Seattle area re-emerges as immigrant 'gateway'
Norwegians and Swedes, Japanese and Filipinos eyed their future in fishing and lumber. The Vietnam War sent Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians and Thais here. Mexicans arrived to work in agriculture and the service industry. The high-tech boom brought South Asians — Indians and Pakistanis.
This 100-year portrait of Seattle-area immigration is at the crux of a first-of-its-kind demographic study being released today by The Brookings Institution, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C.
The study shows that, in these parts, the influx of foreigners crested in 1910, when immigrants accounted for one out of every 3.5 residents. Immigrants represented one out of every 11 people in 1970, but three decades later, their presence nearly doubled.
In 2000, one out of every six people in the Seattle-Bellevue-Everett metropolitan area was foreign-born.
Put another way: In 2000, there were four times as many foreign-born residents living in the Seattle area as there were in 1900. But because they were a higher percentage of the total population in 1900, you would have been more likely to run into an immigrant back then.
Prompted by the rapidly changing face of her Washington, D.C., neighborhood, demographer Audrey Singer of The Brookings Institution decided to use decennial Census data to sketch the various waves of U.S. immigration between 1900 and 2000.
"It made me think, what's going on out there?" said Singer, who described seeing a blooming suburban mosaic much like scenes in the Pacific Northwest: a Vietnamese video store next to a Latino grocery only a few doors down from a Middle Eastern restaurant.
"I felt I needed to capture the trends and capture the lives of people living today," she said. Or sketch a history for people thinking about their parents and grandparents, she added.
Through her research of metropolitan areas, Singer concludes:
• The U.S. foreign-born population grew 57 percent in the 1990s. In that decade, a "hot" job market in construction, services and manufacturing drew immigrants in record numbers to such states as North Carolina, Georgia and Nevada.
• By 2000, immigrants were more likely to live in suburbs than in cities.
• For the first time in recent decades, the dominance of California as a destination is fading.
• The flow of foreigners during the 20th century fell into what Singer calls six major types of immigrant "gateways."
Seattle, for example, began the century as a magnet for immigrants, with the percentage of its foreign-born residents exceeding the national average. After 1930, that pull waned. After 1980, the attraction became strong again, particularly to the burgeoning suburbs.
This tempo, occurring also in Portland, Denver, Tampa, Fla., and the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul), classifies Seattle as a "re-emerging" gateway, according to Singer.
The flow of immigrants here has never been a steady river as it is into New York and Chicago — "continuous" gateways. Nor has area immigration been only a recent surge, as in Dallas, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. — "emerging" gateways since the 1980s.
Miami and Los Angeles are called "post-World War II" gateways, because they started attracting significant numbers of immigrants after the 1950s.
Raleigh-Durham, N.C., and Salt Lake City are "pre-emerging" because the flow of foreigners began only about 10 years ago.
And the stream of immigrants is only trickling into "former" gateways: St. Louis and Pittsburgh.
In 2000, there were 94,952 foreign-born Seattle residents. In the combined Seattle metropolitan area, the foreign-born population totaled 331,912.
Singer uses the terms "foreign-born" and "immigrant" interchangeably. Her numbers, taken from the U.S. Census, account only for those individuals who listed their birthplace as someplace other than the U.S. The numbers, therefore, don't include all foreign-born residents who may have entered the country illegally.
While that means the actual numbers are sure to be higher, Singer doesn't think that alters settlement patterns nor the rankings of the various source countries of immigrants.
The U.S. economy and immigration laws in the 20th century helped shape the wave of foreign arrivals. There was the worldwide depression in the 1930s, Singer notes. Restrictive immigration policies were instituted during World War II. Then, most significantly, the Immigration and Nationality Amendments of 1965 repealed national-origin quotas. The doors swung open.
In the Pacific Northwest, Filipinos, for example, first entered this country as U.S. nationals between 1898 and 1946, according to the state Commission on Asian Pacific American Affairs. In the 1920s, Filipinos took jobs in Alaskan canneries and in Northwest lumber. Filipino professionals arrived post-1965. Approximately 1,000 Filipinos continue to arrive each year through the Port of Seattle, according to the commission.
Filipinos, after Mexicans, accounted for the largest group of foreign-born residents in the Seattle metro area in 2000. In order, the other top countries of origin were Vietnam, Canada, Korea, China, India, the United Kingdom, Japan and Ukraine.
The arrival of immigrants is heard in the 110 languages spoken in the Seattle School District; seen in the bustling shopping enclaves dotting Highway 99 from Snohomish to South King County; tasted at corner taquerias, halal markets, or the Ukrainian deli on Broadway in Everett that opened within the past six months.
For 27 years, Rita Meehan of Everett has worked with the Refugee and Immigrant Forum of Snohomish County — once known as the Asian center because it worked mainly with South Asian refugees.
"Then all of a sudden, we had the Solidarity people coming from Poland," she said. "We have Russians, Vietnamese, Bosnians, Somalis."
With the exception of people from the Caribbean, the greater Seattle area is a snapshot of the diversity of the foreign-born population nationwide, said Charles Hirschman, professor of sociology at the University of Washington.
Where folks settle isn't determined so much by the distance from their originating country, Hirschman notes, but rather by familial ties.
"The general principle is that migration, both domestic and international, follows chains," he said. "There are connections from prior waves. Some people get here. Then come their friends and families and you help them find housing and jobs."
History has shown that an increasing number of foreigners can lead to a backlash against immigration.
But Hirschman speculates the nation in the 21st century has become more tolerant.
"And I think the country recognizes the value immigrants have," he said. Besides, he added, "Immigrants vote."
Florangela Davila: 206-464-2916 or fdavila@seattletimes.com