Thread: Study: Pittsburgh drawing highly skilled immigrants

Study: Pittsburgh drawing highly skilled immigrants


By Rick Wills
PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Thursday, June 9, 2011

The Pittsburgh region attracts the most highly skilled group of immigrants in the United States, according to a study being released today by the Brookings Institution.

The report from the Washington, D.C., think tank found that 53.6 percent of immigrants in the region are highly skilled. About 13.7 percent of the region's foreign-born residents are considered low-skilled, with the rest being "balanced" in skill.

"The pattern we observe in Pittsburgh is one of the most surprising that we found," said Matthew Hall, an assistant professor at the Institute of Government & Public Affairs at the University of Illinois at Chicago and one of the study's authors. "The area is unique in the very high percentage of highly skilled immigrants, more than any other city in the United States. It is an area that is reclaiming its economic identity."

The region has a small overall number of immigrants, according to the report, which used American Community Survey statistics and a 2009 population estimate. Only 3 percent of the region's population is foreign born, as opposed to places like Cleveland, where immigrants make up 5.6 percent of the population; Buffalo, 5.7 percent; and Detroit, 8.9 percent.

Immigration trends here also run counter, in many ways, to immigration patterns in other parts of the country.

According to the U.S. census, 24.7 percent of immigrants in the United States were born in Mexico. The Pittsburgh region, by contrast, has only 900 residents born in Mexico.

"Pittsburgh is one of the few areas that still has not experienced Latin American immigration," Hall said.

Numbering 11,000, Indians are the largest group of foreign-born residents here, followed by people born in China, Africa and Canada.

The composition of the immigrant population here contrasts sharply with the city's reputation as a smokestack town, said Christopher Briem, a regional economist at Pitt's University Center for Social and Urban Research.

"For decades, job growth here has been in high-skilled areas like health care, education and technology, so the work force -- both immigrant and nonimmigrant -- has changed dramatically," Briem said. "Overall, we are near (Washington) D.C. and Boston in terms of overall education of the population."

Many in the region's immigrant population teach or study at the region's "very prestigious universities, like Pitt and Carnegie Mellon, schools that have a technical emphasis and attract students from all over the world," Hall said.

Of the nation's 100 largest metropolitan areas, 44 are destinations for highly skilled immigrants, where college-educated immigrants outnumber immigrants without high school diplomas by at least 25 percent.

Such destinations include large coastal metro areas like San Francisco and Washington, but also older industrial cities like St. Louis, Detroit and Cleveland.


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