Welcoming South Bend: A Q&A with deputy chief of staff Allie Dolz-Lane
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South Bend had much to celebrate in 2021 when the city recorded its first 10-year population growth since Studebaker closed its main factory in the city in the 1960s.
Now, city and regional leaders are taking a closer look at what’s causing that population growth, and a major contributing factor, they say, is immigration.
A new report conducted by the American Immigration Council shows 87.2% of St. Joseph County’s population growth is attributable to immigration. Moreover, immigrants, who make up about 7.8% of South Bend’s total population, are found to have contributed more than 10%, or $686 million, of the city’s GDP in 2019.
Regional leaders are sharing the new data, and an accompanying welcoming plan, to encourage local businesses and community partners to help address three central needs: more programs to help immigrants find work commensurate with their education and experience; more opportunities to improve language skills; and a central location where immigrants can receive services.
Inside INdiana Business talked to South Bend Mayor James Mueller’s deputy chief of staff, Allie Dolz-Lane, about the report and how it can be used to inform future growth and development opportunities across the region. The full report and regional welcoming plan can be viewed at southbendin.gov/welcoming.
Why did the city and its partners want to conduct this study?
When we got the census data from 2020, we saw that the population in St. Joe County and in the city of South Bend were on the rise. So, we knew that there was population growth happening here, and one of our goals was to increase that, continue that, continue to see growth in the city especially.
One of the things we realized from data was that a lot of our new population was thanks to immigration. So, one thing that’s in this report is that in St. Joe County alone between 2014 and 2019, 87% of population growth was attributable to immigration. So, that’s really significant. That means that the majority of our population growth is attributable to immigration in the county. That was what spurred the need to kind of investigate, what do our immigrant or new American neighbors in St. Joe County and in South Bend specifically need? And how can we address those needs?
Can you tell me about the methodology of the reports? What sources of information were used?
There are two reports. There’s a data report, New Americans and Elkhart, Marshall and St. Joe Counties, and that report was put together using American Community Survey data. Since we know that the 2020 census — we didn’t have a high sense that it was accurate — we decided to use data from before 2020. The other aspect is that we have a South Bend Regional Welcoming Plan, and that plan has a different source of information.
We convened a stakeholder group of mostly organizations that work with immigrant populations. So, think La Casa de Amistad in South Bend, religious communities, and various other organizations including adult education, the South Bend school corporation, WorkOne. We also had a survey that was really aimed at talking to the people who are new Americans here, and we had more than 138 responses on that, but that was between the three counties. Then, we also had listening sessions where we engaged with more than 77 individuals and those were all based in St. Joe County.
So that’s a little bit of our methodology for how we gathered information. We had our stakeholders brainstorm the three pillars of the plan. What were the three categories that we needed to address? And then we used the feedback directly from our immigrant population to build the recommendations and to see what the needs were.
What are your major takeaways from these reports?
One of our biggest takeaways is that we know that language access is important. We know that we need our immigrant population to have a better grasp of English and we need to be able to serve our residents better in different languages. Translation and interpretation and language access services were one of the top needs that spanned all the three pillars. The three pillars of our report are civic engagement and leadership, safe and connected communities, and economic development and education and equitable access. Those are really all-encompassing. They’re very broad, but we know that language access is relevant to every single one of them.
Other things we learned, a lot of people who come to this country can’t work in the same profession that they may have done in their home country so, how do we get people to be able to work at the level that they were doing before they came here? That might be credential evaluation. That might be new training opportunities. But, we know we have a great potential in our immigrant population. In the report as well, we are shown that in the tri-county region, the proportion of the population that is a working age is higher than the proportion of the population that immigrants make up and there are more working-age people proportionally than there are in the native-born population, so we know that they’re an important demographic of workers, and some of the highest industries that we found that immigrants work in are manufacturing, education, health care and social assistance—industries where we know that there might be a need for more workers right now in the region. I think that’s another really helpful part of this report.
It shows the industries with the highest job demand in the region since 2021. We have health care and social assistance. That’s one of the top industries for immigrant workers. Educational services, another top industry of immigrant workers, and then retail, trade, manufacturing and information. So, those are some of the main takeaways when we talk about the labor market and the shortages we’re experiencing here. We have record low unemployment rates which is fantastic, but that means that we need more workers and we need to get people who are here in better jobs as well, because that’s also in our interest to have our residents have higher paying jobs and better opportunities.
Were there any surprises?
Luckily, most of it was sort of what we knew. We know that immigrants contribute a lot in tax dollars. I think that that might be surprising to the people that do see this report is just, what proportion of the spending power do immigrants hold? We know that immigrants contribute just in this region $3.8 billion to the gross domestic product, which is 9% of the total GDP for the year and also larger than their share of the population. So, we know that our immigrant population is highly productive and is a really important part of our GDP, and a tax contributor. Even though not all immigrants get to reap the benefits of public benefits, they still contribute highly to taxes.
The American Immigration Council data shows 87% of growth between 2014 and 2019 was attributable to immigration. Why are immigrants choosing the region?
One of the spotlights that we have in our report is the university population, which I think is the central piece of this. The University of Notre Dame has 1,593 international students, which is far higher than any of the other regional universities, and I think that the international population at the University of Notre Dame is really one of the top reasons that we have such an influx of immigrants to this region. There are other reasons. There’s always been immigrant communities in South Bend, ever since the inception of the city. We’ve seen different waves of immigrants over time, and we know that South Bend is a place where people go because they know they can find jobs here.
Historically, there have been the auto industry and railroad industry, and so we know that people are coming here for jobs, principally. But, we also know that the university is a big pull and the university employs many international students as well. In fact, that’s one of the reasons that we started the High Skill Immigration Fund in the city of South Bend, which is a program that helps de-risk the process of sponsoring an H-1B Visa for employers to help incentivize them to hire that international talent, help that person stay in South Bend, retain the talent regionally, locally, and get those high-skilled positions that we know we have opened in the city filled. That’s one of the initiatives that the city of South Bend has already implemented this year and has seen success in.
How does having this data help inform regional priorities?
The South Bend regional plan is a welcoming plan for everyone. This was put together in partnership with multiple organizations through a Gateways For Growth grant, which is from the Welcoming America national organization and American Immigration Council, the organization that produced the data report for us. This report is really applicable not just to the public sector. I think it’s also important that people from every sector—nonprofit, private to private-public partnerships—read this and understand that there are strategies that can be implemented at any level.
Some of the recommendations in the report can’t necessarily be implemented at the government level and need the help of our nonprofit partners and even our higher levels of government to also take interest in recognizing the economic importance of our immigrant population. The fact that this is a growing demographic and that this is one of the main contributors to our population growth, we hope that people from all sectors can take parts of this plan and implement them. Just like I told you before with the language access, while it’s important for essential services, it’s also important that maybe businesses think, ‘Well, maybe I should hire a bilingual staff member.’
Part of this report also shows which industries are the greatest need for bilingual staff members as well. That’s really telling. With the more immigrant population we see, the more we need multilingual support. That’s just one example of something that private companies can also try to implement in their businesses.
You mentioned that it may be surprising to some to see the total economic contributions that immigrants make in our community. What do these numbers tell us and why were they important to include in the report?
The reason that it’s highlighted in the report is to counter some narratives that may suggest that immigrants don’t pay their fair share. I think that this report shows objectively that from what we can see, based on the data, our new American population is paying more than their fair share proportionally of what they could make up the population in taxes.
In 2019, immigrant households earned $198 million and spent $29 million in federal taxes, $19 million in state and local taxes, and had $150 million left in spending power, which means they had 9.3% of spending power in the city, whereas they only contributed to 7.8% of the total population. So, we know that they are important contributors to local businesses. Any place where you spend hard earned money in the city and in the region, we know that immigrants are contributing there as well.
Another aspect of the report that is a smaller aspect, but it shows the entrepreneurial aspect of immigrants. It also shows that immigrant entrepreneurs generated $43.3 million in business income in the region, which is important in showing that immigrants make up 9.2% of business owners in the region despite only making 6.9% of the population. So, in all of these aspects, we see that the population isn’t necessarily proportionate to how much they make up in spending power and in entrepreneurship, which shows that they’re a growing sector of our business owners as well.
The New Americans report shares the story of Dr. Rose Alyousif, who was a physician in her home country and initially met difficulties finding work matching her expertise because she was not licensed in America to practice medicine. What resources are there for new Americans like Dr. Alyousif and is there more work that can be done in assisting immigrants new to the community?
We don’t have a great solution right now and that’s something that when someone comes to you with a foreign qualification to be a nurse or a doctor which, by the way, we know are really high-demand careers in our region, they can’t necessarily start working like that. There are good reasons. We have high standards for doctors and nurses and other medical workers. But, there’s not, right now, a very good pathway. So last year, the United Religious Community worked to put together a pathway for nurses, and the pathway is not perfect still, but one of the things that in this case, sometimes we need state level or federal level guidance and legislation to actually be able to change some of these kinds of regulations because the regulations are at the state level.
Luckily, we also know that some of the local schools—nursing schools and hospitals—are trying to partner now to figure out how to train people up as quickly as possible to get those qualifications that they need. Historically, if someone comes here, depending on what country they come from, they might have to do nursing school again. They might not have to do medical school again, but they might still have to take the MCAT and that requires years of studying, so there are lots of different struggles, but that just goes to show the resiliency of our immigrant population because many of them do achieve that, and we want those positions filled and we want those people to be able to access them. A lot of people come here as refugees. Some of the struggle is not just getting the paperwork, but also getting the job that you did in your home country.
Anything else?
It’s important that people read the whole report themselves and understand that we include this information because we think it’s really important to our region on many levels. If we want to continue growth, we need to continue to welcome immigrants and continue to make sure that they have jobs and that they can have a place in our city.