Rubén Rosario: Down on Main Street, They're Still Building America
Rubén Rosario: Down on Main Street, They're Still Building America
Between 2000 and 2013, immigrants accounted for 48 percent of overall growth of business ownership nationally, according to a new AS/COA and Fiscal Policy Institute report.
Plaza Del Sol is hardly the Mall of America. It's a little indoor mall in a two-story, formerly foreclosed building on a corner of Payne Avenue on St. Paul's East Side. It opened less than eight months ago.
But it meets most of my basic needs. I can eat and buy clothes off a rack in the main lobby. I can get a cup of joe and my taxes done. Soon, reportedly on Feb. 2, I can get a microbrewski as well as get my hair cut or learn how to do it in two languages. I think I can even organize or take part in a nonviolent protest there for a socially just cause without getting busted....
That may be surprising to some, but not to researchers at the New York City-based Fiscal Policy Institute, which partnered with the At Americas Society/Council of the Americas group to conduct a supposedly unprecedented study on "Main Street" immigrant-owned businesses in the nation and their impact.
Essentially, it makes the case that if immigrants helped build this nation, they are still doing it, and one of the profound ways is at the neighborhood, small-business level.
According to the report, immigrants make up 28 percent of Main Street business owners nationally, "a level well beyond their share of the labor force or overall business ownership...."
