Pittsburgh could still use immigrants -- legal or illegal
In 2006 I columnized that the rusty ex-Steel City needed a flash flood of immigrants to reverse its steady economic decline and energize its economy and white-bread culture. It still does.
The 'Burgh could use immigrants
April 9, 2006
It's almost too bad Pittsburgh doesn't have an illegal immigration problem.
To be sure, there'd be plenty of obvious downsides.
But being swamped by 5,000 fresh, young, hardworking immigrants -- legal or illegal -- from south of the Rio Grande each year wouldn't be the worst thing that could happen to aging, stagnant Pittsburgh.
It would, as Ronald Reagan knew, pump some new blood and much needed vitality into our amazingly white-bread monoculture.
More important, the arrival of fresh boatloads of foreigners --- from anywhere, really -- would be an encouraging sign that our region was coming out of the slow economic death spiral it's been in for about six decades.
As a 200-year parade of migrant invasions has shown us, immigrants to America go where the economic growth and the jobs are. Which, unfortunately, is why Pittsburgh has been attracting so few of them each year.
According to U.S. Census data, the percentage of foreign-born people living among the 2.3 million souls of metropolitan Pittsburgh is dead last among the top 25 metro areas -- just 3 percent.
Miami and San Diego have foreign-born populations of 40 percent and 20 percent, respectively. The national figure is 12 percent, or 36 million immigrants.
Comparisons with healthier cities show just how unpopular Pittsburgh is with immigrants. While about 11,000 legal immigrants came to metro Pittsburgh between 2000 and 2004, Denver got 62,000 and Seattle 72,000. Even Cleveland attracted 16,000.
If these numbers sound nightmarish, remember what it was like around here a century ago.
Thanks to tens of thousands of poor, uneducated, foreign-tongued aliens from Central and Eastern Europe who came in waves seeking jobs, by 1920 about 25 percent of Pittsburgh was foreign-born.
Pittsburgh's annual "wave" of immigrants today couldn't support a weekend soccer league, but at least most of them are high-end.
Christopher Briem of Pitt's University Center for Social and Urban Research says half come from Europe, 25 percent from Asia and about 9 percent are Latinos.
They are disproportionately well-educated and have college degrees, Briem says, and blue-collar immigrants are almost nonexistent. No one really knows how many illegal immigrants there are in Pittsburgh, he says, but it's obvious there aren't many.
A lot of Pittsburghers, let's admit it, are perfectly happy so few immigrants come to town.
They're infamously parochial, for good reason: They are living in polyglot America's whitest metropolis. In the 2000 census, 89.5 percent of Pittsburghers defined themselves as white. We're No. 1.
But professor Richard Delgado of Pitt's law school has an idea to enliven and re-energize Pittsburgh. In the University Center's March issue of Pittsburgh Economic Quarterly, he says we should actively recruit working-class Latinos.
Not only would they find plenty of jobs here, but he says their cultural traits -- they are pious, law-abiding, hardworking and have high fertility rates -- are a natural fit for Catholic, proletarian Pittsburgh.
Plus, he says, they'd displace no local workers and consume fewer social services than the average citizen. Cities like Memphis, Tenn., and Charlotte, N.C., already have recruited large Latino populations with great success, Delgado says.
Rusty old Pittsburgh, as usual, is 10 years behind the curve on this smart idea. But what's it got to lose?