Commentary: Regional Perspectives - Coming to America - and our

An observer walking along Broadway and Eastern Avenue in southeast Baltimore cannot help noticing an ever-increasing array of shops, services and restaurants geared to the needs and tastes of new residents recently arrived from Central America, South America and the Caribbean.

Along the Reisterstown Road corridor in Baltimore's northwest corner, shops with merchandise and food delicacies, labeled in the Cyrillic alphabet, have been sprouting up to serve the growing population of immigrants from the lands of the former Soviet Union.

Exotic food items are featured in a few international markets owned by Nigerian entrepreneurs in the Lauraville and Hamilton sections of the Harford Road corridor in the northeast.

These signs of new arrivals from foreign lands are much more than a phenomenon evident only in Baltimore City.

The 2000 census counted nearly 54,000 foreign-born residents in Baltimore County.

Over 45 percent of those were relatively new to the area. Some 24,500 individuals immigrated to the county since 1990. They came primarily from Asian nations, such as Korea, India, and the Philippines; from Nigeria; from the Caribbean basin; from Russia, the Ukraine and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

Another 11,400 foreign-born residents, who had immigrated to this county since 1990, settled in Howard County during the past decade.

One of every six Howard County residents over 5 years old speaks a language other than English at home, according to a 2002 survey by the Census Bureau.

The county's Foreign-born Information and Referral Network reports that, after English, the predominant languages spoken by Howard residents are Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Urdu and Vietnamese.

The wave of international immigration that swept across the nation during the 1990's has continued unabated, even in the face of the lean economic years of 2000-2003, according to a recent report by the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies.

These demographic changes are having profound effects on our region. Indeed, in a special look at the Baltimore-Washington region, the CIS found that one of every five members of the bi-regional work force is foreign-born.

All told, the Baltimore region had over 145,000 foreign-born residents in 2000. That was far less than in metropolitan Washington, where a total of 832,000 residents were born abroad, based on the 2000 census count.

Some see opportunity in that particular disparity between the two regions. With Baltimore City continuing to lose population, various approaches have been tried over the years to reverse the tide.

Mayor Martin J. O'Malley's administration is turning back a page of history in Baltimore's latest approach: growing the city by attracting new residents from foreign lands, particularly those that have already settled nearby in the Washington suburbs.

These newcomers are among the first targets of a campaign to have a look at Baltimore's lower-cost housing and other advantages, according to Beery Adams, the Immigration Support and Outreach Coordinator working out of the Mayor's Office of Community Investment.

Think about the city's past development. It grew from a colonial seaport to a major international port, first as waves of German and Irish immigrants, among others, arrived in the decades prior to the Civil War.

In the latter part of the 19th century and into the early decades of the 20th century, those earlier settlers were followed by new arrivals from Italy, Greece, Poland and other lands of Southern and Eastern Europe.

In our own times, even as the city was experiencing a net population loss of 110,000 in the 1990-2000 period, it had attracted some 14,000 people who had immigrated to this county in that same period.

The city's 21st century initiative takes a new look at what the demographers refer to as channel immigration, in which friends and family reconnect with their fellow countrymen in their newly adopted communities.

Hector Torres, who heads the Governor's Commission on Hispanic Affairs, thinks that the city's campaign should work if the appropriate incentives and assistance is made available.

This assistance would have to include basic orientation and acculturation, including English language proficiency, and extend to direct help in accessing health care, acquiring housing, work force skills and assistance in setting up and maintaining businesses.

Beery and her network of City agency representatives, immigrant support groups and social service agencies are now at work to see that the proper incentives and support systems are in place.

Our new neighbors, from many foreign lands, and their American- born children are reshaping the fabric of our regional community, adding to its diversity, enterprise and culture, just as other immigrant groups did in earlier periods of history.

They also represent an important future source of labor for the regional economy as the aging native-born work force retires.

The entire community - governments, the schools, business and social service organizations - should learn to accommodate and welcome these new Americans.