Immigration and Diversity of Worcester

This month there are a lot of Christmas parties. Many companies and organizations have parties. Two parties I attended this past weekend were the Central Mass Filipino Association and the Kenyan group at St. Peters and St. Andrew Church celebrating Kenyan Independence Day. This week I’ll attend a Southeast Asian Coalition event, a group which primarily serves Vietnamese people. All these festivals reminded me once again how wonderfully diverse the City of Worcester’s immigration has been.

At the turn of the century, many Irish, Italians, and Eastern Europeans, mostly Poles and Jewish people, came to Worcester. Greeks and Puerto Ricans, who migrated not immigrated, as Puerto Ricans are US Citizens, came. Then people started coming to Worcester from Ghana. Vietnamese people came as refugees; Salvadorians, Lebanese, and Liberians came seeking asylum protection because of civil wars in their countries. Then Syrians, Kenyans, Dominicans, Ecuadorians, Colombians, Jamaicans came and Poles came again.

The largest immigrant groups to Worcester are now from Ghana, Brazil, Albania, Dominican Republic, and India – many of the Indians work at UMass and in the computer field, as do many Chinese people – both Indian and especially Chinese students fill our colleges and prep schools as well. More recently, many refugees have started to make Worcester home from Iraq, Bhutan, Somalia, The Congo, and Ethiopia. No one group predominates in Worcester. This makes our immigration particularly interesting and balanced.

Immigrants work incredibly hard, take care of their responsibilities, and ours. As Worcester moved from a manufacturing to a healthcare city so did the immigrant work force. Many of us, and especially many of our parents, are cared for by immigrants. We rent apartments to immigrants, they buy our homes and stabilize our neighborhoods. Immigrants are a very positive force in Worcester.

But internationalization and globalization has also worked the other way. Many American college students now study abroad for a semester in other countries. My son, upon graduating college, found a job teaching English in Spain. He is not alone. Large American companies now hire more people to work abroad than hire their new workers in the US. We should not complain about this, we should go get those jobs. The world is now integrated and interrelated. People have come to the US to work for over a century. We should now also go take some of their good jobs abroad that we are uniquely qualified for.

On that topic, I will not be with you for the next three weeks. I am meeting my son in Spain and we will travel through Morocco and the Saharan desert to enjoy a music concert in the African country of Mali. I’m sure I’ll have more knowledge about the world when I return.

This is Randy Feldman on WCRN’s Midday Report.

Also check out Randy’s blog a bigmouthmanifesto.com