Immigration reshaping U.S. cities

Immigrants flowing into urban America live mostly in the inner cities of huge metro areas, form tight ethnic enclaves and stick together, right?

Wrong, wrong and wrong.

Yesterday, cities were in the nations. Today, the nations are in the cities, urban ministry pioneer Ray Bakke has observed. But to reach those nations, or peoples, for Christ, we need to understand who they are, where they are and how they are moving and changing.

“The epicenter of the urban wave in North America is ethnic minorities,” Troy Bush told pastors, lay church leaders and others during a session of “ethnéCITY: Reaching the Unreached in the Urban Center,” held Oct. 20-22 at Park Slope Community Church in Brooklyn, N.Y. “How are we going to tap into this, not only to reach them with the Gospel, but to mobilize them so that they will be the ones reaching people groups? … We must recognize what God is doing in our cities and seize the day.”

Bush, a former missionary to Moscow, leads the Dehoney Center for Urban Ministry Training at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. He also directs The Rebuild Initiative, a national urban leadership and church-planting network based in Atlanta, one of the most ethnically diverse communities in America. While working with the North American Mission Board, he directed church planting in Baltimore, another city undergoing major ethnic change.

Using new data about urban immigrants in America from the Brookings Institution, Bush examined some key changes in the decade between 2000 and 2010. The number of foreign-born people in the United States reached 40 million in 2010, a 28 percent increase since 2000 — and about 13 percent of the nation’s total population. More than a third of new immigrants during the decade came from Asia, while the fastest-growing group came from Africa.

Immigrants living in the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas increased 27 percent during the period. The five cities with the largest foreign-born populations: New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago and Houston. But the top five’s share of the total immigrant population dipped from 43 percent to 38 percent during the decade. The fastest growth came in smaller and mid-sized cities.

The Brookings study reports: “A swath of metro areas from Scranton (Pa.) stretching southwest to Indianapolis and Little Rock and sweeping east to encompass most of the Southeast and lower mid-Atlantic — including states and localities that have been flashpoints in the immigration debate — saw growth rates on the order of three times that of the 100-largest-metro-areas rate. These include Charlotte, Raleigh, Nashville and Indianapolis, all of which passed the 100,000 mark for total foreign-born population by 2010.”

“These aren’t your Chicagos, L.A.’s, New Yorks, your normal gateway cities for immigrants,” Bush said. “These are medium-size cities. … Many [immigrants and refugees] coming from places like Somalia are only passing through LaGuardia or JFK [airports in New York] as they go straight to Louisville, straight to Kansas City, straight to Memphis. They’re bypassing these large cities right from the start.”

Similarly, the state with the fastest-growing immigrant population isn’t California or New York, but North Carolina. Number two: Georgia — followed by Arkansas, Nevada and Tennessee.

“So when we think strategically about where we’re going to engage unreached people groups, it’s OK to think about coming to Atlanta,” Bush said. “It really is. Why? Because they’re coming there! The largest Hindu temple in the entire U.S. is in Atlanta, in Gwinnett County.”

Another key trend: New immigrants are increasingly settling in the suburbs of metro areas rather than traditional inner-city ethnic enclaves as they seek better neighborhoods, jobs and schools. By 2010, slightly more than half of all immigrants could be found in suburbs.

“The younger generations that are moving in today, almost regardless of where they are coming from, are skipping completely over the center city. They’re actually starting in the suburbs,” said Bush. “They’re not going into ethnic enclaves that once made up the cores of those cities.”

Perhaps even more significant is the increase of second-generation immigrants in the cities and the nation at large. More than half of the children in Los Angeles, Miami and San Francisco are second-generation — i.e., U.S.-born but with at least one foreign-born parent. They now account for more than 11 percent of the national population.

“This is a wave that we’ve really, really got to get on the radar,” Bush urged. “But here’s the thing to watch: Second-generation immigrant children represent 25 percent of all of the children under 18 in the United States. It is an enormous wave that is beginning to crash down on us.”

Second-gens often leave their parents’ homes, neighborhoods and ethnic communities. They move around (a trait that also typifies many new immigrants). They change. Their worldviews change. They create new patterns and cultures. In some cases, they actually form new people groups. “New American ethnic groups are forming more quickly than ever before [and they are] the children and grandchildren of today’s immigrants,” write Alejandro Portes and Ruben G. Rumbaut, authors of Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation.

Bottom line: There’s no simple formula for reaching the “nations in the cities.” But any number of creative ministries can meet specific needs. Bush cited 11 different church-planting models that work effectively in different contexts. There surely are more.

“No one church can get its arms completely around any metro, especially a larger metro,” Bush said. “So what I encourage churches to do is begin in their own neighborhoods, geographically and relationally. Because in many cases, through their work and their play, they’re encountering many of the different ethnic groups that are coming into their communities. The census is certainly a good starting point, but relief agencies and especially immigration agencies are actively looking for church partners who will come alongside as they’re bringing in peoples — many of whom are coming from closed countries and unreached people groups.”

What ultimately works, regardless of location or context, is Jesus Christ’s model of disciple-making.

“There are no two cities that are exactly the same, but when it comes down to it, the heart of everything we need to do comes back to proclaiming the Gospel, displaying the Gospel and making disciples that congregate into reproducing, multiplying churches. That core is central whether we’re in Moscow or we’re in Mumbai,” Bush said.

“We need to model how to live as believers with immigrants. We need to share meals with them. We need to share life together. Our homes need to be places where we invite them not to come for a meal but to come for a month. … They see how you cling to Christ when there’s nothing else to cling to. It’s not just something you talk about in a Bible study. It’s who you are as a disciple.”

(ethnéCITY, co-sponsored by IMB and the North American Mission Board, reflects the reality that national borders no longer define the task of missions in a globalized world. Two more ethnéCITY conferences are set for Nov. 17-19 in Houston and May 3-5 in Vancouver. To find out more or register, visit www.ethnecity.com.)

Mumbai is the urban future

Listen to an audio version of this post at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/77/7739/7739-43113.mp3

Read my full coverage of Mumbai at http://www.imb.org/main/news/details.asp?StoryID=7858&LanguageID=1709

See a multimedia presentation about Mumbai at http://www.commissionstories.com/?p=141

Flying at night into Mumbai, India, you see millions of pretty lights glittering along the curving coast, like jewels on the neck of a queen.

At ground level, in the harsh light of day, illusion gives way to reality. The elegant monarch that once was Bombay is dead. Something altogether different — both exciting and terrifying — has replaced her.

Two-pack-a-day air pollution. Round-the-clock road wars between vast armies of cars, trucks and auto-rickshaws. Sleek skyscrapers, posh coffee shops and luxury high-rise apartments abound, taking their place alongside the grand Taj Hotel, the monumental Gateway of India arch and other reminders of the city’s former glory. But they’re surrounded by slums, filth, stench, violence and the crumbling remnants of old Bombay.

And everywhere, people.

Greater Mumbai’s population is approaching 20 million. That number is projected to rise to 26 million by 2025. India, the land of 600,000 villages, has joined the relentless human trek toward urban centers as the global economy moves in the same direction. Half of the nation’s more than 1 billion people will be living in cities by 2020, some estimates say.

“South Asia, set to overtake East Asia as the world’s most populous realm in 2010, will contain nearly one-quarter of all humanity by 2025,” reports geographer Harm de Blij. “Consider this: There are more people in Dhaka [Bangladesh] than in Greece. There are more people in Manila [Philippines] than in Belgium. There are more people in Delhi [India] than in Chile. Mumbai will soon overtake Australia.”

On a global scale, urban dwellers will double to 6.4 billion by the middle of this century — 70 percent of the projected human population, according to a United Nations forecast. By that time, predicts a BBC report, Mumbai “will have reached an almost unimaginable size.”

Mumbai, then, “is the future of urban civilization on the planet,” declares Suketu Mehta. “God help us.”

Mehta, author of “Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found” (Vintage, 2004), left the city of his childhood in 1977. When he returned two decades later to live there, he barely recognized it. Somewhere toward the end of the 20th century, the bustling but livable Bombay he remembered had become — like Jekyll turning to Hyde — the dangerous, uncontrollable beast called Mumbai.

Mumbai has “hundreds of very different ethnic communities, most of whom heartily dislike one another,” Mehta notes. “They [tolerated] one another for centuries” — until the Hindu-Muslim riots of the 1990s, which left 1,000 dead and drove more than 100,000 from their homes. The riots tore apart the city’s delicate ethnic fabric and fueled extremist forces in politics and society that persist today. The citywide unity displayed after last November’s terrorist attacks encouraged many, but didn’t erase the memories of past bloodshed.

Bombay’s name change to Mumbai, part of a national initiative that renamed several major cities, symbolizes more fundamental shifts. The steady inflow of migrants and merchants seeking a job, a deal or a patch of ground to occupy has become a torrent. Organized crime bosses control major parts of the economy; their gangs attack each other and victimize the public. More than 100,000 women and children work as prostitutes in the city. The police have become notoriously violent and corrupt. The rule of law is nearly nonexistent. City government is dysfunctional. The courts have slowed to a crawl; justice interminably delayed is almost a guarantee.

On a more mundane level, accomplishing anything in Mumbai requires single-minded determination — and money.

“You’ve got to pay five bribes to get anything done,” complains Suman Nabar, an eye doctor who struggled for years to build a private medical practice. She treats her patients all day — and sometimes cleans the office toilets at night to make sure it’s done right.

“I just wish people would do their jobs,” she says with a tone of exasperated resignation.

Yet for all its staggering problems, Mumbai radiates addictive energy and excitement.

“The chaos is what I’m going to miss when I leave,” says Rose Wynn,* a Southern Baptist worker retiring after serving in the city for more than 10 years. “The chaos and the people. I love it.”

She marvels at how people still help one another, regardless of caste or class. If you fall on the street, someone appears from nowhere to offer assistance. If you’re lost, someone shows you where to go and personally takes you there, if necessary.

Somehow, the city keeps going — like its trains, the arteries that move 6 million people through Mumbai every day. And like Mumbai’s renowned dhabba wallahs.

Mostly nonliterate deliverymen, the dhabba wallahs carry some 200,000 hot lunches each work day by foot, bicycle and train from the suburban homes where they are made to the cross-town offices where they are consumed. That’s more than 60 million lunch tins a year. Of that total, they misplace perhaps 10 — an accuracy rate UPS and FedEx have enviously studied (see a multimedia presentation about Mumbai’s dhabba wallahs at http://www.commissionstories.com/?p=141 )

“It looks like chaos, but it works,” says an amazed observer.

Could the Gospel follow similar paths across Mumbai and other vast megacities, bringing living bread to millions of hungry souls? The time has come to find out.

“I wouldn’t say so much that we’re failing as that we’ve never tried,” says John Wynn,* a Southern Baptist worker in Mumbai, of the Christian movement’s response to the global urban explosion.

“We haven’t had the focus and the vision to reach the urban masses. The only answer is Jesus Christ. We can talk about the problems, the poverty and corruption and politicians. But it all goes back to the darkness they live in.

“They need Jesus Christ.”

*(Names changed)