April Issue Focus: Immigrant Communities

Every Wednesday, GLUE will bring you information and interviews on that month’s issue focus.  April’s theme: the role immigrants and immigrant communities play in our cities.

While it was not GLUE’s intention in choosing this month’s theme to dive in the middle of the immigration debate (immigration policy and immigrant policy being two different, if related, things), we’ve received a number of emails suggesting that I shouldn’t avoid the topic altogether.

Especially interesting to those of us who care about mega-regional cooperation is the effort by over 30 chambers of commerce, united under the moniker “The Great Lakes Region Coalition,” to influence federal immigration policy.  Their agenda–which covers a range of topics–includes the exemption of H-1B visas from national immigration caps, and suggests the creation of High Skill Immigration Zones in Great Lakes metro areas.  Their full agenda can be downloaded here: Great Lakes Region Coalition Agenda for Jobs.

As Burgh Diaspora (or is it now R2P?) blogger Jim Russell notes, that’s a difficult argument to sell during a recession, when it sure doesn’t feel like we have jobs going unfilled.

The recent report released by Michigan Future, Inc., on growing Michigan’s knowledge-based economy (which report contains a lot of information and thought that will be just as interesting to those from other states as it will to Michiganders) posits that the best predictor of future prosperity for a region is no longer its past success, but rather, the percentage of its resident adults who hold at least a bachelor’s degree.

Michigan Future also defines the “knowledge economy” as those industries in which 30% or more of its employees are bachelor’s degree holders.  In Michigan, in 2007, only 24.7% of adults were bachelors degree holders.

According to the Chicago Fed, and research by the Urban Institute, our mega-region lags the rest of the country in attracting immigrants.  Only Illinois is a “major destination state,” as described by The New Neighbors, a guide published by the Urban Institute.  However, every major metro in the Great Lakes region besides Chicago attracts immigrants who are well more educated than immigrants on the national average, and more educated than our states’ current populations.

As the Chicago Fed states in this article (with illuminating graphs), “According to sample data by the U.S. Census Bureau, an incredible 50 percent of Pittsburgh’s working-age population who are foreign born hold at least a bachelor’s degree.  Detroit, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Columbus are not far behind.”

That’s good news.  Let’s make sure those well-educated immigrants are putting their degrees to work starting businesses, and not driving taxis.

Thanks to Richard Herman and Jim Russell for some of the ideas and resources behind this post.