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By Root 1628 0

American suburbs, it changed its character and function almost overnight. By 2000, it was only 47 percent white, more than a quarter Hispanic and 14 percent Asian, the site of an explosion of arrival. The aviation-industry workers had moved out of the apartment blocks in its center, using expanding mortgage markets to buy homes in suburbs even farther out. Word spread to the dense Latino enclaves of D.C., and to the villages of Central America, of the low-rent and comparatively pleasant apartments and small homes of Herndon and the ample service-industry work nearby. Networks of assistance took shape: small shops, Spanish-speaking churches, social clubs. More people moved, helped one another get set up, and became known to the area’s employers as a good source of labor. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Herndon was shocked to discover that it had become a full-fledged arrival city.

The shift of immigrant arrival to the suburbs is a new and dramatic phenomenon in North America and Australia. As of 2005, for the first time more immigrants were living in the suburbs than in the central cities of the United States, with immigrants settling in the burbs outnumbering downtown arrivals by almost two to one. This trend has transformed the suburbs. Racial and ethnic minorities now represent a third of the population of America’s suburbs, up from 19 percent in 1990.20 Almost half of all Hispanic Americans now live in the suburbs.21 Scholars call these “melting-pot suburbs” or “ethnoburbs.” Although much attention has gone to Asian migrants to the suburbs, who arrive with skills, savings, and high levels of cultural capital, they are actually outnumbered by the suburb-bound Central Americans and Mexicans, who, in their first stages of arrival, have filled construction, landscaping, and service-industry jobs in the fast-expanding suburban fringe. Much of the suburban settlement has to do with family and village networks, which establish chain-migration footholds in an affordable suburb, rapidly turning a small group of workers into a large and concentrated influx; one Washington-area official calls this “the cousin syndrome.” Economists have also observed an immigration-driven pricing mechanism with a suburbanizing effect, in which first-wave migrants arrive in the urban core in such great numbers that they drive up arrival-city rents and drive down immigrant wages, making the inner-ring suburbs appear more appealing, in wages and rent, to the next wave of villagers to arrive.22

This pattern is even more sharply defined in the largest cities of Canada. In Toronto, which receives 40 percent of the country’s 300,000 annual immigrants, a 2008 study found that almost all of them were settling in the suburbs—a complete reversal of the pattern of the 1970s, when most migrants settled in the downtown core—with wealthier urban–urban migrants from the Indian subcontinent and China settling in the outer suburbs and village-born migrants from Africa, Latin America, and Asia settling in inner-ring arrival cities such as Victoria Park, Thorncliffe Park, and southern Etobicoke. This new settlement had much to do with the gentrification of urban-core neighborhoods, which turned the inner suburbs into the last low-rent enclave. As Robert Murdie of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Urban and Community Studies has found, this has the deleterious effect of increasing the isolation and segregation of immigrants in a city that had been famous for its integration.23

The sudden transformation of suburbs into arrival cities is often a shock to the established population. It can reawaken a dormant suburb, bringing new entrepreneurial economies, cultures, and attractions. Or it can anger the established “white” residents, many of whom had long associated immigration with the faraway urban core (and some of whom had fled that core, in an earlier generation, to escape immigrants and minorities). In Herndon, the result was a political explosion of statewide proportions. It began, rather humbly, with men standing on the street and looking for