Immigration Panel Highlights Lansing's Growing Knowledge-Worker Economy

To be successful, you have to have new ideas. It is true for communities and businesses as well as people, says Edsan Zackerny.

Zackerny is an immigrant to Lansing and it is people like him that add strength to the Capital region’s shift from manufacturing to the knowledge economy, says John Melcher of Michigan State University’s (MSU) Center for Community and Economic Development.

The center has recently moved to a Michigan Avenue storefront on the city’s Eastside, in the heart of an area rich in small businesses and homes occupied by people born in other countries. 

Melcher says that if the Capital region is going to attract young knowledge workers, it will have to nurture the kind of communities they seek.
 
“Diversity is crucial to these young people,” says Melcher, citing Richard Florida’s book, “The Rise of the Creative Class."

Raised in the country he still calls Persia, now Iran, the 42-year-old robotics engineer has lived in nine countries, picking each for a specific purpose. He came to the United States Dec. 20, 1999, deliberately to start a new life in the auto business with the beginning of the new millennium.

Within 10 days, he’d enrolled in language classes, had a donated car and a job in a Williamston auto parts manufacturing plant.

Then came Sept. 11, 2001, and the attacks on New York City and the Pentagon, followed by the closing of his plant for a month.

“I could see then the frailty of the auto industry and set out to work elsewhere,” he says.

He now works for 21st Century Plastics in Potterville, overseeing maintenance of the company’s robotics operation. The company makes plastic seats and has no reliance on the auto industry, he notes.