The New Immigrants Part I

People from Scandinavia, Japan and China were once Seattle’s largest immigrant groups. Today, our immigrant population reflects more of the globe—from Ethiopia to India, Africa to Central America. Neighborhoods peppered with ethnic groceries and restaurants, schools peopled with students speaking dozens of languages, places of worship where congregants wear turbans and saris, and jobs (from the tech industry to taxis) filled by non-native speakers—the Seattle area is being changed and influenced by these newcomers as never before.

On a warm, drizzly late-summer Sunday afternoon, families streamed into the festive grand opening of a house of worship in the Seattle suburb of Sammamish. Children darted around, smiling adults greeted old friends and SUV drivers trolled for parking spaces on crowded neighborhood streets. Congregants at the door offered friendly handshakes to visitors.

As the suburbs have burgeoned, many new places of worship have opened in recent years, but in this instance the scene came with an exotic twist for the Eastside: The majority of women and girls heading through the doorway wore shimmering saris; the men, baggy white trousers or tunics. And the house of worship? The Vedic Cultural Center, a crenellated, exuberant two-story confection of a building decked out in two shades of pink, the new home of local followers of the Hindu-based Hare Krishna faith.

The $4.5 million temple, shaded by mature Douglas firs and cedar trees, is emblematic of how the faces of immigrants to the Puget Sound area have profoundly changed in the past 10 years, and how these groups are putting down permanent roots here. Somalians, Russians, Ethiopians, Mexicans, Asian Indians—immigrants from these countries are the latest twist for a region that, like the rest of America, is shaped by the experiences, hard work and outlook of people originally from anywhere but here.

Our current piece of the immigration puzzle mirrors vast demographic shifts across the nation, as the country is hurled into a future where racial minorities will outnumber Caucasians by 2042, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The bureau also projects that the national number of foreign-born residents, which now hovers around 12 percent, may approach 15 percent in 2025, a number unequaled since around the start of the 20th century.

The Puget Sound region increasingly surpasses that trend. These days, our area has “immigrants coming for high tech—from Asia, India, Pakistan, China, Singapore and some from Europe, [along with] more general-stream folks from Eastern Europe, Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic,” says Richard Morrill, a geographer, demographer and University of Washington professor emeritus who has spent part of his career studying who came here and what forces pushed—or tempted—them to leave their homelands for the Northwest. There’s also a continuing stream from Central and South America, and Mexico, he notes.

Our region is moving from a primarily white and native-born population to one in which small girls wearing headscarves go to school with Vietnamese kids; where some of the best Mexican meals in town can be found in that former Scandinavian enclave of Ballard; and where many City of Seattle documents are routinely translated into Spanish, Vietnamese, Cantonese, Mandarin, Somali, Tagalog and Korean, as well as Cambodian, Amharic, Oromo, Tigrinya, Laotian, Thai and Russian. It’s a city where there’s a 20 percent chance your neighbor was born in another country.