[1]The face of New Hampshire's foreign-born population doesn't have Mexican features. Nor do the majority of the state's local immigrants speak primarily Spanish at home.
According to research [2] published by the Carsey Institute [3], at the University of New Hampshire (UNH), only 2 percent of the state's foreign-born population comes from Mexico.
Diversity is increasing in New Hampshire. However, 15,000 fewer immigrants reside in the state today than in the early 1900s.
In 1950, the Granite State ranked six in the nation for its concentration of foreign-born. Today, it's 26.
The Carsey Institute focuses on policy research on youth, working families, and sustainable development in small cities and rural communities in the U.S.
The institute publishes 20 reports a year, according to Carsey communication director Amy Sterndale.
The Carsey team, led by Ross Gittell [4], analyzed Census statistics which show that in 2005, New Hampshire had 72,000 immigrants, the top five countries of origin being Canada (17%), India (6%), Vietnam (5%), Germany (4%) and China (4%).
But those countries are not necessarily the nations with sharper population increases since 2000.
"The largest groups with [population] increases are from India, Brazil, Vietnam and Russia, ironically all countries that currently have stronger economies now," says Gittell, a professor of management at the Whittemore School of Business and Economics at UNH.
The study, co-authored by Timothy Lord, also notes that New Hampshire's immigrants have higher levels of education than non-immigrants do. New Hampshire leads all 50 states in percentage of foreign-born residents (25 and older) with a four-year degree, at 24 percent compared to the U.S. average of 16 percent.
As a result, only 11 percent of children in immigrant families live in poverty, which is half of the national percentage.
"It shows that immigrants are contributing to the skilled labor force and to the (local) economy, being able to spend more here," says Gittell.
The highest concentration of immigrants in New Hampshire is in Hillsborough County, which had a 70-percent increase in new residents from 2000 to 20005.
For former Democratic state representative Carol Burney, of Concord, NH, the research is "too general."
"It doesn't tell me what I need to know. The reason why the early 1900s show [a] greater number of foreign-born is because a lot of people came from Canada, including my grandparents and their 27 siblings," she says.
But the lower number of Latinos caught hotel business consultant Tony Castro, of Amherst, NH, by surprise.
"I was struck by the higher number of Vietnamese, Indian and Russians because a lot of the things we read in the Telegraph [newspaper of Nashua, NH, which this article's reporter contributes to] are about Hispanic," Castro says.
The research doesn't reveal which is the most-populous foreign group in the state.
However, from 2000 to 2006, about 1,000 Spanish-speaking Caribbeans, excluding Jamaicans and Cubans, settled in New Hampshire, compared with 1,398 immigrants from India, 1,227 from Brazil, and 1,118 from Vietnam, who arrived in the same period.
The Carsey research is based on Census data, which does not include many undocumented persons and which may serve only as a sample of an area's actual numbers of residents.
Born and raised in New Hampshire, Burney gives a shot as to why people choose her state to live in.
"It's a beautiful place, with low population and low crime rate. Besides, many knew that Nashua was elected the best place to live in America in 1997," she says, though the exact source of the accolade was in question.
The peaceful beauty of the Granite State may be the attraction for Valdimir Calazans Silva, a Nashua resident since 1986, the year that the Boston Celtics last won the NBA championship title - before this year.
Who would think that Silva, a 48-year-old custodian at the Southern New Hampshire Hospital, likes the state's freezing winters and peaceful mood?
"With all of this peace around here, and my team just won the NBA title, what more can you ask?" he says, quite satisfied.
Although New Hampshire's foreign-born population is increasing at a rate that is higher than the average for the U.S., Gittell says the harsh stance adopted on immigration in national debates should not apply to New Hampshire.
"We have a more-skilled [foreign-born] population. This is a real opportunity for the state to embrace the foreign-born population as a way of diversifying a homogeneous state, and to let them continue to contribute to the local economy," says Gittell, whose grandparents migrated here from Russia.
"Profile of New Hampshire's Foreign-born Population," co-authored by Ross Gittell and Timothy Lord, is online at http://carseyinstitute.unh.edu/publications/IB_NH_Foreign-Born_08.pdf [5].
source: EthnicNewz.org
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