Sunday, March 9, 2025
Deeply reported NYT article by Lydia DePillis about St. Louis’s efforts to attract foreign-born residents, historically and within the current climate. A concerning, frustrating read, though it’s heartening to see a range of local leaders advocating for this issue nationally. Attracting, welcoming, and assisting immigrants and refugees has been such an important part of our city’s last few decades, and we’ll be worse off, as a whole region, without it continuing. (I’ve experienced this first-hand; the International Institute helped settle my wife’s family when they arrived more than 25 years ago.) Gilberto Pinela, who I was fortunate to get to know when he was at Cortex, sums up what this could mean for the region:
“We are experiencing the early stages of a winter demographic. It’s not only affecting the city and the region, but soon it will affect the entire state,” said Mr. Pinela, sitting in the mayor’s office at City Hall, in a part of downtown that feels deserted on a weekday afternoon. “The same politicians that are trying to isolate the state are going to be suffering the consequences of this later on.”