A hundred years ago, Irish, German, Italian and Polish immigrants with little education and few skills came in waves to Chicago to build the railroads and toil in the factories.
They lived in ethnic enclaves, each group cocooned in its common language and culture, but sharing the common struggle to survive in a strange new world.
A half-century ago, another wave of immigration began, this time of Hispanic origin. Like the Europeans, they came as laborers, and like those before them, they clustered in city neighborhoods of their own.
Today, the latest wave of immigration is from Asia. But this group is breaking all the rules.
In a sharp reversal of historic patterns, many Asians aren`t settling in run-down ethnic ghettos of Chicago. They`re going, instead, to the affluent suburbs.
Three of every five Asians in the metropolitan region live outside the city-in Du Page County, in Skokie and other north suburbs, in northwest Cook County.
And suburban Asians aren`t clustering together like the old immigrant groups.
”They`re not living together in one neighborhood or on one street,”
said Dalip Bammi, Du Page County planning director and an emigrant from India. ”They`ve assimilated into the society. They`ve spread out.”
For many Asians, Chicago is no longer even a port of entry, said Paul Friesema, a political science professor at Northwestern University.
”Now, people are joining a cousin out in Skokie or somewhere else in the suburbs,” he said.
This phenomenon has been little-recognized, said Douglas Massey, an immigration expert and sociology professor at the University of Chicago,
”because we still have places identified as Koreatown and Chinatown in Chicago. But it`s been many years since most Chinese lived in Chinatown, and most Koreans never lived in Koreatown on Lawrence Avenue.”
During the 1980s, Chicago`s Chinatown expanded into the nearby neighborhood of Bridgeport (still an Irish enclave), and the Chinese population of the area doubled to 10,379.
However, twice that number of Chinese (20,721) now live in the suburbs, from Naperville (1,456) to Schaumburg (641) to Evanston (1,014). In fact, 34 suburbs have at least 100 Chinese among their residents.
One of those suburbs is Skokie, internationally known for its large Jewish population. In 1970, the village had 512 Asians. Today, it has 9,253, including 2,416 Filipinos, 2,292 Asian-Indians, 2,156 Koreans, 1,334 Chinese, 518 Japanese, 142 Thais and 118 Vietnamese.
Indeed, one of every six Skokie residents is Asian.
The same is true in west suburban Oak Brook, one of the richest villages in one of the richest counties in the nation.
”We are aware there is a respectable percentage of Asian residents, but it`s nothing that`s very relevant,” said Vincent Long, assistant to the Oak Brook village manager. ”Everyone in the village enjoys the same services.”
Oak Brook takes such a nonchalant attitude toward its Asians because they aren`t much different from the rest of the village`s residents. In fact, most of the Asians in Oak Brook and throughout the suburbs have more in common with their long-established white middle-class neighbors than they do with their European immigrant predecessors.
Unlike those earlier immigrants who worked by the sweat of their brow, Asians tend to be highly educated members of the middle class, white-collar professionals and entrepreneurs.
”Asians have a strong desire to provide good education for their family,” said Bammi, a Wheaton resident, who came to the United States in 1969 and began working for the Du Page County Planning Department in 1971.
”The quality of life that the suburbs offer provides for a better development opportunity for the children-better schools; more open space;
overall, a higher quality of life.”
Today`s Asian immigration is mainly middle-class because of changes in U.S. immigration law that took place a quarter of a century ago, Massey said. In the mid-1800s, Chinese were recruited to the West Coast to work in mines and on the western segment of the transcontinental railroad. (Building the eastern portion were unskilled Irish laborers.)
Once the railroad was finished, the Chinese began looking for other work, prompting an outcry from unions and others that they were taking away jobs from whites. So, in 1888, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, halting Chinese immigration.
That was the first move in what became a virtual ban on Asian immigration to the U.S. for much of the 20th Century.
In 1913, at the request of U.S. officials, Japan agreed not to send any more of its people to the States. And, in 1920, the National Origin Quota Act all but excluded Asians from entering the country.
The exceptions were Filipinos, whose homeland was a U.S. colony until 1946. Until that time, Filipinos were free to come to the U.S. mainland in the same way that Puerto Ricans can today.
In 1965, American immigration policy changed, Massey said, with Asians being permitted to enter if they could fill certain high-skill labor shortages-for a long time, doctors willing to work in public hospitals were on the list-or if they had relatives in the U.S.
Because there had been little previous immigration, few Asians had American relatives, so the bulk of those entering the U.S. were highly educated professionals and business people.
”It`s no coincidence that if you go into Cook County Hospital,” Massey said, ”you`ll find a lot of foreign-trained, foreign doctors, but if you go to Rush-Presbyterian, you`ll find a lot of Americans.”
It is still a largely middle-class migration today even though the general education and skill levels have dropped somewhat because the original immigrants are now able to bring over family members, regardless of whether they can fill labor shortages.
The move of Asians to the suburbs has been a quick and natural progression, said Prashant Shah, editor of the weekly Chicago-based India Tribune.
In the mid-1970s, when the paper started publishing, most Asian-Indians lived on Chicago`s North Side around Broadway and Sheridan Road, just west of the lakefront.
Then, as Jewish businesses began leaving Devon Avenue between California and Ridge Avenues, Asian-Indian stores took their places. Today, as many as 25 Indian groceries can be found on Devon, as well as Indian-owned clothing stores, electronics shops and travel agencies.
Walking down Devon, Indians ”feel like they`re living in India,” said Shirish Sanghavi, owner of Indian Groceries and Spices, a warehouse and factory operation in Skokie.
Because of this, many who have moved away have settled in the north suburbs and are still close enough to drive to Devon to shop.
In making that move to the suburbs, Indians and other Asians haven`t had to face the sort of discrimination that African-Americans and, to a lesser extent, Hispanics often encounter in the Chicago-area housing market.
”We never worry about harassment,” said Shah, who lives in Mt. Prospect. ”We are very peaceful people. Nobody worries us.”
Today, 59 percent of the 251,328 Asians in the Chicago region live in the suburbs, up from 51 percent in 1980. By contrast, the suburbs are home to 35 percent of the region`s Hispanics and 24 percent of its blacks.
The census figures show that 72 percent of all Chicago-area Asian-Indians live in the suburbs, as do 64 percent of Japanese, 62 percent of Koreans, 56 percent of Thais, 54 percent of Filipinos and 48 percent of Chinese.
Not yet on the suburban bandwagon are the Vietnamese and the Cambodians, both of which are refugee groups, made up to a significant degree of uneducated peasants. Sixty-one percent of the region`s Vietnamese are in Chicago, as are 67 percent of the Cambodians.
Five years ago, Zung Nguyen, a French teacher, escaped from Vietnam with his wife and 2-year-old daughter in a 30-foot-long boat that carried 52 other refugees. After a 12-day ride on the ocean, the tiny craft landed in Malaysia. From the refugee camp there, Nguyen came to Chicago`s polyglot Uptown neighborhood, where he is a youth coordinator for the Vietnamese Association of Illinois.
”Most of the Vietnamese when they get to the States need a lot of social services available in Uptown. That`s why they want to concentrate in this neighborhood,” he said.
Nguyen, who lives nearby in the Lincoln Square community, said his brother-in-law in Carol Stream has invited him and his family to move to Du Page County. But, so far, Nguyen has refused.
In part, it`s because he and his wife, Ly, have been taking English classes at Truman College in Uptown, and because Ly was using public transportation to get to work at a downtown insurance company until recently, when the company moved out of state.
But that`s not all.
”There`s a very emotional reason,” he said. ”You want to be close to your countrymen at the very beginning, and, later, when you become self-sufficient, that`s when you move.”
