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| Side-by-side comparison of speeches naijaeforum.com |
Well Day One of the Republican National Convention got off to a tumultuous start. A mini-rebellion was quashed and charges of plagiarism. Melania Trump, the wife of presumptive nominee Donald Trump, made her convention debut. Her speech was your typical fawning spouse-of-the-candidate speech. However, when it comes to all things Trump, there is always drama. In this case, the twittering masses noticed similarities between the loving speech given by Ms. Trump and the one given by Michelle Obama in 2008. If you look at the graphic on the left, you can see the highlighted similarities. Whether it was purposefully lifted or not remains to be seen. The "Poor Melania" narrative does not hold because as a public person, she is responsible for her words. Frankly, yours truly thought it was a typical canned speech. Other highlights included scathing critique of Secretary Hillary Clinton's handling of Benghazi, despite a finding of no wrong doing. There were harsh words on undocumented immigrants. A couple of celebrity speakers. Today, the norovirus made an appearance, felling California state officials. Now, onto one of the campaign's hot button issues, immigration.
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| U.S. immigration protests Washington D.C, rt.com |
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| Immigration stamp sayanythingblog.com |
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| "Where did they live?" slideplayer.com |
Typically, American metropolitans have the first and last destinations for most new arrivals. That, in of itself, makes immigration an urban issue.
Throughout most of the 20th century, when immigrants landed in the United States, they would enter one of major "gateway cities" such as Ellis Island in New York. Once processed, they would make their way to one of the ethnic enclaves. Ms. Misra writes, "While that still happens to some extent, the settlement pattern has become much broader." In 1965, immigration policy changed to allow amore inclusive flow of legal and illegal immigration. This new wave of arrivals made their way across the metropolitan areas in the South and Southwest: Charlotte, North Carolina and Atlanta, Georgia, lured by the hope of work ad affordable living.
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| Interactive immigration map Migration Policy Center citylab.com |
The map on the left, by the Migration Policy Center, is of the metropolitans with the largest immigrant populations between 2010 and 2014.
During the four year study period, another geographical change occurred: suburbanization. To compare, in 1990, about equal shares of foreign-born people in the United States lived in cities, as opposed to the suburbs. By 2010, "...51 percent of all immigrants in the U.S. lived in suburbs of U.S. metros." Be that as it may, in 78 out of 100 of the largest American metropolitans immigrants were less likely to live in the suburbs than the overall population, based on Ms. singer's research.
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| Charlotte, North Carolina en.wikipedia.org |
Richard Florida recently explained how immigrants are enhancing the metropolitans they reside in.
First and foremost, many of them have literally build some of the U.S. cities that are thriving today. Take Charlotte, North Carolina, for example-a city with a skyline that's less than 25 years old. This was the same period over which its Latino immigrant population saw an incredible growth: from 0.098 percent in 1980 to 13.1 percent in 2014. "Economic growth in Charlotte has been robust, with high demand for position in industries like construction work.,
based on a 2007 University of North Carolina Charlotte report. The demand was, by-and-large, fulfilled by Latino immigrants.
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| Downtown New Orleans, Louisiana commons.wikimedia.org |
These are just two examples of immigrants building, repairing, and maintaining American cities. Charlotte and New Orleans are not anomalies or exceptions. Historically, immigrants have always worked, out of sight out of mind, in integral jobs-typically doing the work that their native-born counterparts will not do. Generally, foreign born workers with limited educations tend to work in the service and construction sectors. They are the ones maintaining our cities, minding our children, and preparing our food.
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| Highland Park, California laweekly.com |
Tanvi Misra's colleague Laura Bliss wrote about a new initiative to re-evaluate this work. Ms. Bliss spoke with Lee Vinset and Andy Russell at the Stevens Institute of Technology, who see maintenance as absolutely crucial in the face of crumbling infrastructure. They said,
The vast majority of technologies that surround us and underpin our lives are not innovations...And the vast majority of labor in our culture is not focused on introducing or adopting new things, but on keeping things going.
However, immigrants are building futures cities through innovation. This year, "...more than half of the 87 billion-dollar start-ups in the U.S. were started by immigrants, and these created 760 per jobs company." The Wall Street Journal wrote,
...non-partisan study on entrepreneurship give some credence to the tech industry's stance that American innovation benefits from robust immigration.
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| Austin, Texas skyline sparefoot.com |
And yet, we're not building cities for immigrants
Tanvi Misra writes, "For all of these reason, we believe it's immensely important to write about policies that affect immigrants. Because they are among those who we're hoping to 'inspire and inform.'"
In truth, the future of immigration is something that should concern all of us who love, live, and care about cities. Regardless of where you stand on the immigration debate. Whether or not you support undocumented immigrants, the fact of the matter is that they are here and many are assimilating and becoming productive members of American society. It is their future generations that will become the majority of U.S. population by 2043. They will be the future urban dwellers.
Despite these pronouncements, the realization by municipalities of the contribution of this segment of the populations, are trying to be more hospitable. However for the most part, we have not been design our cities with immigrant communities in mind. Most of the low-income immigrant communities in the United States still largely live in separate neighborhoods with sub-standard schools, foul air, and insufficient potable water. Further, like many ethnic communities, they are affected the most by environmental disasters and lack of available transit. These are also the communities that more likely to have police-involve incidents, be subject to discriminatory hoping policies, wage theft, and predatory lending practices. In short, we really need to do a better job at building cities for the people who actually live their.
One more thing: It is now official, Donald J. Trump is officially the Republican nominee for the 2016 Presidential elections.
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