Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [133]
Parla has become, unusually for Europe, an arrival city that recognizes itself as an arrival city. Its city hall, an airy modern structure grafted onto the sleepy clapboard building that served the town until the end of the twentieth century, effectively functions as a center for managing immigrant arrival and rural-to-urban transition. Its integration office offers legal services, job and housing help, translation and interpreting services, women’s services and shelters for Moroccans, and language education. Its urban works have not been the pretty but disconnected parks and pavilions of other outskirts-cities but a popular tramline that connects dozens of points in Parla and a high-speed train that links it to central Madrid in less than 20 minutes—a link that has visibly opened Parla’s economy to the wider city. The city has built a large residential development of midsized apartment buildings and ground-level row houses, designed with the direct involvements of the city’s migrant communities, which provides ground-floor space for small businesses and pathways to home ownership, all at a high enough housing density to keep streets busy and to provide a flow of customers into small businesses. This is still a poor place, and it has all the social problems associated with poverty and immigration, but even in the midst of the crisis there is a sense of optimism and opportunity: People here are not trapped.
A major study found that the Spanish-born children of Moroccan immigrants are becoming fully integrated into Spanish language and customs far better than South American and Central American migrants to Spain, whose parents would seem to lack the disadvantage of a foreign language. This difference is attributed to the fact that Spanish immigration policies for Moroccans and other Africans, which were formulated a decade later, made it possible for entire families to migrate and become citizens, so that children are not raised in single-parent families or in families assembled through immigration-driven forced marriages. The Latin American migrant process was more likely to split up families.28
Lisaneddin and his wife have five daughters, aged from four months to nine years, all born in Spain, all citizens. The older ones are fully acculturated Spaniards in identity, behavior, and self-description and are respected as such by their peers. “The children born here, in general, are treated like Spaniards, not like Moroccans,” he says. “Most people here really don’t notice the difference, not with the kids who were born here. It’s very mixed, very open. You can afford to get a start here, and the government gives you help, so if you work hard you can become successful in this city. We really do feel like we have arrived, and we belong.”
9
ARRIVAL’S END: MUD FLOOR TO MIDDLE CLASS
THE NEIGHBORHOOD THAT CAME IN FROM THE COLD
Jardim Angela, São Paulo, Brazil
Each weekday morning, Pedro and Denise Magalhães wake in their whitewashed bungalow on the southern outskirts of São Paulo, make a quick espresso, check the headlines on the web, drag their two teenagers away from their TVs and computers and usher them off to school, and open the front gate to begin their drive to work. As they back their Peugeot sedans into the street, Pedro glances across the road to a spot he has spent his entire life watching: a small park in the middle of their boulevard, one of the few scraps of green in this