Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 3 | New Immigrants in New Places: America's Growing "Global Interior", page 2

Tennessee's foreign-born population grew by 169 percent between 1990 and 2000, and the state ranks sixth in the nation in the rate of its foreign-born population's growth. It is the nation's fourth fastest growing state in Hispanic population. Within Tennessee, most of the newcomer population flocked to Nashville in Davidson County and seven other adjacent outlying counties of middle Tennessee. Today, one-in-seven of Nashville's 570,000 residents is foreign-born.

Nashville's transformation was rapid. The foreign-born population grew by 203 percent between 1990 and 2000, almost four times as fast as the national average. Researchers assert that the rates are actually much higher because large numbers of undocumented immigrants are not counted by the census. By 2020, the Hispanic population in greater Nashville is projected to double.

Frank Sharry, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based National Immigration Forum, said immigrants are drawn to Nashville because of its reputation for "jobs, nice people, low crime and good schools. Immigrants want the same things we do." Not only did the growth occur quickly--almost half of the foreign born arrived in Nashville after 1995--but the newcomers are vastly diversified. Latin Americans, mainly from Mexico, comprise 40 percent of the immigrants. El Enlace Latino, the Nashville Hispanic yellow pages, reaches more than 200,000 Hispanic and Latino customers in twelve counties surrounding Nashville.

But the foreign-born population in greater Nashville is not exclusively Latin American immigrants. The U.S. Department of State worked closely with three religiously affiliated charities to relocate refugees to Nashville; as a result, the city also has significant concentrations of Middle Easterners, Europeans and Africans. In fact, Nashville has one of the nation's largest groups of Kurdish refugees, approximately 7,000.

The agenda of a recent meeting of the Nashville Task Force on Refugees and Immigrants, a coalition of immigrant and refugee service organizations located in Middle Tennessee, reflected the area's diversity. The meeting included presentations on cultural resettlement issues faced by Somali refugees; a "Walk-As-One" 5K fundraising event to celebrate diversity; a Kurdish and American community project to support Tennessee soldiers serving in Iraq; and advice on helping foreign-born individuals with limited English proficiency to understand cutbacks in the state Medicaid health care program.

Unlike previous generations, today's immigrants and refugees simultaneously maintain cultural, political, economic and social ties to two or more societies. And one of their greatest challenges is integrating not only with the American culture, but also with the multiple cultures of other newcomers.

"I didn't know which city in America was bad or good to raise my family, but I had a cousin who lived in Nashville and I used his address as a contact," says Tahir Hussain, president of the Nashville Kurdish Forum, who arrived from Iraq in 1997 to work first in a plastic factory and then for the public health department. "Initially, I came with no choice but I decided to stay here for several reasons--there's a good job market and the quality of life is affordable. Three-fourths of the Kurds here own their own homes. There's less traffic and it's a religious city. That's a factor because it's a trusting community with family values and less of the Western society atmosphere. People feel safe raising a family here."

Nashville is perfectly suited to be a receiving community and a model for study, says Dan B. Cornfield, a Vanderbilt University sociology professor and acting director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies. "This is a Tocquevillian paradise," Cornfield says, conjuring the spirit of Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote, in his 1835 landmark book, Democracy in America, about how citizens' associations played a critical role in preserving and strengthening the young United States of America. "We have a long tradition of a vibrant not-for-profit community in Tennessee," notes Cornfield. "There's a reason it's called the 'Volunteer State.'"

The greater metropolitan area has 813 private and public social service providers, 18 colleges and universities, a highly developed network of social service providers, a history of racial integration, and a shockingly low two percent unemployment rate even while the general population increased twenty percent during the 1990s.

Nashville has traditionally had a strong economic base. It is home to major corporations, including Hospital Corporation of America, the largest health care company in the world, and 200 other health care companies that manage half the nation's for-profit hospitals. Often dubbed the "Athens of the South" (it even has a life-size replica of the Parthenon in its city park) because of its historic dedication to fine arts and higher education, "Nashville was never deep south in its political culture," Cornfield declares. He has more to say about what makes Nashville both a magnet for newcomers and a rich source of information about their effects on a community, pointing out that the city's robust service economy, progressive government, highly developed community of nonprofit social service providers and advocates, renowned place in the history of the civil rights movement and pioneering efforts in racial-ethnic integration affords researchers and policymakers abundant opportunities to study and devise creative community-building policies to address the conflicts and complexities that accompany rapid globalization "Nashville is an important case in point of a city for which immigration is recent and inter-cultural group relations are complex," Cornfield notes. "The foreign-born and immigrant population is cross-heterogeneous. They face a variety of needs."

Struggling With Change

It is against this textured backdrop that Nashville--a politically "blue city" in a "red state" that has always perceived itself as more progressive, less parochial and even superior to other southern cities--embarked on a new and different challenge of becoming a multiethnic community.

Rising to the challenge has not happened without conflict and controversy. "This is a rapid-fire change," says Reginald Stuart, a journalist and Nashville native, "and southern towns don't change fast. They're being pushed and pushed."

In 2001, Stuart wrote an expose about immigrants in his hometown. "A vague disquiet hovers beneath the surface of our thoughts, causing even the most well-meaning of longtime residents to question our collective ability--and our will--to move the city up a notch, to transform it into an equitable, vibrant, multiethnic and productive 21st century community," Stuart wrote. "Are we prepared--mentally, socially, politically, educationally, economically--to transform ourselves into a community of independent citizens, or even a reasonably progressive and productive small city attuned to cross-cultural strengths, like Seattle or Portland?"

Next page: Among the first group in Nashville to feel the convergence of immigrants and refugees were local businessmen who were readily employing the droves of newcomers arriving in the city looking for jobs.

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