August 21-27, 2003

cover story

Missing The Boat

FRUITS OF THEIR LABOR: (l-r) Sisters Alicia, Cristina and Elisa at La Tienda, their parentsí Mexican food store. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Why Philadelphia’s failure to attract immigrants is killing the city.

by Daniel Brook

After seeing medical- and law-school graduates selling food on the streets of his hometown, Jesus dropped out of college and headed north. Three years ago, he paid a smuggler $1,000 in cash borrowed from a friend in Philadelphia to sneak him across the border and into Los Angeles. From there, he flew to Philly, where he went to work and ultimately repaid his friend.

With his typical nonchalance, Jesus explains that crossing the border illegally is no big deal. "It's not like you see on the news. It's nothing like that. You just walk in broad daylight like it's nothing," he shares. It's hard not to wonder what part of this is honesty and what part is Mexican machismo, considering he paid a smuggler a grand he didn't have to help with this ostensibly easy task.

But since his arrival, Jesus has worked his way up from a near-minimum wage job cleaning hospitals to a $13-an-hour position as an assistant to a well-known Italian chef in the suburbs. His subway-to-regional-rail commute from South Philadelphia takes more than 40 minutes, but Jesus does it without complaint. In fact, the only thing he gripes about -- other than fellow Mexicans who won't accept his help in learning English -- is the anti-immigrant sentiment he occasionally encounters in the City of Brotherly Love.

HISTORIC PHILADELPHIA: Are immigrant neighborhoods, like this one in 1930s South Philly, a thing of the past? Courtesy of The National Museum Of American Jewish History

On his day off, we take a cab from Broad and Snyder to a check-cashing place in Center City. Jesus explains that he has a bank account -- many banks offer fully legal, interest-free accounts for undocumented immigrants who, by definition, lack Social Security numbers -- but he wonít go to the bank on the three days a week that a racist teller he calls "the bitch" is working.

Jesus says the teller is very impatient with anyone who doesn't speak English like a native. "You go there, they give you attitude," he says. Ironically, with the clean vowel sounds of his Spanish accent, Jesus actually says "addy-tood" like a South Philly native. Because he brings in so much word-of-mouth business to the check-cashing joint from fellow Mexicans, Jesus explains, they don't deduct their customary percentage from his check.

Even though more and more Mexicans like Jesus continue to flow into Philadelphia, the city has lagged behind other large American cities for decades in its capacity to attract foreign immigrants. According to 2001 statistics, only 11 percent of Philadelphia's population is foreign-born, compared with more than 20 percent in Chicago and Boston and more than 30 percent in New York.

In raw numbers, Philadelphia has a long way to go, even with recent gains. While the city of Chicago now has more than 500,000 Mexicans, Philadelphia's Mexican population just recently passed the 10,000 mark.

For immigration advocates, attracting immigrants is a matter of civic life and death for the city. Without new foreign-born residents, they argue, Philadelphia will continue to shrink, its urban blight problem will grow even worse and the city will never fully connect to the global economy.

In the context of Philadelphiaís centuries-old history of being a city of immigrants, the current dearth of newcomers is odd. Philadelphia was the first destination in the American colonies for non-English-speaking immigrants. In 1683, the first Germans and Dutch settled in what became known as Germantown. The Irish potato famine brought a large wave of Irish immigrants to the city in the late 1840s.

But, in the 1850s, Philadelphia's shortsighted business community failed to invest in new, faster steamships and, as a result, lost out on immigration to New York City. The more things change, the more they stay the same, say immigration advocates who see Philadelphia International Airport's limited list of overseas destinations as an Achilles' heel. (Amy Kudwa, a spokesperson for US Airways which operates two-thirds of the flights at the airport, says service to Costa Rica and Mexico City are imminent, though the airline will maintain its East Coast focus.)

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Philadelphia remained a strong secondary destination for immigrants landing in New York. When the city finally updated its fleet in the 1870s, it lured more than one million immigrants during the next 50 years, mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe, until Congress brought most immigration to a halt in the early 1920s.

But it is the most recent wave of immigrants, mostly from Asia and Latin America, that Philly has really missed out on, despite the relocation of significant numbers of asylum-seekers from Southeast Asia to South Philly and the Eastern European wave that Russified the Northeast.

In the 1960s and '70s, Philadelphia was rapidly losing jobs. That trend made the city unattractive to all but the most desperate of new immigrants and those fortunate enough to have highly skilled jobs waiting for them at area labs and universities. Since 75 percent of immigrants choose destination cities based on already having family members in the area, missing out on the beginning of the latest immigration boom has forced Philly to play catch-up ever since.

"It's a chicken-and-egg problem," Pennsylvania Economy League Executive Director David Thornburgh says, explaining that it's hard to determine if there are fewer immigrants because there are fewer job opportunities or fewer businesses bringing jobs here because the city has so few immigrants with the skills (high-tech) or desperation (garment sweatshops) to do them. "If we had economic opportunity we wouldn't have to worry about [a lack of] immigration," Thornburgh says.

With the post-WWII population shift from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt, only those northern cities like New York, Chicago and Boston that have attracted large numbers of foreign immigrants have managed to stop hemorrhaging population.

Still, many of the powers that be in Philadelphia don't seem eager to play catch-up at all. This inaction is spurring a new generation of immigration advocates like Edward Carlson of The Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvanians, a recently formed organization that helps area immigrants adjust to life in the U.S., to make the case that if the city is to grow and thrive in the 21st century, it will need to start attracting immigrants. "If Philadelphia doesn't have immigrants, Philadelphia won't globalize," Carlson says. He argues that immigration is just as important for building Philadelphia's presence in the global economy as "whether there's a flight between Philadelphia and Frankfurt."

Advocates like Carlson are encouraged by the uptick in the last few years. In addition to the rapidly growing Mexican community, there are also new Asian immigrants, in part because after 9/11, many Asian New Yorkers left lower Manhattan's economically battered Chinatown neighborhood for Philadelphia.

Michael Williams, the African-American security guard at the New World Plaza shopping center at Sixth and Washington, is a Philadelphian "born and raised" in a city of full of lifelong residents. The plaza sits in the heart of South Philly rowhouse territory and looks as if it was airlifted in from Los Angeles -- and not just because itís a strip mall in a city of pedestrian-friendly commercial thoroughfares.

Every tenant in the mall is an immigrant-owned

business. Instead of a pizzeria and a Subway, there's a Chinese dim sum restaurant and a Vietnamese pho soup joint, among others. All cater to the city's Asian community, which has outgrown Chinatown.

There's even a Latin American food and music store, La Tienda, that serves the growing Central American community in the neighborhood.

Williams has held his current job for six years. The gig's good, he says, despite the occasional shoplifter. Generally, all is quiet on the South Philly front. Most of the grief Williams gets from the job, he explains, comes from other native Philadelphians who whine about the upwardly mobile immigrant shopkeepers he guards. "I hear them complain about the trash. I hear them say, åThese people, where do they get their money from?' These people, they work seven days a week. They work hard. They don't have it that easy," Williams says, happy to get steady work in a tough economy from the Chinese man who owns the shopping center.

But it seems anti-immigrant sentiment in Philadelphia isn't limited to Williams' neighbors. In 2001, when Councilman Jim Kenney proposed creating a city-sponsored center for new immigrants to help those who are already here and market the city to newcomers, he got little support from fellow politicians. However, he received tons of hate mail from constituents.

Anne O'Callaghan, executive director of the Welcoming Center, says it's not just rowhouse voters who are anti-immigrant. After giving a detailed PowerPoint presentation to area business executives on the importance of immigration to a city's presence in the global economy, the first question she heard was, "What are you doing about the gangs in Chinatown?"

GOING PLACES: (l-r) Immigrants Joseph, Marcus and Max Rosenbluth stand in front of their 1892 storefront. Rosenbluth International is now one of the world's largest corporate travel agencies. Courtesy of The National Museum Of American Jewish History

As Father Tom Betz, who heads the migrants and refugees office of the Philadelphia Archdiocese, says, the city has just enough immigrants for natives to view them with hostility. "In cities like Pittsburgh, immigrants are not seen as a threat. Itís like a National Geographic experience" when an immigrant walks through a neighborhood, Betz says. In bigger cities like New York and Los Angeles, immigrants have filled neighborhoods that were completely abandoned by native-born residents.

About those cities, Betz asks, "Is a business going to respond to immigrants? Of course, or they're going to die. [Here in Philadelphia], neighborhood associations can do two things. They can become the neighborhood association for the old guard and become less and less relevant or find a way to include newcomers and stay relevant."

But to Kenney and to many Philadelphia policy wonks, wooing immigrants is necessary for the survival of the city.

"Philadelphia and Detroit are the only two [of America's 10 largest] cities that lost population in the last decade," Kenney says. Lists with Detroit on them are "lists I don't want to be on," the councilman quips of the crumbling Michigan metropolis. While the conventional wisdom is that Philadelphia is losing population because middle-class residents are fleeing for better schools and public services in the suburbs, the truth is that during the 1990s Philadelphians fled their city at a much slower rate than New Yorkers fled theirs.

But New York ended the 1990s with a net gain in population because it brought in more than enough foreign immigrants to make up for the loss while Philadelphia continued shrinking. Despite being among the largest metropolitan areas in the nation, the region ranked 18th in new immigrants during 2001, according to Immigration and Naturalization Service statistics.

Because Philadelphia can't bring in enough new residents (U.S.-born or immigrant) to take the place of those that are leaving, the city now has the most vacant properties per capita of any city in the nation. "The simple calculation is there's 60,000 vacant lots and properties in the city," says David Thornburgh. "That means people walked away from their houses and their factories because no one wanted to buy them. Some of those people who bought those properties in other cities were immigrants. Immigrants have traditionally bought into less desirable neighborhoods [and] invested in those neighborhoods."

While Mayor John Street has made neighborhood revitalization a cornerstone of his administration, his Neighborhood Transformation Initiative focuses on knocking down vacant buildings and trying to woo major developers, rather than wooing foreign immigrants who might fix up existing buildings.

In 2001, Councilman Kenney held hearings on Philadelphiaís inability to attract foreign immigrants and issued a number of recommendations. His most urgent suggestion was that Philadelphia "should establish immediately an office and/or department to handle immigrant affairs, calling it the "Office for New Philadelphians.í The mission of the office will be to actively recruit new immigrants to Philadelphia and assist these new arrivals with assimilating into Philadelphiaís civic, cultural, economic, social and political life."

Kenney also endorsed increasing the number of foreign cities served by Philadelphia International Airport (currently there is no nonstop service from the major immigrant centers of Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, with the exception of the Mexican beach resort, Cancun). He also urged area universities to recruit more international students. Last year, for example, Boston's universities had more than twice as many foreign students as Philadelphia's did. Locally, the University of Pennsylvania is a national leader in attracting international students, but other city universities aren't even close.

The councilman also pushed for the city to market itself to would-be immigrants in embassies and consulates overseas. But Kenney found little support for his proposal in City Council or from the mayor and the bill never came to a vote.

"There wasn't resistance but I don't think there was a lot of interest. I don't think people realize the potential to revive neighborhoods," Kenney said of his fellow pols.

Among his constituents, there was some downright hostility as hate mail poured into Kenney's office. One Northeast Philadelphia resident wrote a series of lengthy letters all embossed with a stamp reading "STOP IMMIGRATION WITH BULLETS AND YOU STOP DRUGS." Another Philadelphian expressed his wish that the Councilman be "the first person in the area to contract the Ebola virus." Many letter writers claimed that immigrants take advantage of America's social safety net, steal jobs from native-born Americans and are reluctant to learn English. Sept. 11, which occurred less than four months after Kenney's hearings, was the final nail in the proposal's political coffin.

As Anuj Gupta, an immigration advocate who testified on behalf of the Kenney plan, puts it, in the post-9/11 era, "you mention immigration to someone and the first thing they think is Osama." This pains Gupta, a recent University of Pennsylvania Law School graduate and Rendell administration staffer who is the son of Indian immigrants. At a café near his University City apartment, Gupta notes that "the pockets [of Philadelphia] that do have some diversity -- like this one -- are thriving."

Welcoming Center Community Outreach Director Edward Carlson also sees a link between immigration and gentrification. "I don't think it's a coincidence that immigrant neighborhoods are gentrifying," he says. In the Italian Market area, he says, the fact that there are now immigrants waiting for buses or riding home on bikes after midnight puts eyes on the street, which makes the neighborhood safer. Still, Carlson would like to see more official government support for immigration in Philadelphia.

In contrast with Philadelphia, the city governments of New York and Boston have both set up offices to aid immigrants. In 1998, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino established the Mayor's Office of New Bostonians. According to the office's current director, Rev. Chen Imm Tan, the bureau's goal is to support those immigrants already in Boston, but "my sense is that because communities here feel supported, [Boston] has the reputation of being a welcoming city," which in turn attracts more immigrants. (According to recent statistics, 23 percent of Boston's population is foreign-born, more than twice Philadelphia's percentage.) After decades of population loss, Boston posted a gain in the 1990s while Philadelphia continued its decline.

Rev. Tan says the Mayor's proposal had widespread political support in Boston, unlike Kenney's proposal here. Mayor Menino, Tan says, "speaks out very frequently around the strength of diversity. That kind of leadership anywhere makes a huge difference."

Anne O'Callaghan says there are several reasons why Boston could establish a government office for immigrants without the resistance seen here. First of all, the mayor backed the creation of the office and got his Democratic City Council members behind the idea.

In addition, O'Callaghan says, Boston had received a private grant to aid immigrants from two wealthy immigrant brothers who moved to Boston years ago to start their business. But O'Callaghan also suspects that demographic differences between Philadelphia and Boston are important.

Philadelphia has a higher proportion of elderly residents and African-American residents than Boston -- two groups that O'Callaghan says are traditionally hostile to immigrants. O'Callaghan says she is working with the Philadelphia NAACP to try to address tensions between immigrants and the black community. As for age, she says, "young people are more open."

"Philadelphia is a city of immigrants and we welcome each new Philadelphian. With your unique stories and unique experiences, you make our communities richer. And we support The Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvaniansí efforts to help you make your home here in Philadelphia."

These are the words of Mayor John Street. They were included in an honorary citation given to the center at its June 3 opening. According to O'Callaghan, the center strives to be a "one-stop shop for immigrants in the area" offering everything from help finding a job, enrolling children in public schools or finding a good immigration attorney." In a typical day, the newly opened office fields five or 10 calls from new immigrants who heard about the Welcoming Center through word of mouth.

Mayor Street himself was not present at the opening ceremony and the city contributed no money. In contrast to the New York and Boston offices, the Philadelphia Welcoming Center is not part of the city government, as the Kenney proposal called for. While the Welcoming Center is located in Center City, it markets the entire commonwealth of Pennsylvania, not just Philadelphia, since Harrisburg, not Philadelphia, pitched in with funding. Most of the center's budget comes from donations by local businesses and labor unions.

The building's 22nd Street offices are donated by the AFL-CIO, which recently started supporting amnesty for undocumented workers after decades of taking anti-immigrant positions. The labor movement decided the best way to keep immigration from undercutting American wages would be to make immigrant workers legal so they wouldn't be intimidated into not joining unions by employer threats of deportation, which are illegal but common.

A TASTE OF HOME: Angela Tong bags Florida- grown longan fruit at an Asian supermarket in South Philadelphia. Photo By Michael T. Regan

While the issue of growing the cityís population has been raised in the current mayoral race, it has not attained the status of "front-burner" issue. Sam Katzís deputy press secretary, Nathan Raab, says the challengerís plan to reduce taxes on new businesses will have a positive impact on immigrants, many of whom start small businesses. And Raab insists that, "for us, [immigration] is not a tangential issue."

As CEO of Greater Philadelphia First, a business organization that recently merged with the regional chamber of commerce, Katz hailed the planned creation of the Welcoming Center, saying that increased immigration would help expand the "talent pool" area businesses can draw on to find workers.

But like the city itself, despite the words of praise, GPF did not commit any funding.

Street campaign spokesperson Frank Keel says that despite the mayor's failure to back Kenney's proposal or pitch in with funding for the center, the mayor does support increased immigration, as long as it's of the legal variety.

Keel also chalks up Street's lack of support for the Kenney measure to their well-known political rivalry. "Very likely [it was] more a political decision than anything else," Keel says. "I don't think it was any kind of ideological difference but rather just Philadelphia politics at work there, because the mayor certainly supports the concept of attracting new immigrants to repopulate the city. There's no question that if we are to regrow this city we have to look seriously at attracting new legal immigrants to Philadelphia. It is not the primary focus but it is a component of the mayor's overall vision to grow the population of this city."

According to Kenney, the administration hinted that they would only support his bill if he pulled one of his campaign finance reform proposals, which the councilman was not willing to do.

That neither Street nor Katz has made attracting foreign immigrants a top priority may come from a political calculation that neither of their core constituencies are particularly fond of immigrants. As one piece of hate mail sent to Councilman Kenney in 2001 read, "Forget becoming mayor."

But some political observers believe the immigration issue will come to the fore. "I frankly thought it was going to die down two or three years ago after Councilman Kenney didn't seem to get too much traction, but I'm encouraged to see it picking up steam," says the Pennsylvania Economy League's Thornburgh. "Ideas have a funny quality to them. If ideas hang around long enough and you keep talking about them that gives councilpeople and mayors and governors the confidence to start moving the policy levers."

But even without support from the city, a new generation of Jane Addamses is springing up to lend a hand to newcomers to the city.

A few times a week, Jesus, the 20-something immigrant from Veracruz, meets with other Mexican immigrants in a church office adjoining St. Thomas Aquinas at 17th and Morris. Part of the two-room space is decorated with the blended Aztec-Catholic art of Mexico. With a crumbling ceiling, no air conditioning and a fly swatter to keep away the mosquitoes, the room has a certain south-of-the-border ambience to it. The other room holds processional banners of the Virgin Mary with writing in Vietnamese. One of the Philadelphia archdiocese's most diverse and immigrant-friendly churches, St. Thomas Aquinas holds Sunday mass in English, Spanish and Vietnamese, as well as programs for new immigrants

Christina Peres, a Mexican-born outreach officer with Woman Organized Against Rape leads a discussion group focused on health issues and sexual harassment. For immigration or workplace problems, she refers attendees to bilingual attorneys.

The English as a second language (ESL) course offered at the church is run by two American college students, Peter Bloom and Adam Ureneck, neither of whom is Hispanic. The two decided to take a year off from the University of Pennsylvania and Bowdoin College, respectively, to give something back to their hometown. Bloom was captivated by the needs of the growing Mexican immigrant community and, despite not knowing any Spanish, put together the ESL course. As Bloom tells it, when he asked a leader of the local Mexican community, "What do you need?" the response he got was, "Everything." When he asked, "What do you have?" he was told, "Nothing."

Bloom and Ureneck run the course by the seat of their pants. The day I was there, the instructors realized they had no chalk and had to scramble to procure some. Snack time for the class consists of whole wheat bread and instant coffee. No butter, no cream.

"We've found our lack of funding lets us do what we want," says Bloom. The church provides the space, and an ESL grant from the commonwealth to the church is used to purchase textbooks.

Drawing from his experience, Bloom questions the wonky wisdom that the relative lack of immigrants in Philadelphia is due to a lack of city support for immigration. "They don't need an immigrant-friendly community, they just need work. They're not coming to Philadelphia because they saw a website," Bloom says.

If the current uptick in Asian and Latin American immigration to Philadelphia, much of it via New York City, continues, there may soon be more immigrants here than politicians can safely ignore. With a critical mass, politicians' calculations will include the question of how to get newcomers into their camps, since ignoring them will no longer be an option.

For Kenney, who can play Philadelphia politics with the best of them, the hope is that the people might lead, so the politicians can follow. "All I wish," he says "is that at some point in time, people who live here [whose families] came from somewhere else, recognize the strength and dignity of today's immigrants and see their grandparent's and great-grandparent's face in that face."