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

While the answer is unclear, a city still struggling with black and white racial issues is also learning how to cope with new strains of diversity. 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.

During the 1990s, the metropolitan area added 260,000 jobs, mainly due to the establishment of Nissan, Saturn and Dell manufacturing plants, and employers were overjoyed to tap into the abundant supply of immigrants and refugees--even if they didn't speak English--to work in factories, on construction sites and in restaurants and stores. Nashville-based Gaylord Entertainment, America's fastest-growing specialty lodging and entertainment company, which has expanded its legendary Grand Ole Opry to include an entertainment division and a chain of hotels and resorts, including the 2,884-room Opryland Hotel in Nashville, houses its foreign-born workers at smaller, off-site hotels and provides English-as-a-Second Language (ESL) classes. One large Nashville construction company reports that one-fourth of its employees are Hispanic and a meatpacking plant near Nashville reports that 40 percent of its 1,600 employees are from foreign countries and speak 13 different languages.

"Employers were saying, 'I need workers even if they don't speak English,'" says Garrett Harper, who was research director at the Nashville Chamber of Commerce before joining the Visitors Bureau. "Employers welcomed the foreign-born and whether the employers were good entities or exploiters, they'd say that having this workforce was a good thing for Nashville. There was the idea that everyone was a winner, and the foreign-born weren't considered a great burden. Even if there wasn't always a welcoming, there also wasn't anything negative." Some business leaders even suggested that the economy and population growth would have faltered if not for the foreign-born workers who took jobs unfilled by Americans.

But the immigrant workers also brought problems with them: poverty, illegal status and language barriers all took their toll when these newcomers arrived on Nashville's doorstep. Currently, eighteen percent of the foreign-born population in Nashville lives below the federal poverty level ($17,050 for a family of four in 2000), almost double the rate for the total city population. Almost half of the foreign-born population speaks limited English. Three-fourths are not citizens and, therefore, are civically isolated and politically disenfranchised. The public school superintendent, a Cuban refugee, has increased the number of ESL classes for a student body that speaks 80 different languages. But the increases cannot keep pace with the demand, and the number of classes and teachers is woefully lacking.

The police department began hiring Hispanic officers in the 1990s and now offers an online course entitled "Intensive Survival Spanish for Law Enforcement." But the course costs $120 and provides only limited skills, and there are complaints that officers are often ineffective in working with the foreign-born community because of language barriers. In 2000, Hispanics staged a protest when two local policemen inadvertently gunned down a Korean merchant who was attempting to foil a pair of armed robbers.

City leaders, especially businessmen, realized that the city was undergoing major cultural, social and civic changes and called for help. Garrett Harper was working at the Chamber of Commerce in 2000 when he became the principal architect of a request to the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement for a $375,000 grant to undertake a three-year pilot venture called "Building the New American Community (BNAC) Initiative."

Nashville was one of three cities, including Lowell, Massachusetts and Portland, Oregon chosen in 2001 to receive the grant and become an experimental integration site. The initiative stemmed from the absence of a national immigrant policy that might otherwise help governments and civil society unaccustomed to the influx of newcomers to respond in a positive manner.

The BNAC Initiative is a joint project of five national organizations: the National Conference of State Legislatures, the Urban Institute, the National Immigration Forum, the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center and the Migration Policy Institute. It was primarily funded by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement and received additional funding from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Carnegie Corporation of New York also provided support to the National Immigration Forum, the Migration Policy Institute and the National Conference of State Legislatures for their work on BNAC. Says Geri Mannion, chair of the Corporation's Strengthening U.S. Democracy program, "It is important, in the Corporation's view, to develop immigrant policies aimed at integrating newcomers into our national life--not just immigration policies dealing with who can come here and who can't, and in what numbers--because helping newcomers to become full participants in our democracy will help us keep our nation vibrant and strong."

Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., says smaller cities like Nashville are discovering that public-private partnerships are vital to integrating the increasing numbers of immigrants.

Under BNAC, the Nashville New American Coalition (NNAC), an alliance of businesses, social service agencies and immigrant and refugee activist rights groups, was formed to integrate the foreign born into the political, social and economic life of the city. NNAC, sponsored by the Nashville Chamber of Commerce and sixteen organizations representing immigrants and refugees, specifically identified the workplace as the key arena for integration and focused on involving the entire community--not just immigrants and refugees--in the integration process.

"Immigrant integration is not just a one-way process," says Ann Morse, program director of the Immigrant Policy Project for the National Conference of State Legislatures and BNAC program manager. "What this project proved is that integration is a complex, multifaceted, long-term process that involves an entire community including employers, schools, neighborhoods, places of worship and government agencies. Nashville was unique because of the commitment from the business community, but it reflects a national trend. Most businesses recognize we're running out of workers."

NNAC worked in four areas: business development, citizen and civic participation, research and leadership and capacity building. Nashville Metro Social Services and the Tennessee Department of Human Resources was also involved in the project. The organization's community-building efforts included immigrant voter education, recertification for foreign-trained professionals, leadership training and youth development. NNAC also provided technical and management assistance to community immigrant and refugee organizations such as Kurdish Human Rights Watch, the Somali Community Center of Nashville, the Nashville Egyptian Community, the Sudanese Humanitarian Organization, the International Lao-American Organization and Iraqi House. The city now has two Hispanic Chambers of Commerce.

Next page: NNAC placed added emphasis on reaching out to employers, who had little experience with immigrant workers, to teach them about different social and cultural practices that could affect the workplace.

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