The Role Of Immigration In Shaping American Cities

DIANA SAGINI

FALL 2007

URBS 310

CLASS 13968

The role of immigration in shaping American cities

The United States of America is correctly defined as a melting pot of cultures, and a people because it is not a homogenous nation. People from all over the world can be found living closely together, some even harmoniously live together despite their different ethnicities. This has not always been the case because America’s initial habitants were Native Americans, who were then invaded by and conquered by Europeans mostly from Northwestern Europe. Many years after initial contact with America, the Europeans brought African slaves with them, and these slaves are the ancestors of modern day African Americans.

In the first 50 years of this new America 95% of the settlers lived on farms and in small villages. But as more people arrived into America, they expanded further into the Americas taming the wild land into farms and small settlements. Consequently, as more people arrived due to the economic attraction of this new land there was increased segregation in cities based on ethnicities, urban sprawl and the restructuring of many major urban cities throughout the United States. The differing economic viability and attraction of the various urban areas in America helped further propagate this phenomenon. Some of the immigrants sought employment or entrepreneurship opportunities in the major cities, while some preferred to remain in rural areas as farmers such as the Scandinavians and the Germans.

The influence of immigrants into the United States was so insidious that many smaller urban areas began to sprawl within the United States, growing into small cities and then much later growing into large cities that consisted of immigrants from varying ethnicities. Critical events such as World War I and II as well as the Vietnam War continued to fuel this major immigrant influx and thus culturally influence the cities where these immigrants moved.

Many Chinese and Japanese immigrants favored the far west lands such as California. These new immigrants flocked America to seek employment and settling in areas where people from their similar backgrounds could be found. In some instances, immigrants moved to America with capital and opened up their own businesses resulting in an ethnic economy (businesses owned by a particular ethnic group). The integration of these businesses created enclave economies for example businesses found in Korea town, Chinatown, the Cubans in Miami, and The Armenians in San Fernando Valley. The Koreans favor a more suburban lifestyle and thus their settlements are more spatial clustering. They reside in the places where they do businesses. This clustering of an ethnicity in a suburb is referred to as an ethnoburd. These neighborhoods tend to be very affluent: for example the Vietnamese of Orange county and the Koreans of San Gabriel Valley, the Chinese and Japanese in San Francisco.

Kaplan et al provide statistics, which solidify their argument that immigration has indeed reconfigured and reshaped many metropolitan cities in the Unites States of America. Mexicans are the most populous of the Latino/Hispanic ethnic group making up almost 59 percent of the population of immigrant settlers, Puerto Ricans 10%, Cubans about 8%, and the other Hispanic groups making up the rest. A U.S. Census Bureau conducted in 1990 shows that many Cuban immigrants populated many coastal cities in Dade County in Florida, and other major