I think that any conversation about immigration in the U.S. context begins with certain basic features, and these features or facts are not straightforward widely understood, even in our country, let alone the rest of the world. The first basic feature is that the U.S. is undergoing the second greatest wave of immigration in its history, the first in hundred years. The second feature is that this wave looks very different from the last hundred years ago, the immigrate age city making in America was primarly european in origin: italian, irish, eastern and russian, jewish. Now immigration is much more latin american and asian; it looks very very different. And this is creating new challenges, new strainings in some ways. The next , I think, overall feature that those working in citizen planning communities have to deal with is that fact, while immigration reaches many more metropolitan areas that are used to, there’s no longer just the question of New York, Los Angeles or Miami, but of second cities Chicago, Fresno, Seattle, Laredo (Texas), Des Moines (Iowa), places that never before saw the impact directly of immigration. Well, that is true still the pressures are felt mainly in metropolitan areas and not in rural communities, and this is not widely appreciated at the level of our state and federal government, that the benefits of immigration are felt throughout the country through the economic power and the social vitality the immigrants add, but the cost of immigration in the new term, the adaptation, the dealing with challenges of language, the public education, neighborhood services, the costs and the pressures are felt mainly in cities and we as a country are unbelieved about our cities and about making investments in that. So any conversation about immigration, I think, happens in that context. And the final thing, I think, anyone interested in communities and urban life would need to know about immigration in America is that we have a long historyof what we call “ethnic succession”, so immigrants inherit neighboorhoods, they replace those who were there before them and this is often a tense process. We human beings, I think, are territorial, we are attached to place, we relinquish these attachments with great difficulty in even resetment, and you see many metropolitan areas in the U.S. that were african-american are becoming latino, where community institutions are turning over, where governments are learning to deal with new populations and even with new languages and not just spanish anymore, but several different asian languages like viet and mong and so on, refugee tongues, swahili, eritrean and on and on. In the cities (…) that as I say were not historically targets for immigration at all, this succession is creating certain pressures. On the hole, while I believe that the current economic moment in the strong we would say “business psycho” favors the acceptance of the immigrants in many ways, in there labor markets are tight, there are jobs to be had, if there is to come a downturn or when some kind of downturn slowdown in the economy happens, you may well see a renewed pressure vis a vis immigration, a renewed resentment of the immigrants who might be seen as taking the job bof the native-born, or getting a aid while native-born americans can not and this kind of things. So we have to put everything in the context of the strong economy of the moment to have a conversation about why immigration is received in some ways very positively at the moment.

Particularly to the question if the benefits of immigration are seen to be in some of the costs of pressures, particularly when it comes to planning institutions and planning professions, I think it’s an evolving question or it’s a complex question in the sense that it is changing every minute in communities that are very experienced with immigration Miami, New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, many parts of the Southwest that have been mexican-american or are becoming so for decades now. It is one thing, you have people in positions of power (…) who are themselves members of the immigrant group with their language skills or sensitivities and so on, not to say that they don’t find the world challenging but they bring (…) and would not. In communities that are newer to this immigration wave the Great Plains would come to mind, Des Moines (Iowa), certain parts of South Dakota and Nebraska, even Minnesota seeing brand new waves of North-african and south-east-asian refugee and so on. The plannig profession is slower to adapt (…) you see public problem solving traditions that support inclusiveness, brotherly speaking, collaboration with community institutions including institutions created by and for immigrants themselves, the challenges are still considerable for plannig; in part because the public needs to understand the powerful stories the planners can tell about where the new immigrants groups are living and how they are living and so on, but we have to keep in mind that many of these groups are resentful or fearful, more like they’re fearful, of the government institutions. Some of them are fleeing state repression in their own countries, they are fearful of government, they are unfamiliar with american plannig traditions and they may not respond, well generally they do not, to what you might think of a technocratic plannig tradition, holding meetings at business hours and holding formal public (…).
I think in the more creative cities, which you see opening up with the planning and public liberation process, taking government and planning, whether or not it is done by the government by the way, taking it to the people and putting (…) in there social traditions. What this means in practical terms, in communities that is south-east asian, latino and north-african neighboorhood planners, organizers, professional work for no-profit organizations spending time walking in the streets, getting to know families, learning how they spend their time in groups, may be it’s a recreational game or some kind, may be it’s women circles, or soccer clubs or something else; and taking planning in the broadest sense of an organized way of having a conversation about the future, and to the facts of life, it’s how you do find planning (…), taking planning to the people and to those events and getting them involved and saying : “you need to make your voice heard!”.
Rather than simply announcing planning meetings or other events in the newspapers, on television, expecting the people to come in to the government offices and blaming them if they do not. So I think that this is the learning process that we are through, but the general understanding, and this is extremely important, that immigrants help to fuel our growth and the economic life of our cities, in part because native born americans are not even replacing themselves in terms of the birth rate that is very very low as it is in Europe. (It is extremely important) The understanding that immigrants are good for us, that we were all immigrants one time too, that our families were immigrants, most of us. That is becoming I think more pervasive. It’s not perfectly understood or 100% shared, but it’s more widely even than a generation ago. And we’re all in that too, social sciences brought to public awareness building to seeing immigrants in public life, in entertainment, in politics, in the arts, in literature, in influencial and very positive roles. That’s all part of changing the public face of what the immigrant is.