Transcript
Audrey Singer: Hi, everybody. I'd like to get started now, so anybody who is outside, could you please come in and we can get going. We're a little bit late but I think we have plenty of time.
I'm Audrey Singer and I want to welcome you to Brookings. I'm a visiting fellow here at the Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy. It's my pleasure to welcome you to our forum, "Learning from Farmingville: Promising Practices for Immigrant Workers."
Today we have a program that crosses a lot of borders in terms of the involvement of organizations, perspectives, and media that do not usually meet up in the same place. We are motivated to be here today by a documentary film, Farmingville, that captures so clearly the difficult realities of what happens when a community is overwhelmed by an influx of immigrant workers. The film focuses on the town of Farmingville in Suffolk County on Long Island, but it easily could be any number of communities across the United States that have recently experienced immigration for the first time. It could easily be Cicero in suburban Chicago, or Duluth, Georgia, in the suburbs of Atlanta. Or South Salt Lake in suburban Salt Lake City, Utah. Or it could be Herndon, Virginia, right here in the Washington metropolitan area.
These are places that have been transformed, seemingly overnight to many locals, from places that had very few foreign-born residents to places with a significant number of new immigrants. In the 1990's the immigrant population in the United States grew by about 57 percent, and of course the growth rate is much higher in many localities. Estimates for the past several years have immigrant workers accounting for 50 percent of new entrants into the labor force. Many areas across the country are scrambling to understand the changes that have happened in their neighborhoods, schools and communities, and it has not been without conflict and strain in some places.
read full transcript (PDF—91KB)
View Full Transcript »