'They're addicted to me': How immigrants keep U.S. heartland cities afloat

'They're addicted to me': How immigrants keep U.S. heartland cities afloat
by Howard Schneider

A native of Afghanistan who arrived 16 years ago as a refugee from Azerbaijan, Rahimi has become a fixture in a city center beset with vacant homes and abandoned buildings. A typical day brings a steady flow of customers who come for beer, snacks or just to banter in his St. Louis corner store.

“I think they’re addicted to me,” he said, nodding to the patrons who traded friendly banter with him as they bought snacks and drinks and lottery tickets.

Indeed, St. Louis - and more than a dozen other cities in heartland states which were as often as not carried by Donald Trump in 2016 when curbing immigration was a central plank of his campaign - is hooked on Rahimi and those like him who are serving as economic props for sometimes troubled urban areas.

A dentist by training, the 46-year-old worked in an embroidery shop as he learned English before opening his store. He is now raising two daughters here.

“St. Louis was a good place to start,” he said.

Between 2010 and 2018, if not for the influx of 15,000 foreign-born residents who arrived here, St. Louis’s chronic population shrinkage would have been more than double the 10,000 recorded in that span.

Moreover, a Reuters analysis of census data covering that period shows immigration reversed what would have been outright population declines in 18 cities, including Detroit, Milwaukee and Akron, Ohio, rust belt manufacturing towns in swing states where the 2020 presidential election will be decided.

In St. Louis and elsewhere, immigrants are helping arrest population decline in urban areas caught on the losing end of an internal U.S. trend. Increasingly, people and jobs are concentrating in a few dozen high-performing metropolitan areas, leaving others struggling to maintain population, economic growth rates, or both.

Nationally, the United States recorded its lowest immigration level since the great financial crisis in 2018 as Trump made slowing immigration a top priority - at one point declaring the country “full.” At 202,000, the increase in foreign-born residents in 2018 was about a third of the average since 2010.

To officials in this Midwestern town, that poses a challenge: where to find the bodies needed to fill those empty homes, start businesses and keep the population from shrinking even faster?

For Betsy Cohen, the answer is simple: More Jawad Rahimis.

“When those numbers fall, it is hard to have the growth in the region we want,” said Cohen, executive director of the St. Louis Mosaic Project, whose aim is to make St. Louis’s immigrant population the fastest growing in the country.

“Every person counts,” Cohen said. “All skill lines. All families. We need people.”

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