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98 Nat'l Civic Rev. 2 (2009)

handle is hein.journals/natmnr98 and id is 1 raw text is: Note from the Editor A funny thing happened as I was sitting down to write the Note from the Editor to this special issue of the National Civic Reviewon diversity, social capital, and immigrant integration. A colleague e-mailed me a January 26, 2009, article in News- week about Lewiston, Maine, a winner of the All-America City Award in 2004. The article is entitled, The Refugees That Saved Lewiston. The author, Jesse Ellison, begins by describing how Lewiston, once a bustling mill town, had been shrinking since the 1970s. Jobs had vanished, the population was aging, and the downtown area was falling into disrepair. That was before a family of Somali refugees discovered Lewiston in 2001 and began spreading the word to immigrant friends and relatives that housing was cheap and it looked like a good place to build new lives and raise children in peace. Since then the place has been transformed. Per capita income has soared, and crime rates have dropped. There's a great quote from Chip Morrison, president of the local chamber of commerce. No one could have dreamed this, he says. Not even me, and I'm an optimist. From a cursory reading of this article, it might seem as if every fading mill town should go out and recruit some East African refugees, but of course, it's not that easy. Lewiston won the All-America City Award in part because of its innovative part- nership with the City of Portland, Catholic Charities, and the State of Maine to deal with what was initially considered a big problem: an entirely unexpected influx of Somalis. Immigrant integration efforts are springing up all over the coun- try, as towns, cities, states, and regions that were mostly bypassed by earlier waves of immigration are finding themselves part of our new gateways. Recently, the National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy instituted an E Pluribus Unum Award for some of these exceptional initiatives. For at least three years, the program will give out four awards annually. The award program, says Margie McHugh, co-director of the center, is the result of years of conversation among leaders in the field on the new need to recognize the work that is hap- pening out in states and localities so the people who are doing great work would be able to find one another and get both inspiration and program models of initiatives around the country. We recognize, she adds, that it's not easy to take an ini- tiative that's working in one place and simply drop it into another, but we think there is real value in having people learn about work that is under way. I think a lot of people who are working on these issues at the local level often feel isolated and are doing this work against great odds. Another benefit to increasing awareness of these initiatives, notes McHugh, is to correct the public perception that inte- gration isn't happening with the current generation of im- migrants.In fact, she says, all of the data indicate that this generation of immigrants, and particularly their children, appear to be integrating, for example, learning English, at much higher and faster rates than past generations. We also wanted to raise the visibility of this work and its outcomes to better inform the public. We hope the articles in this issue of the Review will similarly add to the store of public knowledge and inspiration about what is going on in the field of immigrant integration, stimu- late conversation and lead to more articles on this subject in future issues. I would like to thank the Carnegie Corporation of New York and The Colorado Trust for their support in planning and pro- ducing this special issue of the National Civic Review. I would also like to thank Robert Putnam for his introduction to the issue and Lori Villarosa of the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity, john powell of the Kirwan Institute, Joe Wismann-Horther of the Spring Institute for Intercultural Learning, Lisa Thakkar of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, and Daranee Petsod of Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees for their insights and advice. Michael McGrath Editor © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) 2 National Civic Review DOI: 10.1002/ncr.235 Spring 2009 inerScience

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