Post-Gazette

When Eugene Matta made the cross-country leap from New Mexico to Pittsburgh in 2001, it became his assignment to recruit working-class Hispanics to his new home. Not the engineers and other "professional" immigrants, but the kind who work in hotels, restaurants, farms and construction, the kind a city must draw these days if it hopes to build its blue-collar base and satisfy the churning service economy.

He would lead Pittsburgh's Hispanic Center, providing guidance to newcomers from Latin America. Before his career move to Pittsburgh, he directed National Hispanic Culture Center of New Mexico for three years, and he hoped his job experiences -- as well as his life experiences, having been born in Chile and raised in New York -- would help him as he became part of Pittsburgh's obsessive drive to restock the immigrant class that helped build the city in the first place.

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Mr. Matta made promotional videos. He traveled across the Midwest, pitching the city. He begged nurses nationwide to give Pittsburgh a chance.

And then he left.

In just three years, he gave up on the Hispanic Center and its immense challenges, lured away by the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation. So it is that he can provide a sober assessment of where and why Pittsburgh goes wrong, especially in light of the news that the Pittsburgh region, despite a decade's worth of recruiting, drew about 16,000 international immigrants between 2000 and 2006.

That's the fewest among the 25 largest American metropolitan regions, and it's the reason that only 3 percent of the Pittsburgh-area population was foreign born as of 2004. The cities that grow, solidifying their tax base along the way, have largely been successful at drawing an immigrant class, and in older cities this has the effect of offsetting the ongoing white flight to the nation's suburbs. Las Vegas, Chicago and Charlotte, N.C., have succeeded in drawing these new classes.

Buffalo, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh haven't.

"Yeah, sure, it was hard," Mr. Matta said of his tenure. "I learned a couple of things. Newcomers to a place, they want to see a little bit of their culture. Chinese like to go where there are more Chinese ... Hispanics don't have a tradition here like they do in California or Texas."

Hispanics want a community where they won't feel as if they're in exile. Asians and Indians, other sought-after groups, want their own communities, too. But Pittsburgh's Hispanic community is relegated to pockets in Beechview, and all that remains of its Cantonese Chinatown are pictographs on the sides of buildings and the old Chinatown Inn off Grant Street.

Bringing foreign-born workers to such a place can be a tough sell, Mr. Matta concluded, even in the face of arguments about Pittsburgh's affordability relative to such cities as New York.

But in the end, it still comes down to jobs.

That's strike two against the Pittsburgh -- despite improvements in certain sectors, it still hasn't recovered, job-wise, from the collapse of the steel industry. Under Mr. Matta's stewardship, the Hispanic Center had its best results in wooing landscapers and constriction workers, but those are seasonal jobs, and the people who fill them stay in Pittsburgh temporarily, but won't always call the city home.

'Round and 'round we go: To fuel immigration, we need greater job availability. But to fuel job availability and new business creation, we need an available work force.

"It's sort of a chicken and egg thing," said Jeffrey Passel, a demographer with the Pew Hispanic Center, formerly of the Urban Institute, a social policy group out of Washington. "If I knew how to solve that, I'd probably be able to retire."

It's possible that the puzzle is unsolvable for Pittsburgh. Because policies and networking efforts designed to recruit immigrants to urban area are still relatively young, research on whether it works or not is scant. The truth may be that political and business leaders don't have any real ability to substantially affect immigration inflow.

"I haven't seen anything evaluating these programs to attract immigrants," Mr. Passel said. "My sense of what drives immigration is employment of family networks." Once enough immigrants are attracted by the jobs, the population of a certain ethnic group reaches a critical mass, at which point families and friends might conceivably follow.

"Over time," he said, "a momentum builds up. But simply trying to attract immigrants without having the employment potential" won't work.

On the other hand, "The work force shortages are becoming real," said Barry Maciak, director of the Center for Competitive Workforce Development at Duquesne University.

Most research on the subject points to a serious work force shortfall in Pittsburgh by 2020, when all of the baby boomers have retired. And there are jobs for the taking here and now, in areas such as transportation, finance and coal mining, if only the immigrant class -- or anyone else -- had skill sets to match.

"It's a multifaceted issue," said Marisol Del Orbe, who was born in Kenya, raised in Puerto Rico and came to Pittsburgh 15 years ago. A Duquesne grad, she now works at New Century Careers, nonprofit work force development outfit, and sits on the board of the Latin American Cultural Union. One of those facets is that immigrants exposed to American media have heard of other cities, but not Pittsburgh.

"Where is that? What type of lifestyle will I have? Will they be welcoming to me? There's a little bit of marketing to it," she said.

The marketing can be critical to towns of Pittsburgh's size and geographic position. If the town is small enough, one or two families can make a difference, setting off a chain reaction that leads to a proportional immigration upswing. If the city is large enough, like New York or Houston, it may draw immigrants on account of its own gravity or proximity to the Mexican border.

But for the cities in between, overnight success -- or even success after one decade -- isn't a reasonable expectation.

It took the Pittsburgh region several decades, for example, to build a modest Indian enclave of just 10,000 or so -- the seed was planted by companies such as Westinghouse Electric and iGate Corp. in the 1970s and 1980s, and despite years of nurturing from groups such as the Heinz Endowments, the community is largely professional and has yet to snowball into something broader and more economically diverse.

One bright spot in all the discouraging metrics is the realization that Pittsburgh leads the nation in the proportion of immigrants who arrive here already bearing a college degree, almost six in 10. These "professional" immigrants, the kind who are working in white-collar jobs or receiving a post-grad education in Oakland, stay in Pittsburgh despite the lack of their own cultural touchstones because they speak fluent English, integrate into society more easily and don't always require the same support network as do the working class immigrants. They largely work in computer and technical fields.

But there's a flip side to that six-in-10 ratio, which makes it appear that we're doing a good job of drawing educated immigrants. That's partly true, but the bigger truth is that the proportion is high because working-class immigrants just aren't coming here, driving down the sample size.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is Las Vegas -- there's an 83 percent chance that an immigrant settling in Sin City's won't have a degree. Decades ago, that might not have been a desirable statistic, but today it's undeniable that the city's immigrant community is one several drivers behind Las Vegas' rapid growth.

"Pittsburgh has a lot of catching up to do," said Ms. Del Orbe, of New Century Careers. "It's a competitive situation," because most other cities are actively recruiting Latinos, Indians and Asians at the same time we're trying to. (While others zig, Pittsburgh could zag with a targeted recruitment of immigrants "not quite on the hot list" -- Africans, for example, with different skill sets, she suggested.)

But Ms. Del Orbe sees encouraging signs: People speaking Spanish when she makes shopping trips to Monroeville. Businesses beginning to offer bilingual help lines. Pittsburgh, she said, has laid the groundwork for an immigration influx that she believes is inevitable, even if it is still a decade or more away. "In my opinion, we don't have a choice. It's one world."