News Story - Austin American Statesman

By Juan Castillo

Austin American-Statesman

The Austin-San Marcos metropolitan area's foreign-born population surged by 580 percent from 1980 to 2000, to nearly 153,000 people, transforming the area into one of five very recent destinations for immigrants to the United States, a new Brookings Institution report finds.

The report, "The Rise of New Immigrant Gateways," to be released Monday, finds that a changing geography of jobs and opportunity is shuffling major immigrant destinations. Settlement patterns are shifting from more traditional gateways to some of the country's fastest-growing metro areas, such as Austin: destinations with limited 20th-century history of receiving immigrants.

In 1970, the Austin-San Marcos area's foreign-born population was less than 6,000. Its foreign-born population in 2000 was 12 percent of the total population.

The nation's immigrant settlement patterns changed amid an unprecedented immigration boom that will present momentous social, cultural and political change during the coming decades, the report says. "From nothing to something really sizable. I think that's the big story in Austin," said Audrey Singer, the demographer and immigration expert who wrote the report for the Washington think tank.

The study provides a broad look at the diversity of immigration in Austin, expanding traditional discussions that tend to dwell on the undocumented, particularly among Mexicans and Latin Americans. Indeed, the report finds that 55 percent of new immigrants to the Austin metro area in the 2000 census were from Mexico. However, they were among a diverse group drawn here by jobs and by education.

The University of Texas attracts students from around the world, Singer said. And the high-tech surge of the 1990s triggered a boom in local service and construction industries, attracting immigrants from several countries and from both ends of the education and skills ladders.

In the bigger picture, the U.S. is in a wave of unprecedented immigration: During the 1990s, the foreign-born population grew by 11.3 million, or 57 percent, to 31.1 million, the biggest decade increase since the census has been taken.

The report identifies the need for immigrant newcomers to become proficient in English as the most important issue for local communities and governments. It cites Austin for efforts involving police and banks to bring immigrants into contact with mainstream institutions.

Austin joins N.C., Utah

Singer used U.S. census data to chart the growth of foreign-born populations over three decades in 45 metropolitan areas and their suburbs. She tracked historical settlement patterns along with recent influxes of immigrants to identify six major types of immigrant gateways.

Because the census does not ask about a foreign-born person's legal status, the study could not determine whether a person born outside the U.S. is here as a legal permanent resident, a temporary worker or a student, or whether they are undocumented.

Three North Carolina metro areas -- Charlotte, Greensboro/Winston-Salem and Raleigh-Durham -- join Salt Lake City and Austin-San Marcos in the category of "pre-emerging gateways," defined as places that had very small immigrant populations in 1980 but experienced extremely high growth in the 1990s, both in foreign-born and total populations. Pre-emerging gateways had foreign-born populations under 200,000 in 2000.

The report recognizes growing immigrant populations in three other Texas metro areas. Dallas and Fort Worth-Arlington are categorized as "emerging gateways" for their immigrant growth during the past 20 years, and Houston is called a "post-World War II gateway" for attracting immigrants on a grand scale during the past 50 years. By 2000, more than one in four of Houston's residents was foreign-born.

Houston is among a handful of large metro areas still receiving the great majority of immigrants. That group also includes New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami. And more than two-thirds of America's immigrants lived in just six states in 2000: California, New York, Texas, Florida, New Jersey or Illinois.

However, the share of the nation's immigrant population living in those states declined significantly for the first time during the 1990s, from 72.9 percent of the total to 68.5 in 2000. And major metro areas with few immigrants in 1980 -- such as Dallas, Fort Worth, Atlanta and Las Vegas -- are seeing extraordinary growth in their total and immigrant populations.

These and other shifts began taking shape in the '90s as the economy continued growing and moving from manufacturing to services and information technology.

"They were great times economically, and immigrants saw good opportunities for work," Singer said. But current major gateways such as Los Angeles became saturated, and foreign-born workers began looking for jobs elsewhere, drawn to the fastest-growing metro regions, Austin among them.

The foreign-born population increases in North Carolina, for example, can be attributed to a diverse economy: agriculture, manufacturing, the Research Triangle area, information-based industries.

"So a place like that, which was growing fast, could attract immigrants from all over the world with the full range of skill levels," Singer said, putting Austin in the same category.

Bringing skills

Austin can use the skills of people such as Francisco Hernandez and Arturo Pinzn.

Hernandez clears land for the subdivisions that seem to appear overnight in Central Texas.

The Mexico native started coming to Austin in the 1980s, when he was a teenager. The trips were usually for short periods, to work, save some money, then return home. Back then, home was Guanajuato, where he worked with his father on a ranch and where he had dreams of completing college.

But the family's financial situation made continuing his studies impossible, and Hernandez decided to try to make a living in the United States.

Now 36, he's lived in Austin for 13 years. He's gained legal U.S. residence and bought a home. He has a daughter, a 10th-grader.

Finding work is a constant endeavor. Sometimes construction work is slow or seasonal. Still, he's optimistic: "In the United States, you can get what you want if you put in the effort."

Since 2002, Pinzn has been running his own business in Austin, SpanishTech, which helps businesses enhance their communications between Hispanic and mainstream markets through the use of the Internet and technology, advertising and marketing.

The 37-year-old Colombia native came to Austin in January 2000 when his wife, Susan, a U.S. native, got a job with Motorola Inc.

The Pinzns had been living in Illinois, where Arturo was flourishing in the high-tech field and Susan was doing work on her master's degree at the University of Illinois.

Pinzn got his degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Bradley University in Illinois. When he graduated in 1995, "It was the whole Internet boom," and he went to work as a consultant for a print-based firm, introducing the firm to the Internet and its potential for content management and distribution. He engineered a content management system that corporate giants are now using.

Pinzn became a permanent legal U.S. resident in 2000. One of his motivations for creating a business is that Austin has been a top city for entrepreneurs. "And it's a hub point (in Texas) if you want to cater to the Hispanic population."

Nation of change

There are even more profound changes ongoing in rural counties across the country, from Northeast Texas to North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky and the Midwest, said Luis Plascencia, an immigration expert and a lecturer for the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas.

Jobs in the meat and poultry processing and carpeting industries are driving those changes, attracting a mostly Latino immigrant work force.

"It has really changed the face of what one may call rural America," Plascencia said. "Here in Texas, in the counties where (poultry processor) Pilgrim is based, that's where you have highly dramatic changes in communities that had very limited experience with immigrants. You see it in the school districts, in the housing. It's phenomenal."

Change in metro areas such as Austin is not as dramatic because the city was already home to Latinos, mostly Mexican Americans of second and succeeding generations.

"But in places where you have five or 10 families before and now you have 300, you're in a new world," Plascencia said.

Tensions have resulted as longtime residents feel threatened by the changes. "You have questions of language. The schools have no experience with non-English-speaking children. The schools cannot absorb the growth."

Meeting needs

Communities face considerable challenges to meet the needs of new foreign-born arrivals, who are increasingly in poverty and with low English proficiency. Singer said local leaders in the new gateways need to respond sensitively and create an environment that helps immigrants succeed.

"Local areas can't solve (immigration) problems," Singer said. "What they are left with is how to incorporate immigrants into the communities, schools and labor markets."

Austin leaders and immigrant advocates have laid a foundation during the past decade to address the report's recommendations, said Julien Ross, coordinator for the Central Texas Immigrant Worker Rights Center in Austin.

"I think we've led the country in terms of bringing cultural and language sensitivity to services and creating linkages to institutions," Ross said. "We've made great strides in creating access to local health care, and we have an array of opportunities for building English language capacities."

He said the Austin region needs more groups working to encourage civic engagement among immigrants, particularly in the area of immigration reform.

The report does not address the ramifications of the downturn in the high-tech sector in Austin, nor its impact on foreign-born workers.

A national report released last week by the Pew Hispanic Center found that Hispanics gained twice as many new jobs as non-Hispanic workers last year and that Hispanic immigrant men fared better in the job market than Hispanics overall. Construction jobs spurred the gains.

Hispanic immigrants are mobile and follow the work, particularly construction jobs, a Pew researcher said.

Ross said the Austin region is still among the fastest-growing in the country and the construction and home-building industries are still thriving. New immigrants from Mexico and Latin America make up the bulk of the work force in the fields.

"Many of the immigrant laborers are skilled, and they're valued for those skills," he said. "The construction industry is booming because of those laborers."

Earlier this month, Richard Birkman, president of the Texas Roofing Co. of Austin, told a Senate panel that his company could not find American workers, despite salaries that can reach up to $50,000 a year.

"Most native-born Americans simply don't view roofing as a desirable profession," he said.