Luring immigrants should be a strategy for Detroit

It's been well-documented the benefits of having a healthy immigrant population. They start companies, they diversify the economy, and they put the money back into the community. Just look at Southwest Detroit or Hamtramck's Bangladeshi Avenue, which you may know as Conant. Detroit's immigrant is only at 4.8 percent, while the nationally that number is 12.5. That means there's room to improve... and you know us here in Detroit have space.

Excerpt from the Detroit News:

Bring us your fired-up, your hungry-to-succeed, your Ph.D.s. Bring us your entrepreneurial foreign born, who were 189 percent more likely to start a business in 2008 than those of us born stateside.

For decades, Detroit's ethnic populations have migrated to the suburbs, while new immigrants largely bypass the city.

The trend is national, but it's acute in Detroit, the city that once teemed with immigrants. The region now has an immigrant population of 12.5 percent, which mirrors the national average. Detroit's is about 4.8 percent.

Those are among the findings from a draft of "Global Detroit," a study backed by foundations and industry types and shepherded by former state Rep. Steve Tobocman. The southwest Detroit resident spent a year researching how to unleash new energy in Metro Detroit.

"No American city has had population gains without immigration," says Tobocman, whose grandfather came to Detroit from Poland a century ago.

Read the entire article here.