Will st louis ever get huge immgrant enclave/ nighborhoods? (St. Louis: neighborhoods, construction)

[CommonFire]

I did some random thinking about about population growth and demographics, which i sometimes look up mainly for fun during my break, and i notice that St Louis and its metro area is becoming more diverse (Which is a good thing). I also noticed we are getting a lot more a lot more immigrants not only from Bosnia, like the past 20 years or so but also a lot of Asian and Hispanic immigrants also. I also expect this trend to accelerate as the years go on for the foreseeable future. Which brings me to my question, if there any true ethic/immigrant neighborhoods in St Louis?( besides older immigrant areas like the hill)
my other question would be which neighborhoods do you think would become mostly Asian Bosnian, or Hispanic in the future lets say 5-20 years away from now?

[Conner1994]

Why is this a good thing? Not saying it isn't, just curious.

[Salsalera]

As interesting as that sounds to me, I really don't think that there will be "Towns" in the St. Louis area. I believe there is a little pocket or two of Bosnians. I guess once a wave of immigrants come here, they might collect in one area, but after a while scatter to wherever parts of St. Louis city and county and surrounding cities.

I don't think no one group to have major impact on the general landscape like if you stroll down a Town in San Francisco or New York and see the majority of signage or architecture or whatever else that lets you know you're not in Kansas anymore. Sure, there's the Chinatown on Olive in U City, but it's not as if you see a large Chinese/Asian population actually living there. It's just were some Asian businesses are located. And the area isn't really connected to Hop Alley, which is where (from what I understand) Busch Stadium stands.

[CommonFire]

I view it as a good thing is Immigrants tend to often be themselves educated or really strive for there children to be educated, which i believe would help bring new ideas a maybe even new fields to the St Louis area, Also with painfully slow regional population growth a shot in the arm of people would help.

[MORebelWoman]

It isn't always a good thing!

[CommonFire]

MORebelWoman How are Hard working immigrants never a good thing??? take your bigotry back to a [domain blocked due to spam] forum or something.

[Chicago76]

STL doesn't have significant immigrant-majority neighborhoods. Good presences of Asians in South City, Mexicans in a small stretch near Cherokee, Asians near Olive/Maryland Heights. One area of the metro that might be immigrant-majority is Fairmount City in metro east just E of the mounds.

I wouldn't expect STL to ever have another true immigrant neighborhood. Immigrants tend to go to one of two places: 1) existing immigrant hubs like Chicago, NYC, LA, Miami, etc. or 2) metros with a lot of job growth. STL is neither.

What I would expect is to continue to see the number of foreign born increase. It increased something like 16% over 7-8 years. That seems like a big number, but it really isn't when you compare it to other large, but not really huge metros that might be considered peers. A metro like Indy saw their foreign born increase about 35% over the same period. CLE and DET foreign borns are flat due to the economy. Chicago has seen their foreign born growth come down to 10% over that period. What's happened there is that Chicago used to be THE place to go as an immigrant from the Appalachians to the Rockies in the northern US. People stuck around for a good 5-10 years, if not permanently, before moving to cheaper areas with job growth once they figured out how to make things work for them in the US. Immigration got tighter and the incomings couldn't replace the outbounds to keep the growth rate up. Every other metro pretty much from Buffalo/Rochester to the Rockies, from Minneapolis all the way down to TN and Oklahoma have higher foreign born growth rates though.

Which is a shame, because I've seen first hand how immigrant communities have positively impacted metro economies. Almost every "nice" neighborhood in Chicago populated by college-educated young professionals today was saved by immigrants from the 70s to 00s. Natives moved out and there was a vacuum. The Immigrants moved in and were very entrepreneurial. Most people who are willing to move thousands of miles to a different country, especially if they aren't really well educated with a solid grasp of English, are risk takers. By definition, they are entrepreneurial. They set up stores and services and invested heavily in their communities to build something from scratch. The young educated moved into those neighborhoods because they already had services, good housing stock (immigrant construction workers/rehabbers), etc. Wicker Park, Ukrainian Village, Bucktown, Logan Square, Lincoln Square, a lot of Lakeview/Lincoln Park, etc. Over 500,000 immigrants can do that.

Think about what a lot of north city and some areas of south city or the inner burbs would look like today if the city had an extra 100,000 - 150,000 immigrants over the last 20 years.

[CommonFire]

That is very insightful Chicago76, It seems like the cities that struggle with with attracting immigrants are all Rustbelt cites. But I read many times that the Chicago metro economy was pretty bad from the 70's until the 90's, until chicago made its return prominence in the 1990's. Except for the great recession, it seems compared to other rust belt cities it is doing better economically. Did Chicago's immigrant growth slowed due to just economics or did immigrant new arrivals taste in cities changed as the 21st century went on??

[Chicago76]

Originally Posted by CommonFire

That is very insightful Chicago76, It seems like the cities that struggle with with attracting immigrants are all Rustbelt cites. But I read many times that the Chicago metro economy was pretty bad from the 70's until the 90's, until chicago made its return prominence in the 1990's. Except for the great recession, it seems compared to other rust belt cities it is doing better economically. Did Chicago's immigrant growth slowed due to just economics or did immigrant new arrivals taste in cities changed as the 21st century went on??

Chicago declined in certain ways from 70 to 90, but it always had a lot of non-manufacturing sectors to play in that insulated it from the worst of the Midwest industrial decline. It didn't decline the way that Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Rochester or even St. Louis declined over the same period.

The advantage that Chicago has is that it has historically been a huge port of entry for immigrants over many decades leading up to that decline. It's a huge metro with a lot of all kinds of people. Working class immigrants especially will go where they know people to establish a support system. Mexicans, Eastern Europeans, and Asians of most nationalities have traditionally been present in decent numbers, so it's almost always on those nationalities' short list of places to consider if they're looking to come to the Midwest. NYC is the best example of this nationally, but among certain communities places like Miami, Dallas, Houston, DC LA have the same kind of working class immigrant draw thanks to their size. Seattle and the Bay Area draw a lot of working class Asians too.

Knowing people is extremely important because it allows newcomers with no idea of what its like to live here with no knowledge of English to settle in. Sticking just to Mexican immigrants, if you could poll 100 poor/blue collar Mexicans thinking of coming to the US, I'd bet that almost all of them know someone in Chicago, LA, and at least a couple other Sunbelt metros like Dallas, Houston, and Phoenix. Those are their tier I choices based upon comfort level. They have 5-6 potential places to settle, they'll probably go to the one where they have the best support levels, and STL isn't one of them. After they gain comfort and figure things out, they fan out as their contacts and comfort level deepens. Construction and distribution are big industries where an immigrant can latch on. Indianapolis isn't that far from Chicago (3hrs) and those industries boomed in Indy in the 90s and 00s so Mexicans from Chicago made their way down to Indy and formed a Tier II immigration hub. Even then, a lot of times the people moving to Indy are comfortable enough with the culture and how things work where they don't feel they need to rely upon the comfort of a very Mexican neighborhood to get by, so they scatter everywhere.

Every once in a while, STL gets a decent one-off influx. There happened to already be a decent number of Bosnians here before the Yugoslav civil war, so STL got a huge share of that refugee population. Of the Vietnamese population. Or the Somalis, who settled here not because of some established network but because the govt relocated political refugees here, which gave traction to more coming. But it's always pretty small groups often from small countries like Bosnia where there really isn't a huge established population anywhere in the US because there just aren't that many Bosnians in the world. You can't really count on these fairly small groups to keep popping up in STL because for two of the last 3 groups, it has been a war/civil unrest that has brought them here.

A good article that describes some of STL's difficulties in attracting immigrants:

St. Louis tackles the challenge of attracting more immigrants : Business

They want to increase immigration to grow the local economy, but the problem is the region needs to grow the local economy to increase the immigrants.

[Vols44]

Originally Posted by MORebelWoman

It isn't always a good thing!

Tell that to the St. Louis Regional Chamber. You don't have to like diversity, but you do have to live with it's realities.