Dallas's immigrant population
Dallas boasts a significant immigrant population, with a diverse array of backgrounds contributing to the city's cultural and economic landscape. As of 2019, approximately 1.3 million immigrants resided in Dallas, representing 18 percent of the overall population. The Hispanic community, particularly those of Mexican descent, forms the largest group, making up about 42 percent of the city's population in 2021. Many Hispanics in Dallas have longstanding family ties to the region, while a notable concentration can be found in the Oak Cliff neighborhood, which serves as an ethnic enclave. Additionally, individuals of Asian descent, primarily from countries like India, Pakistan, China, Korea, and Vietnam, comprise around 3.5 percent of the population.
The vitality of these immigrant communities is reflected in the thriving service businesses and cultural enterprises they support. Organizations such as the Greater Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and the Greater Dallas Asian American Chamber of Commerce play crucial roles in promoting economic opportunities and addressing community needs. Despite facing challenges, such as a notable percentage of non-citizens at risk of deportation, many immigrants have lived in Dallas for over a decade, significantly contributing to the city's labor force. The ongoing discussions surrounding immigration in Dallas highlight the city's complex relationship with its immigrant population, making it a focal point in broader national debates on immigration policy.
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Dallas's immigrant population
Identification: Third-largest city in Texas, with an estimated population of slightly fewer than 1.3 million people in 2021
Significance:Although usually perceived as a hub of Texas’s staple industries of oil and cattle, Dallas has long had a wide diversity of flourishing enterprises, including those in the computer and telecommunication industries. Indeed, the very diversity of the city’s thriving economy has attracted so many immigrants—especially from Mexico and Asia—that roughly one quarter of the city’s residents were immigrants in 2021.
Dallas is home to a large number of Hispanics, especially people of Mexican ancestry, because Texas shares a border with Mexico and was once part of that country. Dallasites of Mexican descent therefore include both recently arrived immigrants and members of families that have lived in Texas for hundreds of years. In 2021, approximately 42 percent of the population of Dallas was Hispanic. Although Hispanics live throughout the city, Oak Cliff, a large neighborhood in the southwestern sector of the city, comes close to being an ethnic enclave, as the vast majority of its residents are of Hispanic background. People of Asian descent constituted roughly 3.5 percent of the city’s population. Most of them stem from India, Pakistan, China, Korea, and Vietnam.
The vitality of both the Hispanic and Asian communities of Dallas is exemplified by the city’s large number of service businesses and cultural enterprises supported by the two groups. For example, the Greater Hispanic Chamber of Commerce integrates the activities of the large Hispanic business community in the Dallas area, where roughly 13 percent of all businesses are owned and operated by Hispanics. The Dallas Concilio of Hispanic Service Organizations is prominent in efforts pertaining to literacy and education, health care, and race relations. Likewise, there is an equally active Greater Dallas Asian American Chamber of Commerce, which coordinates the efforts of the almost 5 percent of businesses in the city owned by Asians. Many Asian Dallasites are active in various arts. For example, Dallas is home to an annual Asian American Film Festival and to the much-admired Dallas Asian American Youth Orchestra.
Dallas serves to illustrate how issues having little to do with immigration can place a city at center stage when issues pertaining to immigrants are raised. Although long a large, populous, and active city, Dallas is probably most famous throughout the world for two things. First, it is infamous as the city in which President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November of 1963. Second, it is famous as the setting for one of the most popular television series in history, the prime-time soap opera, Dallas (1978-1991). In popular thought, Dallas has become a crystallization of all things Texan, both exciting and unpleasant. Although Dallas does indeed have a large immigrant population, so do other large cities in Texas. Nevertheless, news reports both in print and on air often tend to draw on Dallas when providing specific details for stories dealing with immigration from Mexico, such as anti-immigration measures and debates on amnesty for illegal immigrants. This trend was most clearly demonstrated in August of 2006, when NBC’s Nightly News ran a story about how public hospitals were coping with large numbers of undocumented immigrants as patients. The network sent a reporter to Dallas to interview doctors at Parkland Memorial Hospital, where President Kennedy had died in 1963.
As of 2019, 1.3 million immigrants lived in Dallas, composing 18 percent of the total population. Among these were 828,000 non-citizens at risk of deportation. The majority of the immigrant population resided in the city for more than ten years, making up 23 percent of the city's labor force. In 2021, 79.6 percent of the 1.29 million immigrants had graduated from high school, and around 18 percent lived in poverty.
Bibliography
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