County – in stark contrast to the city of Dallas, where three-fourths of the new arrivals since 1990 have been Mexican. Chinese and Indian immigrants each account for 10 percent of new immigrants in the suburbs.

There are no local data that detail how many Indian, Chinese and Mexican natives are legal or illegal residents. But nationally, more than half the Mexicans in the U.S. were here illegally in 2000. In contrast, between 6 percent and 8 percent of Indians and Chinese were, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services estimates and total population numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau.

While the same holds true for thousands of Mexicans, it's more likely for Asian and Indian immigrants to arrive in North Texas by invitation from high-tech companies, health care providers or colleges. Construction laborer is the most common occupation for all Mexican immigrants in the metro area, according to a Dallas Morning News analysis of 2000 census data. For Indian and Chinese immigrants, it's computer software engineer.

If they're corporate transfers, a company arranges their immigration clearance and will often assign someone to help them find a house, enroll their children in school and even intervene if they're having trouble getting their utilities turned on.

Illegally crossing the Rio Grande – which is how about 52 percent of immigrants from Mexico arrive in the U.S. – often leads down another path.


No safety net

Statewide figures show at least 1.4 million illegal immigrants were in Texas in 2004, and about 30 percent of those were in Dallas and its suburbs, said Jeffrey S. Passel, a senior research associate with the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research institution in Washington, D.C.

For illegal immigrants, there's not much to rely on, especially if they can't speak English. If an employer refuses to pay them, if their spouse gets sick, or if their children struggle in school, they often can't navigate the system, or they're afraid.

The same people often look down on Mexicans as a drain on resources – bilingual education and health care, for example – and believe they're qualified only for low-wage jobs such as framing houses and cleaning bathrooms.

Every year, migrants working under false Social Security numbers contribute billions of dollars that go unclaimed. The money goes into a a little-known Social Security account called the earnings suspense file, which grows at a rate of about $6 billion a year and now stands at about $376 billion.

Other economists argue that illegal immigrants sap the educational system and public health care, and that they keep wages and benefits for U.S.-born workers artificially depressed.

The stereotypes assume that people in China and India are better educated and work harder than Mexicans, but that's far from true, said Stephen Klineberg, a sociology professor at Rice University.

American employers skim the cream of the crop from places such as India, China, Nigeria and the Philippines, he said, and these highly educated people from middle-class backgrounds are not representative of their countries as a whole.

For instance, India is one of the poorest countries in the world; about 25 percent of its population is in poverty. But uneducated, unskilled Indians can't make it into the United States the way someone from Mexico can, by walking across the border and blending into any South Texas town, Mr. Klineberg said.

People with college degrees who are fluent in English and have the social habits of someone from a professional background will fit in quicker in America regardless of their country of origin, Mr. Klineberg said.

"It has nothing to do with whether you're Asian or Latino," he said. "It has to do with your socioeconomic status on arrival."

Becky Bepko has noticed those differences. She's the elementary English as a second language coordinator with the McKinney Independent School District.

There are middle-to-upper-class Mexican families in the district who raised their children in a sophisticated, big-city setting and possibly enrolled them in private schools, she said.

"Most are able to transition into English much quicker because they have a strong Spanish background," she said. "Kids who come from rural areas in Mexico who have big gaps in their education – and their language is not good and they lived in poverty – they struggle the hardest."

Among new suburban immigrants, those from India and China have higher household incomes than immigrants from Mexico.

In Collin County, for example, new immigrants from China and India have median household incomes of more than $70,000; that's close to the median income of all residents in Collin County. The households of recent Mexican immigrants earn about $40,000. That's only slightly better than their counterparts in Dallas, who make about $35,000.


Lost opportunity

Coming to America was a bumpy ride for a 37-year-old Mexican woman who spoke to the News on the condition her name not be used because she is an illegal immigrant. The scar on her left thigh is evidence of her journey from Mexico City to Richardson.

She got it scaling fences – some 12 feet high – in her journey across the Rio Grande with a group of other migrants. She later moved to Plano, where she shares a modest apartment with her younger sister.

She left her two sons, ages 13 and 10 – and a job cleaning houses in Mexico City – for the offer of a better-paying job near Dallas.

"I needed to find work so I could get ahead," she said. "If nothing else, to help for my children's education and to give them what we couldn't have."

But when she arrived in the area, the current housekeeper – who was being fired – threatened to notify immigration. So she instead took a job at a fast food restaurant.

"When I started working there, I asked God for help because I didn't know if I was going to learn everything I needed to know," she said. "Everybody would talk to me in English, and I didn't understand."

Language is a barrier for almost 60 percent of recent Mexican immigrants. But they manage to get by with help from bilingual bank tellers, store clerks, teachers, police officers and others.


Wealthy immigrants

Although many Mexican immigrants in the suburbs are living in or near poverty, there are more high-income Mexican households than wealthy Chinese or Indian households – those where the income is at least $70,000.

"They think most of us Mexicans ... came here illegally, of course, and that we came without any education and didn't speak any English, [and] that we are not used to big cities," said Francisco Alvarez, a pre-kindergarten bilingual teacher in the Dallas school district.

But the opposite is true for Mr. Alvarez.

He taught English for six years in Monterrey, Mexico, the country's third-largest city, with more than 3 million people. His parents owned their own businesses – a silver mine and a pharmacy. And he learned English in high school and studied linguistics in college.

DISD brought him to Texas about two years ago as a bilingual teacher. And he and his wife and three children settled in a house in North Richland Hills, which he chose because there would be less crime and more serenity than in Dallas.

His experience is similar to that of Grace Pan, who moved to Plano from her hometown, Taipei, Taiwan, courtesy of Texas Instruments. She had been working for TI in Taiwan and was already fluent in English and familiar with most American customs.

Her move went well, in part because a TI liaison helped her find a place to live.

The company helps employees from different backgrounds find a home, a place to buy groceries and a place of worship. New hires also get some help enrolling their children in school, said Kim Quirk, a TI spokeswoman.

At Electronic Data Systems in Plano, the company helps foreign hires even before they leave home, said Kerri Odle, director of expatriate administration. Along with the basic logistics, such as arranging immigration paperwork and health care coverage, EDS helps employees and families with personal issues.

Both companies hire employees from overseas in part because they have offices all over the globe and sometimes need to shift workers among jobs in different countries.

TI employee Dhananjay Kulkarni, a native of Maharashtra, India, said working for such a prominent company has given him more confidence in becoming a part of the community.

Only once did he start to second-guess himself because of his immigrant status, he said.

He got into a spat with a desk clerk at a Plano tennis club over repairing a broken racket. The woman had been polite to the two American customers in front of him, he said, but her demeanor soured when he approached the counter.

At one point, he considered backing down from the argument because he was an outsider. But then he realized – immigrant or citizen – he had every right to stand up for himself.

"I work hard. I pay taxes here. I contribute to the society. I'm loyal to my employer. That's why I don't deserve that treatment," he said. "I'm a customer. I'm paying money. I should get what I want."

IMMIGRANTS WHO CAME TO D-FW BETWEEN 1990 AND 2000
North Texas' suburbs had a greater mix of new immigrants than urban areas. In the major cities and rural areas, the immigrant population is more than three-fourths Mexican. Here's a breakdown of how countries of origin stack up among all the immigrants new to these areas.

Collin County Dallas Suburbs in Dallas County Fort Worth Suburbs in Tarrant County Denton County
Mexico 32.9% 74.4% 56.7% 71.0% 45.1% 45.1%
China 10.2% 1.1% 0.7% 0.4% 1.9% 2.7%
India 9.6% 2.1% 3.3% 3.1% 3.4% 7.0%
Canada 4.5% 0.4% 1.5% 0.4% 2.2% 2.7%
North and South Korea 2.7% 0.7% 1.0% 1.0% 1.6% 4.0%
Vietnam 2.3% 1.8% 7.7% 4.2% 9.9% 3.0%
Taiwan 2.2% 0.2% 0.3% 0.2% 1.4% 1.1%
Britain 2.1% 0.2% 0.2% 0.4% 1.0% 1.3%
Iran 1.7% 0.4% 0.3% 0.1% 0.9% 1.8%

Source: Dallas Morning News analysis of 2000 data from the U.S. Census Bureau