Journal Reporter
If you live and work in the Northwest Suburbs, you don't have to analyze data from the 2000 census to know that many more immigrants are calling this area home than ever before.
Just look at the over 40 languages spoken by the student population of Maine East High School in Park Ridge; the latest "Bollywood" films of India playing at the Des Plaines Theater; the Korean markets of Niles; and the bilingual Spanish-to-English classes offered at schools like John Jay in Mt. Prospect.
And these indicators are just a small piece of a very large picture.
Researchers from Roosevelt University's Institute for Metropolitan Affairs have actually studied 2000 census figures and made this determination based on the data: three Northwest Suburban communities-Mt. Prospect, Arlington Hts. and Palatine-are "ports of entry" for new immigrants to the Metro Chicago area.
In fact, the report ranks Mt. Prospect seventh out of 25 communities in Metro Chicago with high immigrant populations (Mt. Prospect is home to 15,159 immigrants). Also on the list is Des Plaines (11th with 14,010 immigrants), Wheeling (18th with 10,817), Arlington Hts. (19th with 10,546) and Niles (20th with 10,144).
When it comes to the percentage of immigrants living in a particular community, Rosemont, Prospect Hts., Niles and Wheeling rank in the top 25. Small communities like Rosemont and Prospect Hts. have an immigrant population of 37% and 36.5%, respectively. Immigrants make up nearly 34% of Niles' population and 31.4% of Wheeling's.
Rob Paral, one of the authors of the immigration report, said the report was put together to clear up misunderstandings associated with immigration, like the size of the immigrant population in Metro Chicago, who is moving in and where they are living.
"We hope it dispels myths and lets community leaders understand what is going on with immigration," Paral said.
Paral and co-author Michael Norkewicz's analysis of census data since 1850 shows that the number of new immigrants in the suburbs didn't grow very much between 1850 and 1970. Suddenly, around 1980, the foreign-born population in the suburbs began increasing significantly, doubling in about 20 years.
Overall, there are 1.4 million immigrants living in the entire six-county metropolitan area of Chicago. The largest groups come from Mexico (582,000 people), Poland (138,000) and India (77,000). These three ethnic groups are predominantly represented in communities like Arlington Hts., Des Plaines, Mt. Prospect, and Prospect Hts.-one look at school district bilingual census data clearly indicates this.
Since 1990, the number of immigrants from India and Pakistan has more than doubled, as has the number of Mexican immigrants. The report also shows that nearly 75% of Mexican immigrants who arrived in Metro Chicago during the 1990s were undocumented and only 3.4% arrived with a college degree. In comparison, Indian immigrants arrive with more education, with 65.8% having college degrees.
As new immigrants call the Northwest Suburbs home, communities are faced with new challenges. One of these is the need for school districts to add more English as a Second Language classes for children and, in some cases, bilingual classes taught in Spanish with a transition into English.
Immigration adds new demands on local government as well. In Mt. Prospect, a large portion of the village's Hispanic population is low-income, increasing the need for assistance from the Human Services Dept. According to Paral and Norkewicz's report, socioeconomic conditions become lower as the density of immigrants in a community increases. Says the report, "As the immigrant percentage of a neighborhood grows, poverty levels are generally higher, high school completion rates are lower and housing conditions appear to be worse as measured by median rent."
Mt. Prospect has seen this occur on the south end of the village, particularly in the area of Algonquin Road and Dempster Street. Niles has experienced it in a small, largely Indian and Hispanic neighborhood just west of Dempster and Milwaukee, and in Prospect Hts., the Country Pines apartment complex is home to large number of poor Hispanic immigrants.
It is in these areas that police departments have had to spend a significant amount of time trying to make immigrants more comfortable calling the police, as many immigrants come to this country with negative, pre-existing views about the police, officials from the Mt. Prospect Dept. have stated numerous times.
Clearly, meeting these challenges will become necessary for Northwest Suburban communities should waves of new immigrants continue to call this area home over the next 10 years.