One of the first things any immigrant learns upon settling in the United States is: the car is king. And no city makes that clearer than Detroit.
While many of us learned to conquer the wheel in Driver's Ed class or from our parents, newcomers seek out companies like
Shondhan Enterprises, Inc., a company Hamtramck city council president Shahab Ahmed owns with his wife. Ahmed, who emigrated from Bangladesh to the U.S. in 1986, saw a way to turn his own immigrant experience into an economic opportunity. "Hamtramck, an immigrant city, had no driving school until I opened one in 1998," Ahmed boasts. The couple's firm has since grown to 12 employees; it provides driving instruction, state-required road tests, and immigration legal services for thousands of customers a year in a wide swath of cities from Troy to Ann Arbor. Ahmed attributes his successes and those of other Detroit area immigrants to the ability to capitalize on the opportunities found through hard work.
Success comes to people "brave enough to make the trek into another country with a different culture, language, and set of laws," believes Dr. Karen Majewski,
mayor of Hamtramck. Dr. Majewski, who is a former professor of Polish studies and the current executive director of the Polish American Historical Association, continues: "I am a scholar of ethnicity and migration myself, so I'm awed by that leap of faith it takes to get into another world."
For many new arrivals, the wide-awake city of Hamtramck is that world. Shondhan Enterprises is one of the hundreds of businesses which give Hamtramck its beat. Signs translated into languages such as Arabic and Bengali abound, enticing you to pop into ethnic restaurants, clothing stores, and some of the city's 15 bakeries. Ever heard of rasgulla or gulab jamun?
Aladdin Sweets and Café sells the freshly made milk and cheese-based Bengali sweets popular with South Asian immigrants and others in the know.
Mixing It Up
"Real cities remain viable by serving their marketplace," says
Erik Tungate, Hamtramck's director of community and economic development, who estimates the 2.2 square mile city contains anywhere from 500 to 700 businesses – 30 to 40% of them immigrant-owned. Since the 1980s, the Conant Street district alone, he says, has migrated from a mainly Polish influence to a veritable United Nations, where business owners represent about 30 different ethnicities.
"To be a student of Hamtramck you have to be a student of Detroit," says Tungate. "Over the past five years, it's been miraculous, like raising the dead here. In the next five years I see greater downtown Detroit – the T formed by midtown south to the Detroit River and then east and west along the riverfront – completely gentrifying. Hamtramck will become even more of a hotbed of immigration because it's a walkable, affordable enclave just outside of the greater downtown Detroit area."
According to census records, Hamtramck's population bottomed out in 1990, to 18,000. By 2000, the city scored a 25% increase in residents – to nearly 23,000, 41% of whom were foreign-born. Of those, nearly one third entered the USA after 1990. Today, the long chains of cars parked along the city's residential streets attest to the city's growth and density.
The Southeast Michigan Council of Governments (SEMCOG) estimates Hamtramck's population at 25,000, although Tungate says that people close to the city put the number nearer 35,000, a density of about 17,000 people per square mile.
"More immigrants are probably coming now [to Hamtramck] than at any time except for the 1910s and 1920s. It's often a surprise to people that we continue to have a sizable new immigration from Poland, the Ukraine, and other central and eastern European countries, in addition to Bangladesh and Yemen," says Dr. Majewski, who estimates that anywhere from 26 and possibly up to 40 different languages are spoken in the public schools.
Between 2000 and 2007, SEMCOG estimates the population of southeastern Michigan has grown 1.1%; compare that with a nearly 9% increase for Hamtramck over the same timeframe. Much of that trend is due to immigration, which is "our best hope at the moment for southeast Michigan and the state as a whole," says Kurt Metzger, director of research at the
United Way for Southeastern Michigan. "When you look at real entrepreneurial neighborhood development and the impact of retail, look at southwest Detroit, Hamtramck, Dearborn, and other areas of new immigrant population. Drive up John R or Dequindre and you'll see Thai and Vietnamese restaurants, Thai video stores, and all of these different new markets opening up," he says. "Whether it's the Arab community, the Chaldeans, Latinos, Albanians, Indians, Chinese, Filipinos, you name it, they're here. Many people don't realize we already have a very diverse population here. A lot of immigrants are arriving while the area still loses its population, which is maintaining itself, really, through immigration."
And southeast Michigan is drawing a very educated new populace, in the desirable 25 to 40 age range that the area needs to attract for its workforce – particularly from Asian countries, according to Metzger, who has found that 75% or more of the Asian Indian arrivals have college degrees.
A new talent pool
Dr. K.P. Ravikrishnan, Director of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at
Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, arrived from India in 1969 in response to the tremendous need for physicians in Detroit – brought on by Medicare and improvement in the provision of services to treat diseases such as tuberculosis. Today, an aging population and expansion of health services perpetuate the local physician shortage.
"We are still in a growth phase of both the influx of international medical graduates and also demand here. The sky is the limit as far as what you can provide in terms of prevention and optimization of medical care," says Dr. Ravikrishnan, who is also an assistant clinical professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan and Wayne State University medical schools. He estimates that 40% of Beaumont Hospital's medical residents are international medical school graduates. Originally residents from India, Pakistan, and the Philippines composed the majority of the international contingent. Today presents a more varied picture, as residents from the former Soviet Union, Romania, Poland, Korea, Taiwan, China, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran now call Michigan home.
In addition to hospitals, ethnic professional organizations also play an integral part in linking countries together through knowledge. Dr. Ravikrishnan, president of the 1,500 member
Michigan Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (MAPI), explains: "Regulations and guidelines are constantly being changed, so the MAPI educates medical professionals on issues in the community, nationally, and India."
The best kind of investmentImmigration has raised the quality of life for countless area residents. So what has been the quantitative impact, as shown by the dollar value of the goods and services, that immigrant residents provide to Southeast Michigan each year? According to the results of the newly released "
Arab American Economic Contribution Study" conducted by
Wayne State University's Center for Urban Studies, in 2005 Arab American salaries and business activities contributed up to $7.7 billion to the local economy.
This is a good start, but more comprehensive information should be out there. "It would be nice if immigrants wanted to tell their stories and start a program to collect this kind of information, putting it for public consumption to really understand the impact of immigration in southeast Michigan," says Metzger, who cites some groups' reluctance to put themselves in the public eye as a possible reason for the lack of initiatives in this area.
Many, however, are invested citizens who visibly contribute to their local communities and forge ties between countries. Ahmed, who prides himself on his commitment to mingle with society, has served Hamtramck's government since 1998. Various positions included a stint as the city's multi-cultural coordinator, in an effort to make the government more accessible to the people – smoothing the way for even more business and economic investment.
Ahmed's 2003 election to Hamtramck's city council made him the first Bangladeshi-American elected to public office in the USA, extending his influence beyond city boundaries. Afterward, the U.S. State Department invited Ahmed to Italy to speak about how countries can better assimilate immigrants into new countries and cultures.
Southeast Michigan has greatly benefited from the entrepreneurial development, knowledge base, and understanding that comes from sharing with people from different lands – and it needs more. "In trying to make this region more successful, we have to not only think about keeping our young people here, but also about increasing and reaching out to our immigrant population," Metzger says. "We have a good base of population from India and China here to have those kinds of links and to better connect with those growing economies."
Tanya C. Muzumdar is a regular contibutor to metromode. Read her article about Running Michigan.
Photos:
Shahab Ahmed
Statue in Hamtramck
Polish American PAC Federal Credit Union
Polish hat pride
Baikul Makurram Masjid
A mural by Dennis Orlowski depicts a Polish folk dance
Photographs ©
Dave KriegerDave Krieger is managing photographer of Model D and a major metromode contributor