crossing the high-tech divide >BY Roberto Suro

American Demographics, July, 1999

With 23 shopping centers crammed along six miles of road, Rockville Pike embodies the economic growth that has transformed the suburbs north and west of Washington, D.C. Driven by biotechnology, satellite communications, telecommunications, and Internet services, this boom in the 'burbs has produced a population of unusually well-educated, highly compensated, two-income households. But there is another side to this development. The high-tech economy has proved a powerful magnet for immigration, and the combination of economic and demographic change is transforming that quintessentially American landscape that lies beyond the city limits.

On a side street off Rockville Pike in Montgomery County, Maryland, just around the corner from the upscale White Flint Mall, there is gridlock every Saturday in the parking lot at Lotte's Supermarket, where the specialties are things like squid and giant radishes. The customers range in occupation from electrical engineers to house painters, but they are all Koreans in search of the indispensable ingredients of their native cuisine. The clerks are also Korean, of course, but the stock boys at the back of the store are young Latinos, hauling crates of small silver fish packed in ice. Next door there is a Korean pharmacy, an auto repair shop, and an acupuncture parlor forming a miniature immigrant enclave in the heart of this affluent, predominately white suburb. Once a rural county seat, then a bedroom community, Rockville has become a job-generating boom town. It is just beginning to grapple with the demographic implications of its economic success.

The D.C. economy was once so dominated by the presence of the federal government that it was unlike any other, but that has changed with the development of robust, high-tech sectors in Montgomery County and across the Potomac in Fairfax County, Virginia. Some quarter of a million workers are employed by more than 3,300 high-technology firms in the metropolitan area. This profound economic change has been accompanied by an equally drastic demographic change, marked by the arrival of 400,000 to 500,000 legal immigrants to the area since 1980, and perhaps half again as many illegal immigrants. Both the new jobs and the new residents are concentrated outside, often far outside, the urban center-a pattern being replicated in the suburbs around many major U.S. cities. Montgomery County, for example, was once homogeneously white and native born. Now nearly a fifth of the residents are immigrants-already twice as a high a proportion of immigrants as the nation overall, and the figure has risen steadily with every year of the boom.

The nation's capital is less the exception than the rule. The region now exemplifies one of the formulas for economic expansion that has marked the 1990s: rapid population growth scattered across multiple suburban jurisdictions far from the urban center, and economic development spurred by new technologies and a highly mobile workforce. Outside many of the nation's most prosperous cities-Charlotte, Boston, and San Francisco, for example-clusters of high-tech businesses have sprouted along the interstates, and the cul-de-sacs beyond are heavily populated by new arrivals, both domestic migrants and immigrants from abroad. Curiously, the foreign born not only mirror the affluence and high-level of education typical of the native population, but also include large numbers of relatively low-skilled, low-wage workers new to the suburban scene. To an extent that scholars did not anticipate and that policy makers are just beginning to absorb, knowledge-based economic growth in the suburbs has created a tremendous demand for people who will work with their hands for little pay, a demand almost exclusively filled by immigrants.

As a result of this low-end influx, school districts find themselves stretched to satisfy the needs of both privileged whiz kids with MBA parents and poor students who speak only Spanish. Transportation planners are struggling to link the older, close-in suburbs where many low-income immigrants now live, and the far-flung, high-price real estate developments where they work. Suburban retailers, once the happy provisioners of the middle class, are discovering that there is plenty of demand at the luxury and the discount ends of the price spectrum, but less and less in between. And longtime suburbanites must adjust to a greater degree of ethnic diversity than ever before.

transformation In the final decades of the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution fueled the growth of America's big cities, drawing immigrants across the Atlantic to fill the demand for manual labor. As a result, a once-rural nation took on a new urban identity, reflecting the cosmopolitan character of its population. Today, another transformation of potentially equal magnitude is taking place. The high-tech revolution is fueling the growth of America's suburbs, drawing immigrants from Latin America and Asia to fill the demand for highly qualified technicians as well as low-skilled servants. Where exactly this transformation is taking the United States is still difficult to foretell, as the process is just getting under way. Whereas America's cities proved to be extraordinary venues for upward mobility and assimilation, it is not clear that high-tech suburbs will serve the same function. In the industrial economy, workers with strong backs but little education could aspire to middle class prosperity. But in the new information economy, lack of education can be an insuperable barrier to advancement.