St. Louis is a city founded by immigrants and built by immigrants. As it celebrates its first 250 years and wonders what will be next, part of the answer may lie in renewing that legacy.
The muddy streets of the trading outpost that was St. Louis teemed with people from a variety of heritages, from the French-speaking locals to the visiting Indians to the Eastern adventurers called Virginians (no matter where they were from) and the wandering fur trappers.
As the outpost turned into a village and eventually into the European city its founders had imagined, it depended upon wave after wave of immigrants to secure its place in the nation.
As the Civil War began, St. Louis led the country in the proportion of foreign-born residents, with the immigrants mainly coming from Ireland and Germany to join the French, Creole and Indian population that was already in place.
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The assimilation was not seamless. Opposition, mainly to the Catholic beliefs the immigrants brought with them, flourished in St. Louis and the rest of the country. It brought about the rise of the “Know Nothing” movement, which later became the Native American party, which had nothing to do with those we now know as Native Americans. The party’s ideology was “nativism, anti-Catholicism, temperance, Republicanism and Protestantism.”
By the late 19th century, Italians, Serbians, Lebanese, Syrians and Greeks had also settled in St. Louis. As the immigrants became part of the fabric of the city, they took the burgeoning community in a variety of directions, bringing growth and development.
The Germans brought progressive views about education, strong Union loyalty, varieties of musicianship, scientific thought and beer brewing, among other things. Before the German brewmasters hit town, the city’s first Jewish businessman, John Philipson from Philadelphia, opened the St. Louis Brewery in 1815.
The Irish influence was felt in religion, education, literature, business, industry, politics, labor unions and sports. Irish men typically became police officers, firefighters and public services workers. Irish women, long used to hard work in their homeland, started out in the new country as domestic laborers but then became teachers and nuns.
This influence doesn’t have to be stuck in the past. The St. Louis Mosaic Project was created in 2012 in response to an economic impact report that showed St. Louis seriously lagging in immigrant population growth. It turns out this is a big problem.
The study, written by Jack Strauss, then chair of the Simon Center for Regional Forecasting at St. Louis University, highlighted the economic benefits that could be realized by increasing the region’s foreign-born population.
- Immigrants are 60 percent more likely to be entrepreneurs than native-born Americans and, on average, earn 25 percent more.
- Immigrants are 44 percent more likely to have at least a college education and 130 percent more likely to have an advanced degree.
- Immigrants are three times more likely to be classified as high-skilled employees.
- Without the immigrants of the 1800s, St. Louis wouldn’t exist. Without significant growth of the foreign-born population in the 2000s, St. Louis will wither.
It is an economic imperative for the region.
