Hispanic Immigrants Bring Life To The Rust Belt

The Atlantic:

They came in larger numbers than the Italians, Germans or Irish did, dwarfing past numbers of immigrants by a ratio of two to one. Swaths of the Southwest now look more like Mexico than the U.S. More people in Miami speak Spanish than English. And, in the past 10 years, Hispanic immigrants settled far beyond the obvious gateway states of California, Arizona, and Texas, posing vast existential questions of identity, demography, and acculturation for cities as far-flung as Portland, Oregon, and Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the Lehigh Valley, a post-industrial enclave in Eastern Pennsylvania. In just the past decade, the cities of Bethlehem and Allentown, as well as nearby Reading, saw their Hispanic populations explode. The new arrivals tend to keep to themselves, living among their own, speaking Spanish, and generally lending credence to the 2004 warning of Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington: Hispanic immigration will "divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages," he wrote.

But in 60 or 70 or 85 years, few in the Lehigh Valley will remember fear-mongers like Huntington. Even the grandchildren of bodega-owners and Dominican hairdressers might forget, reminded only by family stories like my Aunt Mae's.

"Three generations," declares James Smith, an immigration researcher at the RAND Corporation. "By the time you get to the third generation, you can't distinguish between Americans and Hispanic immigrants. That's how long it takes to look like an American."

This is definitely good news.  I always feel like our economy in Ohio is pretty bad, because we don't seem to attract Hispanic immigrants.  These immigrants can revitalize dying neighborhoods and bring new life to struggling communities.  It is crazy that so many folks are anti-immigrant.  If they can come to the Lehigh Valley, they can come here.