Grow Detroit through immigration

[mwilbert]

Immigrants often see opportunity where natives do not, and Detroit is probably a good place for that. As has been said by others though, immigrants are attracted by the same things that attract other people; they may weight those things differently, but addressing the basic economic and quality-of-life issues is important for everyone.

[kraig]

Kraig, as one of those black middle-class Detroiters, I have long said that we need immigration into the city. Part of what makes a city great is its diversity -- and I can say without malice that a place that is over 75% black isn't all that diverse.

I also don't think dtowncitylover's land grab idea is all that farfetched. In fact, there's historical precedent:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Act

I'm right there with you. When I moved back into the City I chose the Southwest side because of it's diversity. If I don't have the opportunity to travel all of the world, I would like for small parts of the world to be close by.

[Ocean2026]

I've lived on different parts of the Texas-Mexican Border and have lots of experience with immigrants as I speak Spanish and have defended them in court.

If the feds would cooperate it would be a great idea for Detroit. These people would be happy to put sweat equity into a real brick house- and they would do it well. The commit less crime than others in their socio-economic class and are really friendly.

The inexpensive Mexican restaurants that would spring up would make everyone happy.

Its such a good idea .. that it will never happen.

[Lowell]

Most immigrants are risk-takers, adventurous and often fearless. It might seem dangerous to you, but if you were leaving a country with death squads, civil war and totally corrupt police, Detroit is a cupcake. Add to that super-inexpensive housing, burger-flipping wages where an hour's wage is a day's wage back home and Detroit can look like the promise land.

[ndavies]

With all due respect, this is not the 1960s or 1980s. This is 30 years later.

Did anyone even read the article I posted? There are studies showing the turn. A change is coming. Many large metros that have been traditionally associated with immigrants are too expensive for newcomers to set up small shops in.

Yes, I did read you article. and it states.

[quote]

"Newly arriving immigrants are likely to settle where there are job opportunities and affordable places to live,” says Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform. “It also dispels one of the key assertions of the immigration enthusiasts [[who) often look at the fact that immigrants tend to congregate in areas of the country where the economy is most robust, and conclude that immigration is the cause of economic growth. This study suggests that they are confusing cause and effect. If a robust economy exists, the effect will be an influx of immigrants." [\quote]

So we have affordable places to live. Other than that we have nothing. Thisis exactly what I am arguing. Fix the local economy, the city services and the schools and people will flock here.

It may not be 30 years ago, however immigrants mov to places for the exact same reasons they moved to places 30 years ago. They want a better life. Number 1 on the list of things needed for a better life is a good job. Followed closely by good schools for htier children. The last thing they want is a unsafe enviroment with crappy schools.

What everyone fails to realize is that the immigrants we are currently bringing into the country are highly educated people. The current immigration laws give priority to doctors and engineers. So without high paying jobs you will bring very few of them to the region.

Most of the recent immigration into the area has been Chinese and Indian engineers. Without the auto industry pulling these people in there would be very few immigrants coming here.

[Hermod]

What jobs are the Chaldean and/or Korean merchant classes in the city taking from residents that would have been available if they themselves were not present?

1. They are not taking any jobs from residents. Detroit's current residents are not interested in operating small grocery stores and dry cleaners.

2. There is a finite limit on the total number of Koreans and Lebanese that can support themselves by running small stores in Detroit. That would put a limit of growing the city through immigration.

[English]

1. They are not taking any jobs from residents. Detroit's current residents are not interested in operating small grocery stores and dry cleaners.

Untrue. I know of several young Detroiters who are interested in opening up small grocery stores, food shops, and beauty supply stores. There is a world of difference between "not interested" and "don't know how to obtain the start-up capital".

2. There is a finite limit on the total number of Koreans and Lebanese that can support themselves by running small stores in Detroit. That would put a limit of growing the city through immigration.

The only thing finite in this city -- the only thing that has EVER been "finite" -- is the imagination and vision of past generations, all due to their petty squabbles, and a lack of will.

[English]

Yes, I did read you article.

Thank you.

So we have affordable places to live. Other than that we have nothing.

This is exactly the reason why not only Detroit, but SE Michigan is in the state that it is in.

Thisis exactly what I am arguing. Fix the local economy, the city services and the schools and people will flock here.

Sigh. Look, if we have nothing, as you say -- then how on earth are we to make all these fixes happen?

It may not be 30 years ago, however immigrants mov to places for the exact same reasons they moved to places 30 years ago. They want a better life. Number 1 on the list of things needed for a better life is a good job. Followed closely by good schools for htier children. The last thing they want is a unsafe enviroment with crappy schools.

I've traveled extensively. Detroit is more unsafe than many places in the Western world, but there are many, many places on the globe where life expectancy and opportunities are lower.

I'm a product of those crappy Detroit schools, coming from working class inner city Detroit parents without a college education, and I've done quite well for myself. So have thousands of other people. I love it when people don't see us coming. Also there is the satisfaction that we had to work twice as hard with half of the resources in order to get a fraction as far.

Finally, "unsafe environment" and "crappy schools" are features of many urban environments. I have met smart city kids from all over the country, and the stories that kids from East L.A and South Central L.A. have are stories that I could never relate to. Lots of these friends are the kids of Asian and Latino immigrants, and they talk about what growing up in Chicago or L.A. or Philly in the 80s, 90s, and early 00s was like. It was no different than growing up in Detroit... if not worse. I didn't have to worry about the colors I wore on the bus as a teenager, for instance.

Immigrants gravitate towards certain communities not just because there are jobs there, but because there are other immigrants there. People make choices for a whole host of reasons.

What everyone fails to realize is that the immigrants we are currently bringing into the country are highly educated people. The current immigration laws give priority to doctors and engineers. So without high paying jobs you will bring very few of them to the region.

Immigration laws can be changed. In fact, if amnesty comes, they will be, mark my words. What a great opportunity to offer amnesty in exchange for residence in places like Detroit, New Orleans...

Most of the recent immigration into the area has been Chinese and Indian engineers. Without the auto industry pulling these people in there would be very few immigrants coming here.

Once this region stops looking backwards into the past while trying to move forward, and then being surprised when we trip over our own two feet... we'll be fine. We may have to wait until time culls away some of the old resentments and hatreds, but I guarantee you, folks won't care about the same stuff by mid-century.

[gibran]

if one remembers we were alll immigranst to the city..many in the teens and twenties lived in ethnic enclaves...I love english's take on things..he is spot on...diversity will save Detriot...initially there will be a lot of stereotypical new businesses....but hey that should make for better communities....land grants are the answer..along with increased revenue will help schools and park and services....however...we would have to get past immigrant fear...but think of the great restuarants...and ethnic shops....extend it to business developments and you have a winning combination.

[Hermod]

Untrue. I know of several young Detroiters who are interested in opening up small grocery stores, food shops, and beauty supply stores. There is a world of difference between "not interested" and "don't know how to obtain the start-up capital".

The same way the Koreans do it. They form a "till" where a large number of folks pool their money. They select one member of the group [[by lot or by bid) to take the money and start a business. He/she then pays back the money to the "till" and a second member gets the money to start his business. Eventually the whole group is in business. Of course, a Korean would rather commit suicide than to stiff his "till" for the money.

I am also wondering how so many blacks in the segregated:south prior to civil rights were able to open and operate small groceries, laundries, pressing shops, and shoe repair businesses back in the days when they faced constant hostility and violence. Today, their descendants in Detroit seem to have lost the knowledge.

[English]

however...we would have to get past immigrant fear...

I think that this is at the root of the negativity and opposition, gibran. SE Michigan is an extremely provincial place.

[Hermod]

I think that this is at the root of the negativity and opposition, gibran. SE Michigan is an extremely provincial place.

We were pretty welcoming to all of the Lithuanian, Latvian, and Ukrainian Displaced Persons after WWII. Every year it seemed we would get a new kid in our class at Wayne Elementary that we had to teach to speak English. For some reason, nobody provided ESOL or IEP for them. I guess someone took the father down to one of the plants and got him in.

[kraig]

The same way the Koreans do it. They form a "till" where a large number of folks pool their money. They select one member of the group [[by lot or by bid) to take the money and start a business. He/she then pays back the money to the "till" and a second member gets the money to start his business. Eventually the whole group is in business. Of course, a Korean would rather commit suicide than to stiff his "till" for the money.

I am also wondering how so many blacks in the segregated:south prior to civil rights were able to open and operate small groceries, laundries, pressing shops, and shoe repair businesses back in the days when they faced constant hostility and violence. Today, their descendants in Detroit seem to have lost the knowledge.

We had a lot of black owned businesses in Detroit as well. Unfortunately, the freeways were designed to go right through them. So much for any type of legacy. Another case of eminent domain gone wrong. It's also why we have one of the worst designed freeway systems of any metro area in the country.

[English]

The same way the Koreans do it. They form a "till" where a large number of folks pool their money. They select one member of the group [[by lot or by bid) to take the money and start a business. He/she then pays back the money to the "till" and a second member gets the money to start his business. Eventually the whole group is in business. Of course, a Korean would rather commit suicide than to stiff his "till" for the money.

African and Caribbean immigrants do this as well. The Koreans don't have a monopoly on this practice. Indeed, Nigerian immigrants are the most successful in the nation when it comes to educational attainment.

I am also wondering how so many blacks in the segregated:south prior to civil rights were able to open and operate small groceries, laundries, pressing shops, and shoe repair businesses back in the days when they faced constant hostility and violence. Today, their descendants in Detroit seem to have lost the knowledge.

Not everyone did. I come from a family of black business owners who put up with hostility and violence both before AND after the CRM, who aren't flashy or dashy, but who quietly, generation by generation, have done everything for ourselves. We aren't unique, either. I know of a ton of black Detroiters/Southfielders with regular jobs and part-time businesses, from hair braiding to real estate. Just about every woman in my graduate sorority chapter has a second job or a part-time venture and many are self-employed. Lately, I've been enjoying the most delicious honey from one of my soror's and her husband's local farm. Best honey I've ever tasted.

No, the enterpreneurship rate isn't what it should be in Detroit. Perhaps DPS ought to encourage skills-based learning, trades, and knowledge about personal and business finance for all students, even those who are college bound [[e.g. Cass, Renaissance). Getting a health care bill passed will also be great for those who wish to be self-employed.

An increasing number of blacks in the city, and in America in general, aren't native born African Americans descended from slaves anyway. Lots more seem to be from the Caribbean or Africa, or their parents are. Those groups tend to do better than even many white Americans.

We are a nation of immigrants! The new 21st century wave of immigration will be a lot different from prior waves, though. We look forward to the change and the optimism after decades of squabbling and pessimism!

[English]

We were pretty welcoming to all of the Lithuanian, Latvian, and Ukrainian Displaced Persons after WWII. Every year it seemed we would get a new kid in our class at Wayne Elementary that we had to teach to speak English. For some reason, nobody provided ESOL or IEP for them. I guess someone took the father down to one of the plants and got him in.

What did those Lithuanians, Latvians, and Ukranians all have in common?

One of the best discussions I had during my doctoral studies at Michigan was in a seminar about immigration and the process of "becoming white". I was the only nonwhite person in the course. So I spoke up and said, "My family's worked really hard ever since Emancipation. No criminals, and no unwed teen mothers, either! We've started businesses, the later generations are becoming increasingly college educated, and we are model citizens. We tend our lawns and gardens, are homeowners, and are as American as apple pie. So when do we get to become white? We've waited five generations, and..."

That generated the biggest laugh ever. My professor said, "English, I'm sorry, you guys don't get to become white. That's not how it works."

[English]

We had a lot of black owned businesses in Detroit as well. Unfortunately, the freeways were designed to go right through them. So much for any type of legacy. Another case of eminent domain gone wrong. It's also why we have one of the worst designed freeway systems of any metro area in the country.

Yes, my grandfather's electronics business was lost to I-75. Perhaps he could have started another one... after all, isn't that the American way? Instead he chose to work for Mr. Ford.

I think it also surprises some people who were alive in the 1940s and 1950s that black Detroiters could not purchase residential or commercial property in many areas of the city, and certainly not in the new suburbs. You can have all the money in the world -- my grandfather left a respectable inheritance -- yet if no one will sell to you, you're doomed.

Recently I've begun to wonder if black America would have assimilated if Civil Rights had happened a generation earlier -- in the 1930s, prior to World War II. This way, during the prosperous post-war era, ambitious men and women of the black Greatest Generation could have accumulated the same kinds of wealth that other GIs and second-generation Central and Eastern European immigrants did. If it were part of FDR's New Deal, and there wasn't this sense that people had to take to the streets in the late 1950s and 1960s to demand a hearing, things would have been much better.

By the time things began to happen -- in the 1960s -- America was becoming a different place socially, culturally, and socioeconomically. Real wages have declined in the half century since black Americans began to get a seat at the table in order to play the game. The postwar industrial global monopolies were being challenged, and the first decade of full black political enfranchisement -- the 1970s -- was a decade of oil embargoes, malaise, and cultural degeneration. Drugs flooded into inner city neighborhoods, and for the next 30 years would wreak damage on an apocalyptic scale.

This is why I advocate immigration -- we need some people here who aren't invested in this American black/white thing, can move us past the 8 mile divide, and define the city anew.

[Hermod]

Yes, my grandfather's electronics business was lost to I-75. Perhaps he could have started another one... after all, isn't that the American way? Instead he chose to work for Mr. Ford..

My great-grandfather's farm lies under the runway at DTW. He had to quit farming because he was "enfeebled" from the Civil War [[caught a nasty fever after Chcikamauga and was invalided out). He moved into the city after selling the farm and sold real estate. He had a house on Putnam [[near the old Mills Bakery).

One of my spinster great-aunts was living there in the late forties and we had to move her out for freeway construction [[forget whether it was Lodge or Ford which did her house in). Moving her was a job, she had a thirty year collection of daily newspapers..

Everybody glamorizes Hastings Street as if it was Lenox Ave in Harlem, but it really wasn't all that good a place. When my grandfather was shop super at Peninsular Screw, their factory was right down by Hastings Street. When I worked for the Detroit Bureau of Expressway Design, part of my "reading in" to the job in 1961 was the Chrysler Freeway basic design and alignment and the elimination of the Hastings Street area was considered "a good thing" in the design study. I worked mostly on the section from Warren to just past the Ford and most of that time was on the Ford interchange.

[English]

Everybody glamorizes Hastings Street as if it was Lenox Ave in Harlem, but it really wasn't all that good a place. When my grandfather was shop super at Peninsular Screw, their factory was right down by Hastings Street. When I worked for the Detroit Bureau of Expressway Design, part of my "reading in" to the job in 1961 was the Chrysler Freeway basic design and alignment and the elimination of the Hastings Street area was considered "a good thing" in the design study. I worked mostly on the section from Warren to just past the Ford and most of that time was on the Ford interchange.

Of course Hastings Street wasn't the most desirable area in the city. We have always had to make silk purses out of sow's ears. See my post above on where black Detroiters could and couldn't purchase property prior to the 1970s. James Loewen wrote a great book with a chapter specifically about metro Detroit's redlining policies. In some ways, blacks in the Midwest and Mid-South were worse off during the century between slavery and Civil Rights than those in the deep South. There were no appreciable sundown towns in Alabama or Mississippi. On the other hand, Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri were filled with them.

Yet Detroit did more to raze their nonwhite ethnic neighborhoods than comparable cities long before the riots. It's not just that we lost the black business district because of the highways, we also lost our Chinatown.

[Hermod]

There were no appreciable sundown towns in Alabama or Mississippi.

Arab, Alabama was [[and maybe still might be) a notorious sundown town. Arab is just outside of Huntsville where Redstone Arsenal [[and the Army missile program) is located. Huntsville has a very high concentration of educated people from the space program. When I visited Huntsville on business, they always said you could go back in time a hundred years by driving ten miles out of town.

The sundown towns were mostly found in the hill countries of the southern states. western Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina and northern Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Lots more sundown towns in the south than in the midwest though Indiana was rife with them.

There was an interesting book on sundown towns and counties where they looked at racial composition of localities in 1880 and again in 1910 and found out just how many localities had been "ethnically cleansed". In the deep south there were few if any sundown towns. It would appear to be a matter of whether or not the black population in an area was an essential element of the labor force. If they were not, as single incident was likely to spark the conversion of an area to "sundown" status.

[English]

^ I think you're referring to James Loewen's Sundown Towns. I didn't mean to imply that there were no sundown towns in the traditional South; simply that there were no appreciable number. On the other hand, the Midwest was filled with them.

http://sundown.afro.illinois.edu/sundowntowns.php
http://sundown.afro.illinois.edu/con...-whitemap.html

Ethnic cleaning of nonwhite populations in the US occurred as far northwest as Oregon, and as far northeast as Maine. A recent Newbery Honor children's book is about the ethnic cleansing of an integrated Maine town:

http://www.malagaislandmaine.org/

[Hermod]

^ I think you're referring to James Loewen's Sundown Towns. I didn't mean to imply that there were no sundown towns in the traditional South; simply that there were no appreciable number. On the other hand, the Midwest was filled with them.

http://sundown.afro.illinois.edu/sundowntowns.php
http://sundown.afro.illinois.edu/con...-whitemap.html

Ethnic cleaning of nonwhite populations in the US occurred as far northwest as Oregon, and as far northeast as Maine. A recent Newbery Honor children's book is about the ethnic cleansing of an integrated Maine town:

http://www.malagaislandmaine.org/

Not Loewen. He concentrates more on exclusionary towns.

This book was about instances where the entire black population in an area men, women, and children were rounded up by a "sheriff's posse" and brought down to the station. The next train into town would be stopped by the sheriff and the blacks loaded into any empty box car or on empty flats and gondolas. The conductor would be told to take them anywhere, just out of the county.

These incidents seemd to happen most in the "unionist" areas of the south [[places which were opposed to secession in the Civil War) and mostly where the black population didn't exceed 15-20%.

[English]

Interesting, Hermod. This sounds like something I'd like to add to my library. Do you have a title and/or ISBN so that I can order it? Thanks in advance.

[Hermod]

Interesting, Hermod. This sounds like something I'd like to add to my library. Do you have a title and/or ISBN so that I can order it? Thanks in advance.

I am sorry, I leafed through it in a bookstore and read the first couple of chapters. I was on a "no more books for a month" ukase from my wife. It is one of about four books over the years that i really regretted not buying when I had the chance.

Let me do a little bit of online search, maybe I can find something for you.

[kathy2trips]

Until Michigan becomes an attractive place to do business that can compare with Texas and Nevada, you can forget that idea. Immigrants will have their own business if they can, and MI can't compete.

TX has no state income tax because of taxes on oil production; NV because gambling industry pays that for the people. MI needs to become similarly income-generating so they can give people a break.

My idea: a water turbine on Belle Isle where the current is swiftest. Can you imagine no state or city income tax for living AND working in Detroit? Or free electricity up to a certain number of kilowatt hours? Or SELLING electricity to say, maybe....CA, or Japan, maybe? Sweet!

[Hermod]

My idea: a water turbine on Belle Isle where the current is swiftest. Can you imagine no state or city income tax for living AND working in Detroit? Or free electricity up to a certain number of kilowatt hours? Or SELLING electricity to say, maybe....CA, or Japan, maybe? Sweet!

The concept of "power for free" is a good one. I am not sure how many kilowatts a "current turbine" in the non-navigational channel around Belle Isle would develop. It might only be enough for a couple of city blocks. A couple of electrical engineers could probably crunch the numbers for you pretty quickly.

.