Where do Seattleites come from?
Not from local hospitals, that's for sure. The city also is undergoing a remarkable surge of foreign-born and refugees.
Seattle has gone through periods of extensive growth and change. As the city finishes the first decade of Century 21, there are notable differences from the Seattle at the end of the 20th. For one thing, natives seem to be a vanishing species. In their place, Seattle is home to an increasing number of immigrants and refugees from overseas. In other words, if you ask a Seattleite where they were born, you're less likely to hear "Virginia Mason hospital" or even "Mt. Vernon," and more likely to hear "Somalia."
Let's turn the clock back to 1980, the last time native-born Washingtonians were the largest population block in the city of Seattle, according to the U.S. census numbers (the numbers aren't broken down by birth city, but by birth state). In 1980, Seattle residents who were born in Washington made up 44 percent of Seattle population; 43.5 percent were born in another state, and 11 percent were foreign born.
Looking at the numbers since (from data provided by the Puget Sound Regional Council), you can see that there's been a steady decline in the Washington native category in Seattle: from 43 percent in 1990 to 38.6 percent in 2000, down to 37.5 according to 2005-7 estimates.
Meanwhile, the percentage of the population made up of U.S. born, non-native Washingtonians has remained steady, at around 42 or 43 percent of the population. Of those, an increasing percentage (from 6 to 9 percent) are Californians. There probably are as many or more Californians as there are blacks in Seattle. The numbers are small, but the allegations of "Californication" have some hint of validity. Oregon natives, on the other hand, aren't coming in bunches: They remain at 2-3 percent of Seattle's population.
But the number of foreign born Seattleites has been on the rise, from 11 percent in 1980 to 15 percent in '90 to 18 percent in 2000 to 20 percent by '05-07, a near doubling in 30 years. The origins of those Seattleites who come from overseas have changed too. Here are Seattle's largest groups of the foreign-born since 1990:
1990
Europe Other (not including UK or former Soviet Union): 2.4%
Philippines: 2.4%
Southeast Asia: 2.2%
China/Hong Kong: 1.3%
Canada: 1.2%
Korea: .07%
2000
Southeast Asia: 3.2%
Philippines: 2.5 %
Europe Other: 2.3%
Central/South Asia: 1.9%
China/Hong Kong: 1.7%
Central America/Caribbean: 1.4%
2005-7
Southeast Asia: 3%
Central/South Asian: 2.8%
Mexico: 2.1%
China/Hong Kong: 2.1%
Philippines: 2%
Europe Other: 1.8%
Among the notable trends is the recent growth in the Mexican population, up from a mere .03 percent in '90 to 1.4 percent in 2000 to 2.1 percent in '05-7.
Another group on the rise: those born in Central/South Asian. They made up .04 percent of the population in '90, 2 percent in 2000, and nearly 3 percent in '05-07.
And yet another surging group, though still a small percentage overall, are immigrants from Africa, which equaled Mexicans in '90 at .03 percent, climbed to 1.3 percent in 2000, and hit 1.7 percent in '05-7, nearly matching the number of Seattleites of European origin.
The growth in foreign-born residents in the Seattle metro area has been significantly driven by refugees, according to the Brookings Institution staffers who wrote "Seattle: Still Yearning to be Free" in 2006:
From 1983 to 2004, the Seattle region ranked No. 5 nationally in the resettlement of refugees, behind the big immigrant gateways of New York, Los Angeles and Orange County in California, and Chicago. However, Seattle's total foreign-born ranking is only 23rd, as refugees there comprise much more of the immigrant population than most other places around the country.
The region's refugee population is probably more important to the growth of the region than in other places. And it has been growing over the past 20 years.
Of the some 50,000 refugees resettled in Seattle over that period, fully one-third are from Southeast Asia — including Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos — and 42 percent come from the remnants of the USSR.
In the current mayor's race, the Seattle Times reports that both candidates, Joe Mallahan (Everett, WA) and Mike McGinn (Long Island, NY), have said they'd like their administrations to mirror Seattle. If so, it's going to be a bit complicated. Out of their first 100 appointees, roughly 68 would be white, 8 black, 1 Native American, 14 Asian, 6 Latino, and 3 of other races, according to the city's website. On top of that, 43 should be born in America, but outside of Washington; 37 should be Evergreen State natives, and 20 born overseas, including one Canadian and one Korean.
Of course, there will be updated numbers after the big census in 2010, and that will tell us if the trend away from Washington natives is continuing. In the meantime, locals might want to figure out which Seattle native will in charge of turning out the lights on their dwindling species.
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Comments:
Posted Wed, Sep 30, 7:32 a.m. inappropriate
That data is SCREAMING for a graphic visualization treatment !!
Posted Wed, Sep 30, 8:30 a.m. inappropriate
Seattle gets better every year.
I'm a "Swedish Hospital" btw.
Posted Wed, Sep 30, 10:08 a.m. inappropriate
Sound Transit light rail needs these folks to pay full fare as Metro bus routes are cannibalized. And, such a diversity of gang populations has sprouted up over the last 30 years.
Posted Wed, Sep 30, 12:04 p.m. inappropriate
Group Health, upstairs where the breast cancer screening clinic is now. My partner was born at Cabrini. Our son was born at Group Health, in the swanky "Family Beginnings" center.
I love the diversity here, but sometimes I do feel like the only person in the room who remembers Captain Puget.
Posted Wed, Sep 30, 1:03 p.m. inappropriate
I'd like to think that I'm tolerant of all foreign-born transplants to this area, but we definitely need a quota on Californians!
By the way, "sandik", I not only remember Don McCune, but I've had the pleasure of working with him. He was really a prince among men, as are Chris Wedes and Stan Boreson. The death of local programming has really deprived us of a huge piece of our shared culture.
Posted Wed, Sep 30, 4:26 p.m. inappropriate
Oops...over ran the space. My apology; that concluding graf reads as follows:
Let us hope such bigotry is not rekindled (as it surely has been elsewhere) by the terror evoked by the looted economy. Let us hope the new diversity of Seattle’s population is an enduring barrier against hate -- even the whispered hate of the Forward Thrust era.
Posted Wed, Sep 30, 4:47 p.m. inappropriate
lorenbliss, if we're "the most anti-transit city in north america, probably in the world", then why did we built a system that, while bus focused, easily outdraws most of our US peer cities in commute mode share, and has done so for many years?
Historical perspective should be informed by the fact that many US cities, even many with rail, would kill to have our transit infrastructure, and would kill to have our commute ridership (Portland's share is much lower for example). Ever been to the Sun Belt? Detroit?
Seattle is embarassingly far behind most first and second world cities, and we should work like hell to improve, for all sorts of reasons, starting with sustainability, liveability, and social equity. But let's keep our current status in perspective.
Posted Thu, Oct 1, 4:21 a.m. inappropriate
Hello mhays -- my apology for lacking a more polite way to address you -- but with all due respect you seem a bit tense about matters of tense.
I did NOT say Seattle IS "the most anti-transit city in North America"; I said it WAS that for many years (which is proven beyond argument by the serial deaths of the transit measures I cited); I also stated -- again correctly -- that xenophobia and bigotry were the primary reasons for those deaths. WERE: past tense. (And, one would hope, forever remaining in the past tense.)
Moreover I opened my commentary by noting (and implicitly applauding) "Seattle's long-overdue acceptance of the need for adequate public transport”: present tense, the present tense further emphasized by context -- that is, by the implication Seattle’s acceptance of transit is due to rather substantial changes in the makeup of the Seattle population.
Indeed I concluded by stating, “it seems Seattle is entering a new era -- proof of which is to be found in the acceptance, by near-landslide proportions in some districts, of Sound Transit’s recent ballot measures.”
Nevertheless you seemingly chide me to “keep (Seattle’s) current status in perspective.”
Which is precisely what I am doing -- writing about what was unquestionably the most potent force in limiting our ability to rid ourselves of the rotting carcass of the Big Oil/Big Automotive albatross -- the ugly nature of that force unfortunately still probably
the most taboo subject in modern Seattle history.
Posted Thu, Oct 1, 7:43 a.m. inappropriate
I think Seattle has much to gain from the latest immigrants. If we're lucky, we might even see some needed cultural changes through cross-cultural exchange.
Here's one example, on a very small and personal scale: My late father became close friends with a neighbor couple from Ethiopia. When my father died, his neighbor came to our house and grieved in a way that for him is traditional. Completely unselfconsciously, as if it were a duty, he fell to his knees and called out my father's name and all of his titles--"Father," "Husband," "Brother," "Friend."
Everyone in my family found this enormously helpful, to have a ritual for expressing how big the loss was. In our family's Euro-American-Midwestern culture, people are wary of grief because they equate it with depression. I've been to funerals where it's not OK to show signs of sadness. But my father's Ethiopian friend's culture has a way of supporting people in grief that does not feel depressing, just real and honest and respectful of the heart's need to grieve losses.
In a similar way, my father was, I think, able to help his Ethiopian friends when their religious tradition was oppressive to them--they were blamed by their church community for a child's illness. My parents both could share their culture's belief that illness is not a punishment for sin, but a fact of life, and this belief was useful to them.
People come here because they see something about American culture that could help them, and I think they also bring new perspectives and often valuable wisdom from their own cultures which could help improve ours over time.
Posted Thu, Oct 1, 7:45 a.m. inappropriate
The above comment was not posed by me but by a friend using my computer.
Posted Thu, Oct 1, 3:56 p.m. inappropriate
lorenbliss, I meant the "many years" to imply that Seattle has always -- not just lately -- been above many US cities in commute transit mode share. I should have been more clear.
Among cities among our peers or larger, off the top of my head we're second from last (vs. Detroit) to adopt real, frequent, all-day commuter rail transit. However, to suggest that Houston, Phoenix, et al have ever had overall transit ridership even remotely on our scale (in modern history at least) is incorrect.
Posted Thu, Oct 1, 6:43 p.m. inappropriate
I agree on a lot of points. However, many US cities have always had far worse political environments for transit funding as well.
Posted Thu, Oct 1, 11:15 p.m. inappropriate
Fascinating. I thought I'd at least make it to 35 before I began to feel like an endangered species, but it looks like that had already begun by the time I was five! (Group Health Hospital, here.) Don't get me wrong, of course — I'm a first-generation Seattleite and the son of refugee immigrants to the U.S., so it's not so much a complaint as just being gobsmacked to see the figures. And if 1980 was the last time people born in Washington made up a majority of Seattleites, I wonder when the last time people born in Seattle made up a majority of Seattleites? Too bad we don't have those figures.
This of course ties into the pieces that ran earlier this year dealing with Seattle's lack of historical perspective, and also to a conversation I recently had with a friend about the general sense of rootlessness in these parts. That was thrown into sharp relief for me during these last few weeks — I got married in mid-September, and many family members, on both sides, came from the East Coast. Even though they came to this country in the 20th century, that's still long enough for some of them to be third-generation Philadelphians, for example. And then the honeymoon in the eastern Mediterranean. Seeing structures and settlements that are up to 25 times as old as the one in which I've lived most of my life really threw me for a loop, even though I went in knowing, intellectually, what I'd be seeing.
I guess this is a long way of saying all this is fine, but do the newcomers have any sense of the sort of place they're coming to?
Posted Fri, Oct 2, 1:06 p.m. inappropriate
lorenbliss, you describe yourself as a journalist, but after reading all of your missives here I'd suggest that you're really a Professor of Sociology at heart. :-)
To Benjamin Lukoff I'd suggest that the vast number of newcomers here, at least those that come here from other parts of the US, do not have any sense of the sort of place they're coming to. They don't care. They'll just remake it in the image of the place they were so anxious to leave. I hate to invoke the "C-word" again, but those people seem to be the worst in this regard.
Posted Fri, Oct 2, 3:48 p.m. inappropriate
Apropos newcomers (in response to remarks by dbreneman and Mr. Lukoff): once a newcomer myself, I believe newcomers are readily divided into two categories: those of us who want to improve our new home (as for example with adequate transit); and those who merely want to recreate the place they fled.
One of the huge problems here has long been the stubborn inability of native-born Puget Sounders -- especially Seattleites -- to distinguish between the two motivations.
To dbreneman apropos sociology: good catch. Probably 80 percent of my interdisciplinary BA is sociology (that and history), and it remains close to 100 percent of my serious reading.
Sociological reporting -- in which a reporter or a team of reporters works for months, sometimes years on a single story -- was once a journalistic mainstay, especially in the Northeast, the Midwest and South.
It was intended to foster the democratic process -- an expression of the paper’s obligation to the community it served -- and it did so in at least two ways: it gave readers the vocabulary to articulate troublesome questions they might not otherwise be able to express, and it then helped them understand the often-complex answers.
But this mode of reportage was killed forever by the advent of the news monopolies, ostensibly in the name of maximizing profit, actually to further the Big Business agenda of reducing the U.S. population to the infinite malleability of Moron Nation.
Posted Fri, Oct 2, 8:28 p.m. inappropriate
I am a Northgate Hospital baby, now better known as the location where barnes and Noble is. Many children are born here from immigrant parents; at some point in time my family migrated here some hundreds of years ago.
Posted Mon, Oct 5, 12:53 p.m. inappropriate
It is of some interest that the population of Seattle is diversifying with people from other countries. As for the "native" born vs. non-natives in Seattle, you could also turn the clock back to 1889 and see how many people, at least those of European descent, were "native" born. The distinction between "natives" vs. non-natives (even those of us who have been here for at least a quarter of a century, but are considered non native) is based on a relatively short span of history and seems somewhat silly.
Posted Tue, Oct 6, 10:02 a.m. inappropriate
Kamille, there is a very simple definition of who is and is not a native. A native is someone born in his or her area of residence. A non-native moved to that area from somewhere else. It's a binary choice. You either are or not a native. You don't get extra nativity points for sticking it out a long time as a non-native. That doesn't mean that the place where you moved to can't be your home. Many people consider a place other than that where they were born to be their "home town". Even JP Patches isn't a native - he moved here from the Midwest!
Posted Sun, Oct 18, 4:46 p.m. inappropriate
Nothing in my comments suggested that one gets "extra nativity points" for sticking it out as long as a non-native.