Thread: Immigrants reshape Houston, America’s most diverse metropolis

Immigrants reshape Houston, America’s most diverse metropolis

Oil men give way to imams in this hot urban sprawl of 6 million – black, white, Hispanic and Asian

August 27, 2014 6:00AM ET
by E. Tammy Kim @etammykim

HOUSTON — On Wright Road, near the cell phone parking lot at George Bush Intercontinental Airport, sits an enormous rectangular warehouse and parking lot stippled taxicab yellow. Sedans and SUVs imprinted with the blocky names of car companies line up head to taillight in countless rows.

Drivers of every nationality, age and background — nearly all men — wait hours to be dispatched to the airport terminal with the promise of a $53 fare.

They huddle around TVs, lift weights, gossip, pray and eat in a run-down concrete shelter that once served as a detention facility and is now Houston’s main taxi depot. There’s a circle of North Africans watching Arabic-language news, a lively pingpong game, a chess match and a lone Pakistani leaning back in a plush armchair. In the only air-conditioned part of the structure, not far from the two food trucks parked outside, drivers nuke their lunches in microwaves stacked on the cement floor, and part-time students read and surf the web.


From left to right: Houston taxi drivers Mohammed, 49, who uses one name, Ali Sayed, 55, and Sam Arnick, 63, at the airport depot. E. Tammy Kim / Al Jazeera America

Ebrahim Ulu, an affable, round-faced man with a broken gait, begins a sultry 14-hour shift in July. A teacher and public-health worker in Ethiopia, he came to Houston in 2007 on a diversity visa, a certain number of which go to countries with historically low rates of immigration to the United States. “For six months, I slept in the car in order to buy a car and bring my family from Africa,” he said. Life today is much improved: After a long day of driving and waiting for customers, he comes home to his two young children and pregnant wife. He owns the car he drives, but must lease the right to operate a taxi in the form of a costly $170-per-week medallion.

The burden of having to rent the medallion from a middleman moved Ulu and his fellow drivers to form an unofficial union, the United Houstonian Taxi Drivers Association, in 2011. It’s the eighth organizing effort that Sam Arnick, a 63-year-old African-American driver, has seen in his long career as a Houston cabbie. “In the past we had 10 different ethnic groups out there. They didn’t trust each other, so we got representatives,” he said.

Each community of drivers — Latinos, African-Americans, East Africans, West Africans, South Asians — now has a voice in leadership, and the union has become a fixture at city council hearings, demanding more reasonable lease rates, improved sanitation at the airport depot, direct ownership of medallions and, most recently, protection against informal “ride-sharing” companies such as Uber and Lyft.

“I used to dream of going to the U.N., but the U.N. came to me,” Ulu said.


Chris Delphin, left, a Houston native, sits with his fiancé, Roy Brooks, outside their Montrose bungalow. In recent years, Delphin has "noticed a lot more interracial couples like us," he said. E. Tammy Kim / Al Jazeera America

In the past 20 years, Houston — that most Texan of Texan cities — has come to look more and more like the taxi drivers. Between 1990 and 2010,

Greater Houston added more than 2.2 million people (PDF) and now boasts a population of more than 6 million (the city proper has 2.2 million residents). The metropolitan area has eclipsed New York and Los Angeles to become the most racially and ethnically diverse in the United States.

A joint report published last year by the Kinder Institute for Urban Research and the Hobby Center for the Study of Texas (PDF) found that Greater Houston scores highest on the Entropy Index, which measures diversity according to the presence and relative proportions of the four major racial groups (white, black, Hispanic and Asian). All five Houston counties have become more diverse over the past two decades, with increased numbers of Hispanics (from 21 to 35 percent) and Asians (from 3.4 to 6.5 percent), a stable population of blacks (about 17 percent) and a decrease in whites or “Anglos” (from over 50 to under 40 percent), though rates of residential segregation remain high.

On July 12, Houston Mayor Annise Parker hosted her third annual Iftar dinner, symbolically breaking the Ramadan fast with 2,000 guests. “We have the largest refugee, expat and immigrant population in the U.S.,” she told the crowd, praising the city’s diversity and calling for a compassionate response to young Central Americans crossing the border. It was an un-Texan speech at an un-Texan meal delivered by an un-Texan politician: Parker is a three-term liberal and married lesbian. Her nuptials, however, took place in California, for her home state doesn’t recognize her wife.

‘People who heard about economic opportunities came here. You could come in and get a vehicle and get to work, get a fresh start.’

Sam Arnick
taxi driver and labor organizer in Houston

Amina Mohamed, 18, is a freshman at the University of Houston. She arrived as a refugee from Somalia by way of Kenya in 2005. E. Tammy Kim / Al Jazeera America

On maps, Houston resembles a spider web. Its two concentric freeways — Interstate 610 and the Sam Houston Parkway — and radiating highway spokes form neighborhoods as likely to be populated by new immigrants as longtime white, black and Hispanic residents.

The city has the highest concentration of refugees in the country, thanks to its strong network of placement agencies, job opportunities and reasonable cost of living. Since the late 1970s, the city has welcomed 70,000 refugees: Bosnians and Cambodians fleeing genocide, the Lost Boys of Sudan and Vietnamese, Iraqis and Afghans escaping destructive U.S. interventions in their homelands. According to a State Department spokesman, Houston's diversity begets more diversity. Refugees are placed in part on the basis of existing friend and family networks, which "can make a big difference in helping a refugee family successfully settle in the United States, assisting with everything from finding work to teaching American cultural and social norms." And it's not just Houston. Texas receives more refugees than any other state — nearly 7,000 in 2013 — and more than 10 percent of the nation's total.

Shirin Herman, a multilingual academic coach for Houston public schools, has worked with refugee students and families for the past 13 years. “Very often, I will have the occasion to meet a family here after 10, 15, 20 days, and the transformation is amazing. People from refugee camps in Tanzania and Myanmar haven’t eaten well, haven’t had water. You see how much basic things like that can change a person.”

Every refugee family is given a temporary starter package of a furnished apartment, food stamps and health insurance funded by the Departments of State and Health and Human Services. But “the trouble starts when the stress comes, when the rent subsidy runs out,” Herman says. “Language is a barrier, transportation, time is a barrier.” (Although Houston has a bus system and bike lanes and is building a light-rail system, it remains difficult to live without an air-conditioned car.)

Amina Mohamed, 18, arrived with her mother and three brothers in 2005 from Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camp. “We came here because there was war and starvation” in Somalia, she explains, though she was born and raised at Dadaab.


Shirin Herman, left, a multilingual academic coach for Houston public schools, counsels a young political refugee from South Asia. E. Tammy Kim / Al Jazeera America

Mohamed had never attended school but she put her mind to learning English and catching up on everything else. Meanwhile, her mother found work cleaning hotel rooms; her older brother drove a taxi. At Lee High School, one of Houston’s most diverse, she became best friends with girls from Azerbaijan and Sudan. She excelled in school and received a scholarship to attend the University of Texas at Dallas, but turned it down to stay close to home. “It’s not my choice, but I did it for my mom,” she says, wearing a shy smile and a traditional pink robe and patterned hijab. “Our cultural beliefs are that women are not supposed to be out without family.”

The family lives in Bellaire, an immigrant-heavy neighborhood west of Houston proper, in an apartment complex nicknamed “Little Baghdad.”

They worship at an English-speaking mosque alongside Indian, Pakistani, Nigerian, Egyptian, Ethiopian and Somali families. "I never felt like someone didn’t like me because of my skin color,” Mohamed says.

City policies have adapted to changes in the population. Last year, Mayor Parker signed an executive order requiring municipal agencies to provide services and information in the city’s top five languages other than English.

“Over 100 languages are spoken in Houston,” said Terence O’Neill, division manager of Houston’s Office of International Communities, but “immigrant and refugee populations and services is a very limiting way of thinking about [diversity]. People come here for all kinds of reasons. It's a prosperous city."

Houston, often called the capital of “the third coast” (which refers to the Gulf of Mexico), is predicted to see continued economic and physical growth from new immigrants and domestic transplants alike. The city’s job base — fueled by the nation’s largest medical center, energy companies, manufacturing, a vast arts district and the service sector — increased 7 percent in the last decade and will add another 18 percent in the next, economists say.

Life at the airport taxi depot is distant from, yet intimately linked to these larger forces. Passengers and fares track business patterns and housing trends — on Sunday, the rush of travelers arriving for weekday meetings; freshly pitched suburban asphalt; the changing faces of the drivers themselves. “Houston had an economic crisis in the 1980s. That’s how I got involved in the [taxi] industry,” said Arnick, the native Houstonian and former petroleum engineer. “People who heard about economic opportunities came here. You could come in and get a vehicle and get to work — get a fresh start ... There’s a lot of guys here with Ph.D.s, business people and senators. But now we’re all here.”

http://america.aljazeera.com/article...etropolis.html

Houston Crime Rate Climbs . - Google News

news.google.com/newspapers?nid=861&dat...id...Google News


Houston Crime Rate Climbs . HOUSTON - Major crimes reported were up 13 7 percent for the first half of the year and police offi cials say the city's economic ...

Originally Posted by HAPPY2BME

Houston Crime Rate Climbs . - Google News

news.google.com/newspapers?nid=861&dat...id...Google News

Houston Crime Rate Climbs . HOUSTON - Major crimes reported were up 13 7 percent for the first half of the year and police offi cials say the city's economic ...

The date on that article is July 24,1966 so it might not be relevant.

Click to see. Houston Crime Rate Climbs . - Google News then scroll down.

HOUSTON LEADS NATION FOR ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT MINORS' DESTINATION



by KRISTIN TATE 29 Aug 2014, 7:09 AM PDT

HOUSTON, Texas -- President Obama's Health and Human Services (HHS) has responded to the crisis along the Texas-Mexico border by quietly releasing illegal immigrant minors onto U.S. soil. 30,340 illegal immigrant minors have already been released in states around the country--4,829 were released in Texas alone. HHS' Office of Refugee and Resettlement (ORR) recently published additional statistics, showing how many unaccompanied alien children (UAC) were set free in various counties across the country. More were released in Texas' Harris County--in which Houston is located--than any other county in the nation.

As of July 31, 2,866 UAC were set free in Harris County.

Dallas County received the second most UAC in Texas--a total of 851 were released there. Denton County, which is considered part of the Dallas–Fort Worth metro-area, received the least number of UAC in Texas: 55.

Authorities have released far more Central American migrants in Texas than any other state in the nation. Many Texas residents are frustrated and others feel unfairly targeted by the federal government--the illegal immigrants will impose many costs on the state. Texas' schools, hospitals, and other public facilities will now be forced to accommodate the growing number of foreigners dumped in the state.

Educating the foreign minors will not be cheap; David Anderson, the Texas Education Agency General Counsel, recently pointed out that due to cultural differences and language barriers, it will be more costly to education immigrant children than it is to educate students who are U.S. citizens. In Texas, more than $45 million will be spent educating the UAC this year.

California also received a substantial number of UAC, but nowhere near as many as Texas, according to ORR stats.

It is still unclear how HHS decides how many UAC end up in each state.

Foster families, or "sponsors," for the migrants are often located through nonprofit organizations. Breitbart Texas has reported closely on the process of becoming a foster parent of a foreign youth.
The HHS website said, "Federal law requires that ORR feed, shelter, and provide medical care for unaccompanied children until it is able to release them to safe settings with sponsors (usually family members), while they await immigration proceedings. These sponsors live in many states."

It continued, "The sponsor must agree to ensure the child’s presence at all future immigration proceedings. They also must agree to ensure the minor reports to ICE for removal from the United States if an immigration judge issues a removal order or voluntary departure order."

Despite what HHS touts, many of the unaccompanied minors never show up for mandatory court hearings. Breitbart News previously reported that 90 percent of the released illegal immigrants in the Dallas area appear in court for an immigration hearing.

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-T...rs-Destination