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By Root 1665 0

’s agreement to invest in the arrival-city process. There was an understanding among officials not only that the influx of ex-villagers was inevitable but that it would go much better if money was spent on making it work right. Arrival cities do not automatically thrive on their own; they often need investment. In Wheaton, it took the form of a parallel social-services system aimed at the arrival city, including a full-service primary-care medical service, known as Proyecto Salud, offered to immigrants through a public-private partnership, and a well-staffed career center with multilingual staff offering computer training, legal aid, and language classes. The results have been striking: The region is booming with immigrant-owned small businesses, and it has an immigrant home-ownership rate of 62 percent, almost identical to Washington’s “white” level and the highest in the capital area.

Of course, it was the spread of easy home ownership that led to the economic collapse of 2008, and black and Latino home owners had the highest rates of foreclosure. The ethnic suburbs were hit hard. Not only did some better-off Latinos lose their houses but the poorer new arrivals, who were often dependent on the building and property-maintenance industries for their livelihoods, found themselves without their main source of employment. The downturn, however, did not affect the basic logic of the arrival city. Latin American migrants sharply reduced their flow of remittances to villages in late 2008 and in 2009, but there was no return migration. It appears that the Latinos moved downmarket temporarily, relying on arrival-city networks of support. Interestingly, the proportion of Latino immigrants among homeowners in the United States did not fall between 2008 and 2009: The foreclosures were balanced by purchases by more successful migrants. Nevertheless, it was an extremely difficult time in the outer suburbs of Washington. In Herndon, the result was a great outflux of migrants to lower-rent neighborhoods, amid a bitter public mood that welcomed their departure.

In Montgomery County, something different happened. Citizens and officials, realizing that the immigrants were their main source of wealth creation, banded together to find ways to help them stay. In Gaithersburg, Maryland, a suburban town on the northern end of the county with an immigrant mix similar to Wheaton’s, a coalition of officials, citizens, and activists developed a “door-knocking” campaign to save village-born immigrants from eviction. The idea, one official explained, was to “go to immigrants’ homes, engage them through friendly door-knocking campaigns, speak their language, check on problems they face, let them know about neighborhood gatherings, help them tap available government and non-profit services … ask immigrant families about skills they might possess that may help their neighbors.” The campaign was backed with a network of financial and business support services that, while not inexpensive to the taxpayers of this prosperous town, was seen as a wise investment. Uma Ahluwalia, Montgomery County’s health and human services director, explained the logic to local reporters: A family evicted from their home in a foreclosure will need to be put up in a motel, at a cost to taxpayers of $110 a night for 40 to 60 nights; in comparison, some short-term rental or mortgage assistance is a bargain.25 And, the officials believe, the benefits of keeping economically active immigrants around, and keeping their businesses intact, reach to the core of the suburb’s success.

Montgomery County represents one of two paths that the arrival city can follow into the urban outskirts. Everywhere in the world, it is a choice between building a community’s future or setting the stage for its demise. Without an investment now, before the next wave arrives, that choice will be made by circumstances. Without attention to their new populations, the suburbs will turn into the cruel and violent places of our irrational fears.

* The L.A. government and the Los Angeles Times now call this