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Detroit 2019

Free Houses! But there's a catch.... How accelerated immigration is changing Detroit
Ocyris

Detroit has long been plagued with vacant homes. But that's been changing lately. Since the collapse of the oil industry, our already significant Middle Eastern population has more than doubled in the last five years. People who used to work in Dubai or Qatar are now coming West. The Middle Eastern community in Metro Detroit, once dominated by Lebanese and Iraqis is now diversifying, picking up a lot more Egyptians, Saudis, Yemenis, and Libyans. Fortunately for these new immigrants, the Arab-American community has very strong social service organizations, so their transition into the American sphere has been well supported.

The Eastern/Central European migrants have not fared so well. With the resurgence of Russian expansionism, many Ukrainians, Poles, Romanians, Kosovars and others have decided it was time to get out of their home countries. Detroit has historically been a welcoming environment for East European immigrants, and since the city started giving away foreclosed houses to anyone who would occupy them, the cost of living looked favorable. But many of our new immigrants are finding that the good jobs in the wind energy sector have mostly been snapped up, and their iron-curtain-era technical qualifications aren't up to snuff. Now they are living cheek-by-jowl with the generational poor in neighborhoods where the infrastructure is falling apart and mafia groups are the only providers of security (=protection) or investment.

Urban food gardening has become a source of income for some immigrants, but the growing season is short for those who can't afford to build greenhouses. I am not sure what the actual rate of involvement, but I can imagine that many of our new arrivals are being forced into illegal business ventures. The younger ones, or their children, are at high risk of being recruited into ethno-national mafia organizations. And the tensions between groups are getting ever closer to exploding evey time the tightly scripted unspoken rules of transactions and communications are violated.

As the seniors in my neighborhood have been slowly passing on, the mix has become more Middle Eastern. So I'm not particularly worried about something happening to my neighbors, but I am concerned about the larger effects that intergroup conflict would imply for my region and state.

I have been working with a group of Quakers to equip people in poor neighborhoods with non-violent conflict resolution skills. We occasionally mediate conflicts, but mostly get people together to "practice conflict". This work is tedious and often disheartening, but the people who have stuck with the sessions have been empowered to spread peace in their circles of influence. What we are stuck on now is figuring out how to take this to scale. The grassroots work is important, but teaching someone how to see their "enemies" as inherently valuable human beings can take a long time. We would like to find ways to get more people inducted into a commitment to nonviolent direct action related to their communities' needs.

Being active in support of immigrant communities is not without its dangers. Death threats to people who support immigrants have been going on since 2008 at least (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95567819). In some of the neighborhoods I work in, you can see the resentment on the faces of people who have been there for generations. 

Another problem we face is simply communicating in the plethora of languages that are related to the various immigrant communities. The people who are most skilled at translating for each of these communities are least likely to have the time. We could probably find full-time volunteer work for any skilled interpreter in two dozen languages. But they need to eat, too.

Oct 10
migration,immigration,underground economy,nonviolence,Detroit,midwest,mafia,urban gardening,wind energy industry,oil collapse


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  • RJ Eskow
    Oct 11
    Terrific story - it makes the world of future Detroit real.
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