Author: Gaiutra Bahadur

By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

As the bus approached Philadelphia’s Northeast, where houses are arrayed with attractive gardens and even more attractive price tags, passenger Wen Chen pitched a friend in New York City.

“Philadelphia houses are so cheap,” she chatted into her cell phone in Chinese. “It’s easy to buy.”

The 38-year-old waitress, who moved here a year ago, was on her way home from a visit to relatives via a newborn bus line that runs from the Roosevelt Mall on Cottman Avenue to Manhattan’s Chinatown.

Launched a month ago, with a fleet of two and an owner who doubles as driver, Universe Bus Line is one sign of a slow, quiet resuscitation of a neighborhood by an intravenous flow of immigrants, many of them relocating from New York City.

Immigration advocates have long argued that Philadelphia, a former hub for factories and foreigners, could stem its population loss by recruiting immigrants. Other cities, such as Boston, have used immigration as a strategy for urban renewal.

It appears immigrants are arriving even without a plan to lure them. According to a U.S. Census Bureau report released last week, the foreign-born last year were 11 percent of the city population, a jump from 9 percent in 2000.

In Oxford Circle and other areas of the Northeast, cheaper housing appears to be the draw.

At least four realty agencies have opened near Cottman Avenue and Roosevelt Boulevard in the last two years. The Chinese characters on their storefronts hint at marked ethnic change in the neighborhood. In 2000, only about 190 people born in China lived in or around Oxford Circle, of 10,000 citywide. Two of the realty agencies alone have sold three times that number of houses to Chinese-born clients.

Target Realty has sold more than 400 properties in three Northeast zip codes since opening an office on Bustleton Avenue in March 2004. Its brokers say rowhouses that would have fetched $80,000 in early 2004 now go for double that, and real estate that idled on the market for months gets snapped up in days. Almost all the buyers are Chinese-born New Yorkers.

“They can’t even buy a bathroom in New York for the [same] price,” Yvonne Hu, the company’s owner, said. “There are multiple offers because there’s so much demand.”

Word-of-mouth, long part of the creation lore for ethnic enclaves, has driven the move. House hunters approach Jack Kong – whose Cottman First Realty has closed on 250 houses since opening in 2004 – with a specific request.

“They’ll say, ‘I want 19149,’ ” he said. “They’re looking for that zip code… because their friend says so.”

That zip code puts transplants within walking distance of the Roosevelt Mall, the Universe Bus Line, and the fledgling Wing Hing grocery, where smoky circles of elderly Chinese men play backgammon at a folding table every day.

The influx has been so dramatic that nearby Solis-Cohen Elementary School converted book closets into classrooms and added two trailers in a parking lot for 250 more students – half of them new residents.

“The people who’ve resided here for a long time are passing away or moving to retirement communities,” said Joseph Baum, the school’s principal. “And they are being replaced by families with children.”

The Chinese student population alone doubled to about 200 – 20 percent of the school – in the last year. Most came from New York, said Yiquan Xuan, a Chinese-speaking counselor’s assistant at the school.

A dozen families who relocated said they left cramped, rented quarters in New York to become homeowners here.

Wen Chen, the Philadelphia booster on the bus, has been longing for a home more like the one she had on the banks of the Ming River in Fujian, the province once home to many of the Northeast newcomers.

After 15 years in the United States, the mother of two preadolescent boys was ready for her own house in a quiet neighborhood. As she and her husband hunt for it, they are living with relatives and working at China Ruby, a Cottman Avenue restaurant.

For the $1,000 a month they paid to share a house in Brooklyn with two other families, “in Philadelphia, you can own the whole house,” she said. “Everything is yours already, so it’s much better.”

Jin Xiu Wang, 32, and her husband, Jin Hui Zhu, 32 – a cashier and a cook at Chez Elena Wu in Voorhees – bought a $100,000 rowhouse a few blocks from Solis-Cohen in March 2004. The family of four had been paying $1,500 for an apartment.

“In New York, the place is too small. [Here,] it’s very nice,” Wang said, pointing to the front yard, with tomatoes ripening in a tidy vegetable garden. “Enough for the kids to play.”

The newcomers, like the bus that picks them up in front of the McDonald’s at Cottman and the Boulevard, are bypassing a stop in Philadelphia’s Chinatown. It costs too much for them to buy within the borders of that gentrifying, overcrowded enclave, the historic gateway for Asian migrants.

“There’s not enough [affordable] housing,” said John Chin, head of the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corp.

Sept. 11 sparked the migration south. The terrorist attacks hit New York’s Chinatown, close to ground zero, hard. Garment factories shut down. Restaurants lost half their customers and let workers go. Several businesses – and their owners and workers – relocated here.

It may be too early to tell how the newcomers will affect Oxford Circle. But there are traces of new vitality and new stresses in the graying neighborhood, which has lost old-timers to suburbs, retirement homes and mortuaries.

“There are more kids,” said Roger Harvath of Huntingdon Valley, a mortgage loan officer in the Northeast.

He grew up a few blocks away from Solis-Cohen, and his grandparents, now dead, spent their lives there. He has witnessed flight by older residents.

“They look around, and they see this is not the neighborhood they grew up in,” he said. “It used to be some African American and mostly white. Now, the Asian and the Hispanic community is increasing.”

Xuan sees a demand for more resources – for English classes, after-school programs, Chinese culture clubs, and medical care in Chinese.

“The parents have no English. They work long hours,” she said. “They need help.”

Xuan needs help, too. On her two days a week at Solis-Cohen, she arrives to meet a swarm of parents. They ask her to read the school calendar and for favors such as taking a child to the doctor on her day off.

But benefits counter the costs: For one, the influx has been good for business.

Universe Bus owner Kwai Louang Chuek saw an untapped market, so he started a company. Other cut-rate buses, these ferrying between the two Chinatowns, support a culture of commuters who live in New York and work here – or the reverse.
Another start-up shuttles the hundreds of Chinese women who package clothes at a Marshalls factory at Red Lion. Still others have seeded cell phones, construction companies and buffets throughout the region. Five Fujianese business associations have been created in Philadelphia in the last five years.

Kong, of Cottman First Realty, said New York investors want to develop Asian strip malls in the Northeast mimicking the ones that line Washington Avenue. Most of the enterprise, however, is more modest.

Chinese wedding planner Meirong Song, who just moved to Northeast Philadelphia, stood in front of her storefront under the Manhattan Bridge recently. Indicating the businesses of Little Fujian bustling around her, she shouted: “Too many people. Too much headache. Too much competition.”

She is thinking of moving her business to Philadelphia, too.

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.

Iraq veteran runs for Congress
By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

Like John Kerry, Democrat Patrick Murphy, an Iraq veteran running for Congress in Bucks County, Pa., is straight out of central casting: earnest, clean-cut, a lawyer, an officer in war.

But while Kerry was the poster boy for veterans who came home to denounce the war they fought, Murphy is reluctant to criticize: “I’m not anti-war. I’m not pro-war,” he says. “I’m pro-troops.”

Eight Iraq war veterans have run or announced runs for political office across the country, according to the two major parties. Although all but one are Democrats, none has spoken out against the war or stated support for a troop withdrawal.

They have set themselves apart from many Vietnam veterans with their measured tone about the conflict that forged them _ and their early interest in electoral politics. The Vietnam generation, political analysts say, was often more interested in protest than political bids, and those who ran did so angrily.

“More veterans are thinking of running for office, for starters, and they’re taking a different attitude toward the job on top of that,” says Donald Kettl, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. “They’re more engaged. They’re more interested in trying to transform policy.”

So far, no Iraq veteran has been elected to Congress, despite two high-profile runs last election cycle, in Virginia and North Jersey. Though the Iraq veterans lost to incumbents, they were welcomed by the public in a way that soldiers returning from Vietnam were not.

Kerry theatrically cast away his war medals, but Murphy, 31, and his peers have been able to highlight their military experience. One, Democrat David Ashe of Virginia, encouraged voters to “send a Marine to Congress.”

Murphy, who won a Bronze Star as an 82d Airborne Division captain in Iraq, works it as well. He led veterans’ outreach for the Kerry campaign in Philadelphia and, during his own fledgling campaign, has often appeared at public events with soldiers and veterans. A picture of him with a 6-year-old Iraqi orphan wearing his helmet and a grin appears on his Web site.

Although he hasn’t served in the military, U.S. Rep. Michael G. Fitzpatrick _ the incumbent whom Murphy would challenge in 2006 if he wins the Democratic primary _ traveled to Iraq with a congressional delegation over Memorial Day weekend.

His chief of staff, Michael Conallen, said that Fitzpatrick works hard to address the concerns of veterans, a key constituency numbering 60,000 in the district. He said Murphy’s military service, while commendable, does not give him an edge.

Murphy said that crowds had received him by standing, clapping and pledging support.

“There’s been a conscious effort to separate the war from the people who are fighting it” this time, Kettl said.

Just as there has been a shift in attitudes to soldiers since Vietnam, there has been a shift in the tone of veterans who would be politicians.

“A lot of Vietnam veterans came back sad and bitter, highly disillusioned and not wanting to engage,” Kettl said. “Many had a hard time with people … calling them baby killers. It took some time, half a generation, for them as a group to make their stamp on the process.”

The rage of that earlier generation has been sandpapered.

Murphy, for one, criticizes the Bush administration for the way it has conducted the war. There aren’t enough troops on the ground, and many of their vehicles lack armor and technology to defuse roadside bombs, he says.

But he will not denounce the actions of U.S. troops _ or the war itself. Anti-war groups have approached him to speak at their events. He declined.

Little children have asked him, since his return, whether he killed anyone. He deflects the question: “I tell them being in the military isn’t about killing people. It’s about bringing peace to people who don’t have it and bringing them a better life.”

Murphy says he believes his troops helped more than they hurt in Iraq.

During seven months in Baghdad, he saw many damaged lives. He spent most of his time as an Army lawyer, weighing whether those lives had been damaged by the United States in a manner meriting payment.

One Iraqi after another came before him to be compensated for destroyed property or dead relatives. One man bared the chest of his 10-year-old daughter, burned during a U.S. bombing campaign, to make his case.

Murphy heard more than 1,600 cases under the Foreign Claims Act, a World War II-era law that allows the United States to pay if its forces are negligent, except in combat scenarios.

“We make amends,” he said.

In one out of five cases, he did. Murphy paid out $200,000 total.

And he helped arrest and prosecute a revered Shiite cleric, a lieutenant of rebel leader Muqtada al-Sadr, for hoarding weapons in a mosque. The local council had warned that there could be an uprising if U.S. and Iraqi forces arrested him.

Despite the objection, they did arrest him in October 2003. Eight people were injured during the ensuing clash. But zero shots were fired into the crowd, Murphy said.

“That was a testament to the discipline of our troops over there,” he said.

Murphy’s stint preceded some of the moments that, for some, have come to define the war negatively. He left Iraq before the mutilated corpses of four Blackwater guards were hung from a bridge near Fallujah; before businessman Nick Berg was beheaded; and before the pictures of naked, abused prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison were publicized.

Stu Rothenberg, a nonpartisan analyst based in Washington, said veterans who ran last year were constrained.

“You had to be very delicate in the last cycle,” he said. “You didn’t want to be seen as disloyal and not supportive of the troops. … People who served in Iraq or Afghanistan don’t want to go out on a limb too far until they see how it ends.”

A poll of soldiers and their families conducted before the last election, by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, found that 55 percent of those who served in Iraq or Afghanistan thought the war had been worth it.

Murphy is still one of them _ despite the procession of ruined lives, and despite the moments when U.S. troops did fire into crowds of Iraqis.

“It’s never the intent. It’s part of what happens. … It’s war,” he said. “Those are things you deal with for the rest of your life and are not easy to talk about at a dinner party or on the campaign trail …

“I feel I’ve done everything I could to change the world for the better in my time in Iraq.”

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.

A tradition of assimilation makes immigrants and their children less likely recruits for terrorism, experts say.
By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

Adam Bdeir jigged his shoulders like rapper Jay-Z. Then the 7-year-old spat out the Arabic alphabet, to the beat of a Middle Eastern drum: Alif, Baa, Taa.

The so-called Alif Baa rap, concocted at a summer camp among suburban estates, is a twist on an old story: Immigrants and their children become part of American society by fusion. But it also captures – in the weeks after suicide bombings in London carried out by Britons by birth – why experts say second-generation Muslims here are less likely recruits for terrorist organizations.

Though the camp in Whitemarsh, al-Bustan, is not exclusively Muslim or even Arab American, it is devoted to promoting Arab culture. It is part of a multicultural mechanism that allows Muslims here to strike a compromise between two worlds, even in the midst of a post-9/11 backlash that has made that compromise harder. And its campers mirror the Muslim population in the United States: They come from middle-class, suburban families who do not live sealed off in ethnic enclaves.

The descendants of Muslim immigrants in Europe – largely guest workers from Northern Africa who rebuilt cities after World War II – continue to live in ghettos isolated by poverty, language, religion or national origin. One nationality tends to overwhelm: Pakistanis in England, Moroccans in the Netherlands, Algerians in France.

“It’s much easier to recruit in enclaves,” said Robert S. Leiken, an expert on immigration and national security at the Nixon Center in Washington. “It’s much easier to make contacts within a community like that.”

It’s also much easier for residents of an enclave to feel they or their communities don’t have a stake – or have been denied a stake – in their adopted country. That kind of alienation exists to a lesser degree among second-generation Muslims in the U.S., Leiken and other analysts say.

American Muslims are better educated and wealthier than Americans as a whole, and a third are professionals, according to a 2002 Cornell University survey.

They come from a wide variety of countries. Only seven percent of mosques draw worshippers from only one ethnic group, according to a 2001 Hartford Seminary study. And mosques are growing faster in suburbs than in cities.

The parents of many U.S.-born Muslims came here in a wave of students and high-skilled workers after 1965. They have lived the American Dream, and it has scattered them across the country, mostly in towns and suburbs.

Adam, the 7-year-old mock rapper, is the son of a Palestinian, a medical researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who settled his family in Jenkintown when he immigrated nine years ago.

“It had a good school system,” explained Mukhtar Bdeir, 13, Adam’s brother and a camp counselor at al-Bustan. “And, it was a nice, small town.”

It’s also a town with few other Muslims or Arab Americans – the kind of suburban patch that can both fast-track assimilation and make the children of immigrants feel more like misfits.

But a web of civic organizations keeps the Bdeir boys from falling as they try to straddle two cultures. There is al-Bustan, and there is the Foundation for Islamic Education, the Villanova Islamic center where Mukhtar learned Arabic and the Koran.

Such civic organizations allow “the kids to be American and to be Muslim at the same time,” said University of Illinois sociologist Louise Cainkar, another expert on American Muslims. “That is a path other groups have taken in this country. You can be both.”

Just as U.S. Muslims differ from their European cousins, the United States is a different place for foreigners from most European countries. Over more than 150 years as an immigrant magnet, it has developed a model for accepting and integrating immigrants that sets it apart.

While pressures on immigrants to fit in have always existed in the United States, pluralism is a reigning social value.

The children of fairly secular immigrants have, in fact, become more Muslim than their parents, Cainkar said. The revival has taken the form of an explosion in Muslim student associations on campuses, in more U.S.-born women donning the veil, and in more mosque-going.

In France, Muslim girls can’t wear a hijab, or traditional head scarf, at public schools. In the Netherlands, Moroccans are barred from nightclubs. In Germany, Christian and Jewish organizations are allowed to offer instruction in public schools, but Muslim organizations can’t.

“In Europe, the children [of Muslim immigrants] have not been accepted, by and large,” said Leiken, who argues that rejection makes them ripe for jihadists. “There’s a lot of discrimination.”

Policies and attitudes following 9/11, however, have changed the way many Muslims feel about their place in America. As Murad Mustafa, a graduate of Northeast High School born in the United States, put it: “America’s not for us.”

The beheading of businessman Nick Berg by insurgents in Iraq prompted Mustafa’s classmates to lob slurs at Arab Americans. When Mustafa’s twin brother fought back with his own insults, it set off a chain of events that ended with federal agents’ scouring the family’s ceiling for weapons and his brother’s being transferred to a disciplinary school.

Mustafa lives in a diverse neighborhood in the Northeast, next to an elderly white woman he affectionately calls mashghuula(in Arabic, “the guardian” of the block). He goes to al-Aqsa, the mainstream Philadelphia mosque that draws worshippers from 40 countries and from both the suburbs and the city. And he salutes the mostly African American customers at his family’s convenience store with the inflections of Philadelphia: “Yo, man, what’s up?”

Still, however assimilated, he feels targeted. Some say that even that sense of siege has shoved Muslims into the mainstream, as they organize against hate crimes and profiling.

“You see Muslims as participants in coalitions,” Cainkar said. “You see Muslims on the public stage.”

And you also see young Muslims continue to sort through the tensions between their two identities.

Nadia Elokdah, an al-Bustan counselor, regrets that her father – an Egyptian immigrant – never taught her Arabic, in order to ease her acceptance in the Bucks County suburbs. But she has already made concessions of her own. She does not wear the hijab.

“If I lived somewhere else, I would do it,” the 18-year-old said. “We’re told by the Koran not to stand out. We’re told to fit into society.”

Related: Summer Fun, Islamic Lessons

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