| Remarking just the other day on "aggregated demand," Alan Greenspan went on to tell Congress we ought to be thinking about "expanding the number of people we allow in." The Fed Chairman's persistent, pro-immigration stance isn't what made him famous, but in our view will add to the luster of his legacy. But even in the lofty world of monetary authorities and Congressional committees the talk is mostly about allowing in more "skilled workers." It's never been entirely clear to us what that means. Our impression has been that the "less skilled" and even the "non-skilled" contribute. Maybe the Congressional solons should go on a local field trip to find out. All around them, from Washington, D.C., to the suburbs of Maryland and Virginia, there's a motherlode of evidence that immigrants of all kinds are pure gold to an urban economy. We're not referring here to the wonderful cultural diversity that the Vietnamese, Ghanaians and Cubans have brought to workaday D.C., although there is that. As the Old Cold Warrior policy types used to say -- "lose a country, gain a restaurant." We're talking about the kind of bonus cherished by even the most staid citizens: property values. Immigrants, it turns out, are very, very good for both residential and commercial property values. The power of this relationship comes clear in a new study by researchers Bronwyn Lance, Margalit Edelman and Peter Mountford of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute. They surveyed property values across D.C. census tracts from 1980 to 1998 and found that spurts in immigration correlated heavily to increases in residential property values. How heavily? In Northwest D.C.'s Adams-Morgan area, long a neighborhood in transition, a 78% increase in foreign-born population was accompanied by a 21% increase in property value. North Georgetown saw a similar ratio: a 72% rise was matched by a 24% rise in prices. Overall, high immigrant areas saw property values improve 13.77%, far above the 2.36% average increase for the city. But the shift was not confined to the District. The immigrant-value connection also showed up in Northern Virginia, where a 113% increase in foreigners accompanied a 37.5% increase in overall property values. Typical in its transformation is Bailey's Crossroads, Va. Vietnamese first came here via a 1975 airlift; a second wave of Vietnamese, Boat People this time, arrived at the end of the decade. In short order the newcomers bought up the shops, strip malls and parking lots of Bailey's Crossroads and converted them to thriving enterprises. Ethiopians, Hispanics and Somalis worked similar magic in a relatively rough corner of Prince Georges County, Md. In 1991, for example, investor Mike Rubin bought an abandoned shopping mall there, Riggs Plaza, for a sum he describes as "almost nothing." Immigrant tenants rented the vacant stores, cleaned off the graffiti, and made the mall a success. As one real estate agent summed up things: " There goes the neighborhood -- up!" Unfortunately, the flip side of the logic also holds. The Alexis de Tocqueville researchers found that neighborhoods where the number of foreign-born decreased also usually saw values drop. The 10 tracts with the most dramatic decreases in immigrant population, an average decline of 39%, saw home values drop 7.6%. One desolate section of Anacostia lost 76% of its immigration population; its property values fell by 18%. All of which puts the lawmakers' quibbling about targeting skilled labor in perspective. If workers of all races, backgrounds and skill levels have proven such a plus for Washington, why pretend that micromanagement is the best immigration policy? Willing immigrants of all sorts are an asset to the country -- and for that matter, to the neighborhood. (Copyright (c) 2000, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.) |