The History of Florida (103 page)

attracted by the growth prospects of one of the largest Sunbelt states and

perhaps by warmer climate.

Patterns of Asian immigration to Florida have shifted over time. In 1970,

the largest Asian nationality groups were Filipino, Japanese, and Chinese,

their numbers ranging between about 3,000 and 5,000. By 2010, the domi-

nant groups were Filipino, Asian Indians, Vietnamese, and Chinese, ranging

in size between about 40,000 and 62,000. Six other Asian groups had a visi-

ble presence in Florida, with populations ranging between 7,000 and 19,700:

Koreans, Pakistanis, Japanese, Thai, Iranians, and Bangladeshis. Asian im-

migrants have now settled primarily in the state’s eight largest metropolitan

counties, with the highest number in Broward and Orange Counties, each

with more than 56,000 Asians. Since the 1950s, Filipinos have been the larg-

est group in Jacksonvil e and Pensacola, largely due to their tradition of

employment with the U.S. Navy. Asian Indians are by far the largest group

proof

in the Miami, Tampa, and Orlando metro areas, fol owed by Vietnamese

and Chinese. Asian immigrants are very entrepreneurial, establishing busi-

nesses wherever they settle; many are professionals, engineers, computer

scientists, physicians, nurses, and professors. Others found specific eco-

nomic niches. For instance, as early as the 1990s, Indian entrepreneurial

families owned and operated more than 400 of Florida’s smal hotels and

motels. Asian immigrants retained their identity, languages, cultures, and

foodways to a remarkable degree, while also adapting to modern American

life. They established their own grocery stores, shopping centers, weekly

newspapers, language schools, churches, and ethnic festivals and parades.

Florida has Latinized over the past half century, but a sizeable Asian migra-

tion since the 1980s brought new forms of diversity to the Sunshine State.

Modern Florida’s ethnic diversity has other roots, as wel . By the 1990s,

more than 120,000 Jamaicans resided in the three-county Miami metro area,

clustering in places called “Jamaica Hil ,” “Beat Street,” and “Little Jamaica”

in Kendal , North Miami, Miramar, Plantation, Lauderdale Lakes, Lauder-

hil , Coral Sprints, West Palm Beach, and Boynton Beach. South Florida has

the largest concentration of Jamaicans anywhere outside of Jamaica itself.

Immigration and Ethnicity in Florida History · 493

Canadian tourists—more than 700,000 by 2001—stil descend on Florida

every winter, Quebecois primarily to the Atlantic coastal areas and English-

speaking Canadians primarily to the state’s west coast from Tampa Bay to

Naples; tens of thousands of other snowbirds from north of the border have

purchased condominiums and mobile homes and become part-time or per-

manent Florida residents. The “Little Finland” of Lake Worth and Lantana

has retained its cultural identity as one of the largest Finnish settlements

beyond Scandinavia, partial y through a recent direct migration of younger

Finns to Florida. By 2010, however, Lake Worth’s Finns shared residential

space with growing numbers of Haitians, Mayans from Guatemala, and

other Latinos. After a decade of civil war and ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia

during the 1990s, several thousand Bosnian Muslims found new homes in

Florida, as many as 6,000 in Jacksonvil e, others in Miami, Orlando, and

Tampa. U.S. census data in 2006 revealed almost 60,000 African immi-

grants residing in Florida, primarily in metro areas. East European Jews

migrated in huge numbers from northern cities to Miami-Dade County in

the postwar decades. By 2010, Florida had a Jewish population of 655,000,

more than half of them concentrated in the three-county Miami metro area,

including about 10,000 Latino Jews and smaller numbers of Soviet Jewish

émigrés. Florida’s big urban areas, it should be clear, are now more ethni-

proof

cal y and cultural y diverse than ever as a result of persistent but constantly

shifting patterns of immigration and internal migration.

Thus, Florida has become a multicultural state with few paral els else-

where. Early in its history, Florida had difficulty attracting the European im-

migrants who poured into the northeastern and midwestern cities. With its

historic connections to the islands and nations to the south, however, Flor-

ida had already become an immigrant destination for Cubans and Baha-

mians in the late nineteenth century. But since the 1960s, with revolutions,

coups, political violence, and social and economic upheavals in Cuba, Haiti,

Nicaragua, Jamaica, Venezuela, Mexico, and elsewhere, Florida exerted its

magnetic attraction for exiles, refugees, and immigrants from the Carib-

bean and Latin America. Wealthy businessmen and professionals from Ven-

ezuela, Argentina, and Brazil found themselves sharing immigrant status in

Florida with peasant farmers and urban workers from Haiti, Mexico, and

the Dominican Republic. Immigration reform in the 1960s also had an im-

pact on Florida over time, especial y noticeable by the 1990s in the rising

numbers of Hispanic, Asian, African, and Middle Eastern immigrants. In

addition, undocumented immigrants added considerably to Florida’s ethnic

494 · Raymond A. Mohl and George E. Pozzetta

and cultural mélange after the mid-1980s. In 2010, depending on the source,

between 720,000 and 825,000 unauthorized immigrants were living, and

many working, in Florida.

The arrival of overwhelming numbers of newcomers—legal and not le-

gal—over a half century has been accompanied by increasingly vigorous

debate and controversy. State and business officials sought new immigrants

in the late nineteenth century to stimulate the Florida economy, but this

positive stance toward immigration had been reversed by the 1990s and

into the twenty-first century. Florida’s political leaders and businessmen

no longer yearned for new immigration. Instead, they demanded stronger

federal enforcement of U.S. immigration laws. They wanted more federal

financial assistance to cope with demands that exiles and refugees imposed

on the state’s schools and social services. Many native Floridians expressed

concern about rising ethnic and racial tensions touched off by the heavy

immigration of recent years. In the 1990s, mirroring national trends, anti-

immigration groups such as Floridians for Immigration Control and the

Save Our State Committee pushed legislation curbing social services and

other benefits to unauthorized immigrants.

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, the immigration wars

heated up again. New anti-immigrant groups sprouted local y—Citizens of

proof

Dade United in Miami, Floridians for Immigration Enforcement in Jupiter,

Citizens Against Illegal Immigration in Fort Myers, Minuteman Civil De-

fense Corps in Haines City—all demanding tough laws authorizing police

checks of immigration status during traffic stops and denying work, school-

ing, and health services to those without official documentation. Governor

Rick Scott and the state legislature eventual y backed away from such legisla-

tion because of the potential y negative impact on the state’s big agricultural

employers, international investors, and the Latin American tourist trade

and business interests. Nevertheless, anti-immigrant sentiment persisted

and remained political y volatile in the election year of 2012. Whatever the

outcome of current immigration debates, Florida has been, and likely will

remain, a center of dramatic demographic change for decades to come. Im-

migration has reshaped the state of Florida economical y, cultural y, politi-

cal y, even linguistical y. Immigration also brought to Florida an unmistak-

able cultural vitality, a new burst of energetic ethnic entrepreneurialism, a

huge consumer market, and diverse political voices. The rise and embedded

nature of multiculturalism in Florida has placed every big metro area and

every small rural county on a new trajectory of twenty-first-century change.

Immigration and Ethnicity in Florida History · 495

Notes

1.
Florida
Agriculturist
, 19 January 1881.

2.
Tal ahassee
Semi-Weekly
Floridian
, 1 December 1865.

3.
Tal ahassee Weekly
Floridian
, 14 January 1873.

4.
Nassau
Tribune
, 12 October 1977.

5. Ira De A. Reid,
The
Negro
Immigrant:
His
Background,
Characteristics,
and
Social
Adjustment
,
1899–1937
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 184.

6.
Miami
Herald
, 16 August 1933.

7. Harry F. Guggenheim,
The
United
States
and
Cuba
:
A
Study
in
International
Relations
(New York: Macmil an, 1934), 176.

8. Felix Roberts Masud-Piloto,
With
Open
Arms:
Cuban
Migration
to
the
United
States
(Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988), 2, 42.

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