The Changing Face of St. Louis - Why new immigrants are St. Louis' best hope

By Kevin M. Mitchell, St. Louis Magazine

	It's one of those precious few days of fall when recess can still be outside, and I'm standing on the school playground with my sister, Laurie Clark, and her kindergarten class. Stephanie rolls up on a tricycle and honors us with a song:

	"I want to wish you a Merry Christmas, I want to wish you a Merry Christmas...."

	When she's done, she blurts: "I know another one!" 

	"I want to wish you a Merry Christmas, I want to wish you a Merry Christmas...."

	But what Stephanie might lack in repertoire, she more than makes up in her language prowess. See, she could have just as easily sung the song known as Feliz Navidad in her first language, Spanish. She's one of Laurie's seven students (out of twenty-three--thus, 30 percent) who speaks a language other than English with her family. In addition to Stephanie, who is from Mexico, Clark has students from Bosnia, Vietnam, China, and Afghanistan.

	But my sister teaches at Affton's Meisner School, in traditionally homogeneous South County. "Oh, it was nothing like this," she says of the diversity in her classroom compared to 15 years ago when she started. "Maybe there'd be one foreign-born child in a class once in a while, but now everybody has five or more."

	This anecdote is no anomaly. Bosnians get the headlines because of their numbers, but St. Louis had increases in almost every group from every continent in the last decade. The following groups have St. Louis organizations: Armenians, Bosnians, Chinese, Croatians, Ethiopians, Eritreans, Filipinos, Japanese, Lebanese, Laotians, Mexicans, Nigerians, Puerto Ricans, Thais, Ukrainians, and Vietnamese, among others. 

	A few groups congregate in specific neighborhoods: Vietnamese and Russians in the Tower Grove Park area, Bosnians in South City and, more recently, South County. But the vast majority almost immediately blend into the city. 
Some longtime St. Louisans say there are too many. Professor Terry Jones, who teaches political science at the University of Missouri St. Louis, would disagree.

	Studying census data for a book he's cowriting on St. Louis's future, Jones says the number of foreign-born new Americans in metropolitan St. Louis is now 1 out of 33--below the national average of 1 out of 7.

	"Although the number of new Americans settling in St. Louis rose 65 percent between 1990 and 2000, they still represent just 3 percent of the region's population," Jones points out. "Thirty thousand foreign-borns made St. Louis their home in that decade, but Chicago attracted that many in the single year of 1998."

	Jones makes the case that a more diverse community transmits into a healthier economy, a more vibrant urban landscape, and a better quality of life for all of us. Homes are bought in declining neighborhoods and fixed up, and small businesses are started in strip malls that have seen better days. Ron Klutho agrees. As codirector of the Immigrant and Refugee Support Program at St. Pius, he tells the story of Vesna, who, after many years of menial jobs, just opened a bakery. Called The Sweet Life, it's at Hampton and Chippewa--hardly what the Starbucks organization would consider prime real estate.

	"Diversity is good--that's my value statement," Jones says. "You can disagree, but the people who share that opinion are typically those highly educated people in their 20s and 30s," and thus the type St. Louis wants to attract. "They do not just want a community of steak houses and barbecue joints. They want Thai restaurants, Mexican food that's authentic, different styles of music. They want to walk down the street and not just see white and black faces."

	Recent studies reveal St. Louis's economic growth is stagnant, so when Jones maintains that it's advantageous for the city to attract people with skills and energy, there's no argument: "Immigrants provide this."

	He says what the census data shows is that the more foreign-born people a city has, the more it attracts, the more it announces that St. Louis is a good place to live and work and raise children. "How [new Americans] relate to others the experience they have here is key," he says. "We now have almost 80,000 foreign-borns here, which is more of a magnet. So if we haven't treated them well...."
	
	So how do immigrants and refugees get here, and how are they treated?

(part 1 of 3, to be continued)