Eds, Meds and Immigration

Followers of TechFutures know how strongly we feel about the important role immigration plays in a healthy economy and vibrant city. (For those new to this site, or in need of a refresher, check out these posts here and here.)

We were reminded again this morning by a “Making Change” report on ideastream this morning, discussing the importance of “Eds and Meds” (strong educational and medical assets/institutions) as attractors for new, highly educated immigrants.

Lest we forget, when this region was, as Naomi Lamoreaux calls it, “the Silicon Valley of the 19th Century,” it was largely du to (and the result of) the region being a destination for immigrants to the united States. As Joel Kotkin points out:

“For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries immigrants filled and often dominated American cities. With the curtailment of immigration in the 1920’s, this flow was dramatically reduced, and with it, urban areas began to suffer economic stagnation, and in some places decline [editorial comment: sound familiar to anyone?]. Only after 1965, when immigration laws were reformed, did newcomers return in large numbers, once again transforming many of the nation’s cities.”

The key word there is “many.” Cleveland, Akron, Canton, and Youngstown have not benefited from an influx of new immigrants, nor has Ohio as a whole. And this is a problem that must be addressed if we want to reinvigorate our urban areas. As Kotkin continues:

“[D]espite the movement of young professionals and others into the urban core, native-born Americans continued, on balance, to flee the cities in the 1990s…At a time when Americans were fleeing the biggest cities, immigrants were becoming more urban: as over 2.5 million native-born Americans fled the nation’s densest cities, over 2.3 million immigrants came in….Without these immigrants, probably all cities would have suffered the sort of serious depopulation that has afflicted such cities as St. Louis, Baltimore, and Detroit, which, until recently, have attracted relatively few foreigners.” [emphasis mine]

But if strong university research and medical institutions are attractors for immigrants, then one of the “pluses” in Cleveland+ will and must be an aggressive effort to attract and retain new immigrant residents. Yes, finding ways to keep kids who grew up here is important, but it also risks making our intellectual gene pool extremely shallow—not because our own kids aren’t bright—they are—but because without diversity the pool of ideas is not deep enough to dip into when trying to build a robust, innovation-based technology-focused economy. Again from Kotkin: “In 1930, one out of four residents of our top four ‘gateway’ cities came from abroad, twice the national average; by the 1990s, one in three was foreign-born, five times the norm.”

So take a look around at your own circle of friends, your neighborhood, the places people hang out downtown. If you don’t see a high number of new, non-native immigrants, then it’s a sign that we aren’t doing enough of what it takes to rebuild the region’s economy.