Midwest cities get immigrant friendly

students1The Council of State Governments says that a decline in population was experienced by many cities in the Midwest during the recession.  As the jobs started to vanish, many residents left in order to find better opportunities elsewhere, leaving a number of cities decimated and needing an economic boost.  The good news is that stimulus has indeed arrived, albeit not in the manner that most people expected it would.

A number of cities in the Midwest have started to become immigrant friendly, eager for capital to come back to their states, according to the New York Times.  One of those eager cities is Dayton in Ohio, where programs have been created by the City Commission in order to attract potential residents.

The neighborhoods of Dayton have been “ghost towns” for many years now, the Times says, with the landscape littered with empty houses.  However, recently as many as 400 Turkish families have made a move to the city and once again neighborhoods have nice homes with brand new roofs, cut lawns and fresh paint.  Rejuvenation has been caused by immigration to the area, with many of those families being refugees who have left countries in the Soviet bloc in order to find a better life.

In order to facilitate the boom in immigration in Dayton, libraries have begun adding foreign language books, local groups have given classes on starting small businesses and teachers have been learning new languages, while police have stopped checking the immigration status of trial witnesses.  The new residents have since opened trucking businesses, shops and restaurants.