Immigration and the increasing cultural diversity Essay

"living in a neighborhood of concentrated immigration was directly associated with lower violence", first generation immigrants being "45 percent less likely to commit violence than third generation Americans."(Sampson, 2008 29) Sampson further concluded that "immigration and the increasing cultural diversity that accompanies it generate the sort of conflicts of culture that lead not to increased crime but nearly the opposite."(Sampson, 2008 33)
By the 1990s the areas diversity continued to grow. The white population dropped below the 50% mark to 41% of the total, and throughout the '90s the area claimed the largest numbers of Korean, Filipino, and Guatemalan immigrants in all of Chicago. The number of home purchases increased by 125%, Albany Park acting as a large and sprawling "gateway community for aspiring middle-class ethnic groups."(Neary, 2005) The main ethnic group however, remained Hispanics and Latinos, as their population continued to increase and predominate the area onwards into the 21st century. The increase in Latin American immigrants and refugees is largely a result of the 1994 NAFTA trade agreement which pushed Mexican immigrants northward as economic deprivation abounded.(Centro Autonomo) NAFTA allowed larger and heavily subsidized American business to overtake much of Mexico's domestic agricultural industries, to the point where now 2/3rds of the "trade" between Mexico and the US is intrafirm transfers internal to American corporations. Also a big driver of Guatemalan immigration was the civil war that occurred there between 1960 and 1996, which was in large part a result of the struggles between American business interests and the domestic population, the CIA having conducted a paramilitary coup in order to overthrow the government for the interests of the United Fruit company, resulting in a state of terror under which 10% of the country's population was killed.(Farmer, 2016) For these reasons and others there was a large influx of Latin American immigration. According to census data, by 2012 Latinos made up 52% of the neighborhoods total population, followed by whites with 29% and a remaining 12% minority of Asians.
Thus, Albany Park accounts for a unique community in the sense that it contains a much larger Latino and Asian community than the rest of Chicago as a whole, who's overall Latino and Asian populations stand at 28% and 5% respectively. As well African Americans are much more predominate throughout Chicago, making up 32% of the city's total population as compared with 4% in Albany Park. The area's "extraordinary ethnic diversity" however "parallels that of many Chicago North Side neighborhoods that have received substantial numbers of new immigrants and refugees from hemispheres of the South and the East."(Lamphere, 1992 99) Albany Park therefore transformed very rapidly since the 1960s, both in terms of its development as well as its diversity. What originated as an almost exclusively white and European community that had fallen into decay and vacancy was revitalized into an attractive center for residential and commercial expansion, during which time it played host to an influx of predominately Latin American immigration that populated and rejuvenated the community.