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Chapter 4. The New Metropolitan Geography of Immigration: Washington, D.C. in Context
- State University of New York Press
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C Ch ha ap pt te er r 4 4 The New Metropolitan Geography of Immigration: Washington, D.C. in Context AUDREY SINGER The front door of the Long Branch public library in suburban Montgomery County in Washington, D.C. welcomes visitors in 11 languages. This is not a symbolic gesture meant to embrace multiculturalism, but a reflection of the clientele served by this branch library. Inside, library visitors can find print, audio, and visual materials in major world languages and a language lab to sharpen their English language skills. A telephone interpretation service is offered in 140 languages. As the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. has long been an international city. However, it has only recently joined the ranks of major metropolitan immigrant destinations. In 1970, only 4.5 percent of greater Washington ’s population was born outside the United States. By 2000 one-in-six persons or 17 percent of metropolitan Washington’s population was foreign-born.1 While the entire metropolitan area population, 1970–2000, grew by 54 percent, the immigrant population has quintupled during the same period. Greater metropolitan Washington now ranks as the 7th largest metropolitan concentration in the U.S. Region wide, 21 percent of the region’s population communicates in non-English languages at home. Washington fits into a class of metropolitan areas that have recently emerged as new immigrant gateways . Places like New York and Chicago have long held an attraction for immigrants throughout the 20th century , and large metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles and Houston rapidly gained foreign-born residents after World War II. However, in the 1980s and 1990s, settlement patterns began to shift away from more traditional settlement areas to many places with little history of immigration. Washington along with places like Atlanta and Las Vegas have in the last decades of the 20th century, become significant destinations due to burgeoning job markets, particularly in the construction, services, and technology sectors. Although in absolute numbers the majority of immigrants are still going to the established destinations, rates of growth of the foreign-born have been fastest in the newest destination areas. The changing metropolitan geography of immigrant settlement is transforming many new cities into emerging gateways as well as continuing to change the character of more established ones. This chapter describes this new geography of immigration, and highlights how immigrant destinations in the 1980s and 1990s differ from earlier settlement patterns. Drawing on a growing body of research on immigration to Washington, D.C., trends are examined in detail to illustrate an immigrant gateway that has recently emerged as a major destination. TWENTIETH CENTURY IMMIGRATION AND SETTLEMENT TRENDS During the last century, immigration to the United States has ebbed and flowed (see Figure 4.1 which shows both the number of immigrants and the share of the population that is foreign born by decade). The foreignborn population increased between 1900 and 1930, from 10.3 million to 14.2 million; however, as a percentage of the population, the foreign-born peaked in 1910 at 14.7 percent, dropping to 11.6 percent of the total population. 46 Audrey Singer During the depression in the 1930s, the worldwide movement of people was curtailed and immigration to the United States stalled. Immigration levels were low during the period between WWII and the late 1960s due to restrictive immigration laws that resulted in a diminishing of the number of immigrants, 11.6 million in 1940 to 9.6 million in 1970. At the same time, lower levels of immigration coincided with the “baby boom” when fertility rates were high, producing lower proportions of the total population that were born outside the U.S. This percentage dropped to a low of 4.7 percent nationally in 1970. By 1980, the immigrant share of the population began to climb as the less restrictive immigration laws enacted in 1965 brought fresh waves of immigrants numbering 4.5 million during the 1970s. This policy change, together with the mobility fostered by economic growth in many developing nations, brought about an immigration boom of unprecedented proportions in the 1980s and 1990s. By 2000, the foreign-born population numbered 31.1 million or more than 11 percent of the population. Figure 4.1 In addition to the swings in immigrant entries, the origins of immigrants have changed considerably during the course of the 20th century. Today most immigrants come from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia, but for most of the 20th century, they came largely...