Geographers Redefine Immigration Trends in Cities

Washington D.C. Focus of Their Research

For generations, it was believed that most immigrants were people with limited education or training who came to the United States for economic opportunity. They landed in large metropolitan areas—New York, Los Angeles, Miami—and lived in inner cities until they could afford to move to the suburbs.

Now research by two professors in the Department of Geography at Columbian College finds that those patterns are shifting. And there’s no better example of new immigration trends than in metropolitan Washington, D.C.

One of every five D.C.-area residents is an immigrant and nearly every country of the world is represented in the metropolitan area, according to the research.

While most immigration studies have focused on Los Angeles, New York, Miami and Chicago, Elizabeth Chacko (pictured below on the left), chair of the Department of Geography, and her colleague Marie Price (pictured above on the left) have gained attention for their research on Washington. Breaking with past patterns, Washington immigrants live in suburbs, have higher levels of education and are entrepreneurial, rising to prominence in a number of business sectors—from taxi and parking companies to restaurants, construction and telecommunications. Similar patterns are emerging in Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth and other cities that recently began attracting immigrants.

“There tends to be a stereotype, going back to the turn of the century, that immigrants are poor and needy people,” said Price. “But a lot of Washington newcomers are highly skilled and are sought after by the private sector.” 

Price has concentrated on inflows of Bolivians, as well as research into the robust soccer leagues that link Latin America immigrants to the communities where they settle. During the D.C. area’s construction boom, it was not uncommon to find Latin American immigrants who arrived and, within a day, had both found a job and joined an amateur soccer league.

Chacko, meanwhile, has focused her research on Washington’s immigrants from Ethiopia and India.

“When I came to Washington, D.C., about 10 years ago, I noticed there was a large—disproportionately to some extent—African population,” said Chacko. “Among them, Ethiopians were overrepresented. That made me curious and that’s when I discovered that hardly anyone had done research on Ethiopian immigrants.”

She set out to answer her own questions about identity issues for second-generation Ethiopian immigrants, about the immigrants’ use of public spaces, about their businesses and about what happens when they try to carve out ethnic enclaves. She was also curious about why they settled in the United States and, more specifically, in the Washington area, which has the greatest number of Ethiopian immigrants of any U.S. metropolis. Unlike past generations of immigrants, they did not initially arrive for economic reasons.

“There were Ethiopians who came here to study at Howard University. Originally the idea was not to stay but to go back to their home country,” Chacko explained. “But in the 1970s there was a Marxist revolution in Ethiopia. Since many of these students came from well-to-do families, they didn’t feel comfortable going back.”

The 1974 coup that ousted Emperor Haile Selassie not only kept Ethiopians from returning home, but it sparked additional immigration. Devastating famine and political upset marked the African nation at the time and, by the 1980s, many Ethiopians arrived in the United States as refugees.

Chacko said the importance of Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, gave Ethiopians a perception that all capital cities were the center of movement in a country. For that reason, the African immigrants gravitated toward D.C. New arrivals then took steps to bring their families, who also settled in the U.S. capital. The existing Ethiopian churches and community offered support, including jobs.

“I have talked to many people who, since then, have moved to Washington, D.C., because of community, because of the Ethiopian support system,” Chacko said. “Immigrants who had really good jobs in Indiana and Ohio came here because of the existing community. They became part of a population cluster.”

For Price, it was a dinner at an Italian restaurant in Arlington in the early 1990s that sparked her interest in Bolivian immigrants.“I noticed that all the staff in the restaurant were speaking to one another in Spanish and another language, which I learned was Quechua,” she said. “It turns out that the Washington area is the biggest U.S. destination for Bolivians.”

When Bolivians started to trickle into D.C. in the 1960s and 1970s, they found work and did not have to compete with other Latin American immigrants, who were settling in places like Miami, Los Angeles and New York. By the 1980s, political upheaval and hyperinflation as high as 30,000 percent in Bolivia forced more Bolivians to migrate.

“By then, Bolivians were established here, through family reunification and other visa policies,” Price said. “Bolivians as a group have done quite well and they tend toward entrepreneurship. The men have been very involved in construction and Bolivian women have started home cleaning services and child care and day care centers.”

Today they fit into the larger category of D.C.’s growing Latino community, which includes Salvadorans, Mexicans, Peruvians and Guatemalans. 

Research by both professors has found that D.C.’s immigrants are leaving a significant imprint. Chacko said Ethiopians, for example, have made their cuisine synonymous with the capital. They have shaped entrepreneurial businesses, such as parking garages and small stores, and they have altered the flavor of commercial neighborhoods like the U Street District and the Adams Morgan area. Amharic, the major language spoken by local Ethiopians, is one of the languages that the D.C. government uses in public announcements and notices.

Both researchers said local governments and their policies can work to encourage—or discourage—the important entrepreneurship that immigrants contribute to a community. The professors have funding from the GW Center for International Business and Research (GW-CIBER). The Brookings Institution has also supported Price’s work.