crossing the high-tech divide >BY Roberto Suro

American Demographics, July, 1999

The outsourcing trend has created huge opportunities for immigrant entrepreneurs. By focusing on a single function and performing it well, skilled immigrants can create small businesses without the need for large amounts of capital. The suburban print shops, biological testing labs, and computer maintenance firms they launch become ready sources of employment for immigrants of the same nationality.

But high-tech economic development also generates a powerful demand for immigrant labor at the low end of the education and income scales. "No matter how virtual the output of these firms may be, they need a physical space, and electricians and construction workers to build out that space, and janitors to clean it up every night," Sassen says.

Moreover, a preponderance of highly rewarded, two-income families also stimulates demand for service help. In Fairfax County, which has a very high number of workers and a very low number of dependents per household, labor force participation rates for both men (85 percent) and women (73 percent) are ten points or more above the national averages. The resulting lifestyle has major implications for the labor force. "Like the firms that employ them, many couples have adopted intense outsourcing," Sassen says. A good deal of cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing previously handled in-house is now outsourced, primarily to low-wage immigrants. "People who work a lot of hours for a lot of money expect a lot of personal services, and they earn the money to pay for them,'' Sassen adds. "That in turn creates demand for people who will work a lot of hours for not much money."

transience The immigrants' arrival is obliging suburbs to contend with social issues that seemed exclusively urban concerns not long ago. First, there is the simple question of ethnic and economic homogeneity. The desire to live among others of the same race and class has always been and remains an important motivation to move to the suburbs. But today, working-class suburbs and older, declining 'burbs have increasingly diverse populations, and some parts of the Washington area are witnessing second-stage flight: Communities populated by mostly white, former city dwellers who made the break in the 1960s and 1970s are being abandoned in favor of brand new exurbs on the distant fringes of the metropolitan area.

Meanwhile, many other suburbanites are not only accepting but delighting in the experience of living in newly cosmopolitan communities where pho and pupusas have become standard fare in strip-mall restaurants that once offered nothing more exotic than eggplant parmigiana.

Another fundamental change may be more difficult to absorb in the long run: A sense of upward mobility is central to the suburban ethos. The high-tech economy has produced abundant opportunities for the accumulation of wealth; even the immigrant who comes to take a low-wage job as janitor often feels far richer than he did in his homeland. But the split between the highly skilled and the poorly paid has acquired an unusually hard permanence in the suburban workforce, in part because there is not much of a middle to bridge the extremes. "Manufacturing produces a better balance between high- and low-end workers, but in the Washington area and in other places where you have suburban high-tech development, you don't get that," says Stephen Fuller, an economist at George Mason University. In fact, manufacturing accounts for only 3 percent of the jobs in the Washington regional economy and is not expected to grow. Even in the service sector, which accounts for half of the jobs in the suburban economy and is expanding, the middle range of work has shrunk. Automation has substantially eliminated the clerical and secretarial support jobs that once provided those middle jobs in finance, business services, and other non-manufacturing sectors.