Even as a decades-long population decline in Philadelphia has appeared to level off and rebound in the last decade, the city has continued to lose more native-born residents than it takes in. To put it another way, immigrants are central to the city’s rebirth.
Last week, Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture, an Arab cultural organization, and International House Philadelphia hosted a panel to discuss “migration and its impacts on society and the city.” The panel was organized as part of Al-Bustan’s An Immigrant Alphabet, a months-long public art installation and events series about the immigrant experience. Panelists included Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning Domenic Vitiello, who’s written about immigration and community development for the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia and PlanPhilly, teaches a course on immigration at PennDesign and co-edited the new volume Immigration and Metropolitan Revitalization in the United States. He was joined by Penn Law’s Fernando Chang-Muy, and the Department of Sociology’s Emilio Parrado. Chang-Muy needed to leave early for a separate engagement, and was replaced on the panel by Cathryn Miller-Wilson, of HIAS Pennsylvania, formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. The panel was moderated by Karina Sotnik, director of business incubation and accelerator programs at the University City Science Center.
Chang-Muy kicked things off by giving a condensed version of his immigration law course. He uses a condominium building as a metaphor for immigration in the United States. A visa will get you into the lobby, but eventually you have to leave. Other degrees of legal residency—sponsorship by a family member or employer, refugee status, or full citizenship—can give immigrants permanent access to the upper floors of the building.
The panelists presented data on the peaks and valleys of immigration in the Philadelphia metro area and the nation. The portion of foreign-born residents in the U.S. dipped to a historic low of around 5 percent in the 1960s because of restrictive immigration laws before shooting back up to around 13 percent in 2010, closer to rates in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The question that American politics is perpetually tied up in, said Parrado, the sociologist, is what a “normal” percentage of foreign-born residents is. Is the U.S. in fact a nation of immigrants, or do increases in immigration signal fundamental changes to the fabric of American society, as some suggest?
Vitiello pointed out that the low point of foreign-born residents overlapped with mid-century urban crisis. It wasn’t just that whites were fleeing big cities, but that there was also a historic lack of new immigrants to replace them. Every metro area in the U.S. would have shrunk in recent years if it were not for new immigrant communities, Vitiello said. At various points in the country’s history, arguments in favor of immigration and accepting refugees have embraced a moral framework—the idea that immigrants were American allies and had the right to be reunited with family members. But the contemporary argument that gains the most traction is an economic one, Vitiello said, even if it may not be the most compelling or humane. Cities that have supported immigration have seen economic returns, but there are more obvious reasons to embrace emerging communities.
“Another thing I like to say about revitalization is that, yes, it does mean dollar signs, and it means taxes and businesses and jobs and so on,” Vitiello says. “But it’s a term that also has a broader meaning, a more diverse meaning, to include life in a place.”
Vitiello is at work on a new book entitled The Sanctuary City that examines Central American, Southeast Asian, Liberian, Arab, and Mexican immigration since the 1970s.
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