Immigration to Worcester

In 1986 my wife, Valerie Veridiano and I came to Worcester from New York City. She had recently graduated medical school in her native country, the Philippines and had come to St. Vincent’s Hospital to apply for a residency training position. We were nervous and uncertain. This city would hopefully one day be our new home. Awaiting her interview we walked into the cafeteria to have coffee and a bite to eat. We looked around. We couldn’t believe what we saw; or rather what we didn’t see. New York City is the most ethnical and racially diverse place in the world. There are people of all colors, cultures and lifestyles. There is no predominant type or even kind of person in NYC. It’s liberating and for some people can be a little frightening.
But when we looked around the St. V’s cafeteria all we saw were white people (which included me). We were concerned. We wondered what kind of place this would be. Our fears grew stronger when we drove down Grafton Street and saw that the only store that sold some things you didn’t absolutely need, such as food, household goods or stuff for your car; sold birdbaths. But we adjusted. In fact, we were happy to escape the intensity and pretension of NYC for the basic decency of Worcester. My wife even commented that in the emergency room she noticed that not only Worcester guys, but also Worcester women had tattoos, anticipated the present tattoo craze by about twenty years.
My wife Valerie, as a foreign born person of color, is part of the beginning of a wave of immigrants to Worcester that has significantly grown over the past 25 years. I’m carried by this wave too. In 1989 I graduated law school from Boston University with the intention of moving with my wife to Washington D.C. or some other exciting city. But Val had done a clinical rotation with Fallon Clinic and truly liked the people she worked with and her patients. She said we should stay; this would be a nice place to raise a family. But I hated law school and virtually all areas of the law. I only wanted to be an immigration lawyer or not a lawyer at all. I asked other lawyers in town if I could make a living in Worcester just doing immigration law. To a person each one said no.
In the mid 1980’s an immigration boom came to Worcester that has gone on unabated. Actually, the people of color who started coming to Worcester in the late 1970’s were mostly Puerto Rican people who are U.S. citizens, not immigrants. They followed immigrants from Greece who had mostly come to work at Brown Shoe Co. Then the big wave of immigrants from third world countries arrived. People from Ghana, in West Africa were the earliest. Then Vietnamese refugees came in large numbers after the fall of South Vietnam created a refugee crisis for which we in America and Worcester felt a moral obligation to respond. People from the Middle East mostly from Lebanon but also from Syria arrived in Worcester. Salvadorians and Guatemalans from Central America also came in large numbers. Most of these people came escaping civil wars in their own countries. Polish people came looking for work and to escape communist domination. WPI began to bring in more students from Asia, especially India and China. Researchers from these two countries and others also started to do basic research at UMASS, complementing the foreign physicians, mostly from India, who arrived in all three area hospitals for post degree training. Clark University began recruiting foreign students from Latin America, Asia, Kenya, Turkey, and other countries. Worcester Academy reached out to high school students from Asia. Quinsigamond Community College and Worcester State College began seeing more students from Kenya and Ghana, both recent immigrants and the children of parents who had come from Ghana, as well as Vietnam and other countries in the 1970’s and 80’s.
Liberians came to escape a civil war in their homeland. Then with glasnost and the fall of the Soviet Union Russian Jews were allowed to leave and some came to Worcester followed by a much larger group of people from Albania and Kosova.
Most recently Brazilians and Ghanaians have come in very large numbers. Recently, we have also seen many more immigrants coming from the Dominican Republic (often after stopping for some years in NYC) China, India, Ecuador, Columbia, as well as, refugees and immigrants from Iraq, Nepal, Somalia, Myanmar, Bhutan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Thailand, the Ivory Coast, Haiti, Burundi, Ecuador, Mexico, Italy and Jamaica.
Immigrants to Worcester leave their countries most often due to difficult economic circumstances or violent conflict. They come to Worcester because of good jobs. Today they work as nurses aids; LPN’s; cooks; workers in the food service industry, factories, distribution warehouses, landscaping companies, and as house and commercial cleaners. At the highly educated end of the spectrum, immigrants work as computer scientists, physicians, scientific researchers, nurses, radiologic technologists and managers. Immigrants come to Worcester to look for work because apartments and houses are relatively inexpensive. Used cars are also affordable. And they come because people before them have already come from their country and they can stay with them until they get on their own feet. What people don’t realize is that the overwhelming majority of these immigrants are middle class people in their own countries but do working class work here, because it is the only work available to them due to language or education requirements.
Besides some recent refugees, the only major wave of people coming to Worcester who worked the land in their own country were from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Vietnam, all of whom came in the 1980’s, all to escape civil war. The Central Americans snuck across the border. Other than Central Americans, immigrants from most other countries must obtain a visitor visa to the U.S. (which some people then overstay). To obtain a visitor visa one has to show financial means in one’s own country. This is why most immigrants who come to Worcester are not poor, but middle class or upper class in their own countries. Once in the U.S. and Worcester, these people find jobs, prove themselves hardworking, reliable and trustworthy in their jobs, work overtime, pay their rent on time and then buy houses, many in the less affluent parts of Worcester, Marlboro, and Webster. They become very solid contributors to our country. They are hired by employers not because they are paid less but because they work with the conscientiousness of the middle class and/or religious people that they are.
Over the past 25 years all these groups have changed the fabric of Worcester and added to the Irish, Anglo-Saxon, Italian, Jewish and Greek heritages that had preceded them.
The diversity of the latest immigration to Worcester from Ghana, Brazil, Albania, Liberia, Kenya, India, the Dominican Republic, China, Ecuador and Uruguay (in the Leominster-Fitchburg area) has joined the last groups from Greece and Puerto Rico (though they are U.S. citizens). They in turn had followed turn of the century immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe who had come before them. This is now our city: diverse in every way, growing in worldliness every day.