by Anne Farris

Nashville, Tennessee is one of the many new destinations for immigrants to the U.S. Reaction to the city's newest residents may provide insight into similar situations across the country.

Rauf Ary, a 42-year-old Kurdish refugee who fled his native Iran thirteen years ago, points to a sign in front of his Tara Market in Nashville, Tennessee that demonstrates a new direction for this mid-size southern city. "We have fresh Halal meat," the sign reads, conveying its message in three languages: English, Spanish and Arabic. Then he glances toward his neighbors' storefront signs: Inter-Asian Market, Gye Nyame West African Restaurant, Iglesia De Jesucristo Samaria and Istanbul Restaurant. "The world comes together here," Ary says. "Nashville is the cradle for human life."

This predominantly white city known for its country music, rhinestone cowboys and fried chicken and biscuits has suddenly morphed into a new Ellis Island emblematic of a demographic revolution occurring in a thick vein of territory running through the Midwest and Southern regions of America. The nation is experiencing the largest immigrant and refugee resettlement since the Industrial Revolution, and cities like Nashville--rather than the gateway cities of the past such as New York and Los Angeles--are the new, nontraditional settling grounds where foreign-born newcomers find an abundance of jobs, housing, lower prices and, sometimes, friendlier receptions.

The growth has enriched the local culture and economy, but it has also challenged policymakers, businessmen and social service providers to successfully integrate the newcomers into a mutually beneficial community. As a result, Nashville, which has not grappled with this much racial and cultural integration since the civil rights movement fifty years ago, is exhibiting the same growing pains as an angst-ridden, awkward and sometimes troubled teenager entering adulthood. This ongoing transformation is a surprise to many because, says Garrett Harper, research director at the Nashville Convention and Visitors Bureau, "Nashville had hardly changed from decade to decade."

Confronted with a record-breaking and unprecedented influx of foreign-born individuals and families, the city has assembled businesses, government, religious and community organizations, along with philanthropic groups, to grapple with its new role as a global destination. It has made the city and region a national leader in superlatives: Tennessee was the first state to issue drivers' licenses for documented and undocumented immigrants; Nashville is one of three American cities selected to participate in an experiment in public-private partnerships of immigrant and refugee integration primarily funded by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement; and the city housed one of five U.S. polling stations in America for Iraqi expatriate voters during the January 2005 Iraqi elections.

All of this has provoked an anti-immigrant backlash that is loud, proactive and downright ugly at times. Coalitions have been formed to control the growth of undocumented immigrants and talk show hosts are sounding the alarm about what they say is a "la reconquista," or "reconquest" movement of Mexican immigrants ultimately aimed at returning parts of southwest America to Mexico. The heightened debate has left the Tennessee legislature struggling with numerous pieces of legislation that both protect and limit immigrants' rights.

"Nashville now has a stake in the immigration debate in a way that it hadn't before," says Steven Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies. The city's reaction to the large and sudden growth amidst the absence of a comprehensive national immigration policy has positioned Nashville as a model of dynamic and counterintuitive change in the transforming American landscape of immigrant and refugee resettlement.

The New American Frontier Takes Shape

Nashville is a miniature version of a national phenomenon in which all of America is witnessing dramatic increases in immigrant and refugee populations. One-in-ten Americans is now foreign born, with a third arriving in the last decade. Unlike the white European immigrants who came to the U.S. at the beginning of the 20th century, today's immigrants are largely from Latin America. With increasingly relaxed national immigration standards to facilitate a growing need for inexpensive labor, workers have arrived in droves to find economic opportunities. Studies show that half of America's new workforce in the 1990s comprised immigrants, compared with only ten percent in the 1970s. Many are documented, but at least one-quarter of all foreign-born residents are here illegally, and many face persistent poverty, disenfranchisement and language barriers.

One of the most striking differences among today's immigrants and refugees is where they settle. Nashville is part of a new American frontier sometimes called the "global interior" that runs from Minnesota to Texas where immigrants and refugees have moved in unprecedented numbers since 1990. Of the nation's one hundred largest metropolitan areas, Nashville ranks first in the number of new immigrants arriving from 1991 to 1998 relative to the number of foreign-born counted there in 1990. Atlanta, Georgia is second and Louisville, Kentucky is third.

Nontraditional communities have also become a haven for Iranians and Iraqis after the Persian Gulf War and terrorist attacks, Somalis and Sudanese evading political turmoil, Russian Jews seeking religious tolerance and Bosnians escaping ethnic cleansing.

The administration of President Bill Clinton issued new directives that refugees be dispersed to all fifty states rather than concentrated in the traditional gateway communities where they had been settled in earlier times. While this policy continues to be followed, the communities receiving these newcomers have raised concerns that the influx will overtax local resources. For example, in 2002, after more than 1,000 Somalis had settled in Lewiston, Maine--population approximately 35,000--the mayor wrote an open letter to his city's new residents, asking that they discourage any more of their countrymen and women from coming to live in Lewiston because, he wrote, "Our city is maxed out financially, physically and emotionally." The Holyoke, Massachusetts city council also opposed resettling Somalis because the city didn't have enough money to educate and train them. Farmingville, a Long Island, New York community, has become a national flashpoint on immigrant issues because it has been the scene of violence and confrontation centering around a large population of Latino day laborers, primarily Mexican. (It is estimated that starting in the late 1990s, as many as 1,500 immigrant workers--looking for employment in construction, landscaping and similar fields--came to Farmingville, a village of approximately 15,000 people.)

Next page: 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.

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