Houston’s million
Super Bowl celebrations inspire a defense of everything that makes our city great.
Leave “Urban Cowboy” or “Any Given Sunday” on the shelf. If you’re looking for a Super Bowl-themed movie specific to Houston, try one of those teen comedies where the whole school is shocked to learn that, surprise, surprise, the bluecollar girl with paint on her overalls has transformed into a prom queen. National publications like Vogue, Bloomberg and the Chicago Tribune just can’t get over Houston’s arts, culinary scene and energy — both cultural and economic.
Not that we need their words, but who doesn’t like an ego boost or good PR?
The Houston-style twist on the movie plot, if we wrote the script, would have that prom queen turn out to be the child of refugees.
After all, one quarter of the 4 million souls who call Houston home were born in another country. The lives and struggles of our foreign-born neighbors were documented in a year-long series, The Million, which can be read at HoustonChronicle.com/TheMillion.
Count them down as you drive around the city: One, two, three, refugee. One, two, three, permanent resident. One, two, three, undocumented.
Roll the die, and there’s one-in-four odds that you’ll land on Houstonians who call themselves Americans not by birth, but by choice. That’s the tetral pattern of our city, the design of our civic fabric.
No sole cause underpins our international makeup — except perhaps for the Texas state motto of “Friendship.” Some of the million arrived fleeing wars in Vietnam or Iraq. Others came here in search of liberty and opportunity. Plenty booked Houston-bound flights for less romantic reasons: The oil and gas industry relies on a highly skilled international workforce. Our hospitals and universities also draw from the global elite. No wonder that Houston now ranks as one of our nation’s knowledge capitals and sits in the Top 5 for business creation after the 2007-2009 financial crisis. By the way, one-third of Houston’s business owners are foreign-born.
That diversified cityscape — alongside a strong national economy and petrochemical construction — helped our city weather the recent oil bust. Memories of the 1980s were thankfully left in the history books, and Super Bowl crowds found a bustling downtown rather than the hollowed out see-through city created by the last major energy downturn. Will we be so lucky under the crosshairs of new federal policy on immigration and trade? There is powerful symbolism in the fact that the first lawyers at Bush Intercontinental Airport weren’t with the ACLU or another nonprofit — they were corporate attorneys, Texas Monthly writer Michael Hardy told the editorial board. Energy companies put forward a stiff upper lip in the wake of the U.S. travel ban on citizens of seven predominantly Muslim nations, but they’re freaking out behind the scenes as they try to understand how the executive order affects their global workforce. Even legal travelers who aren’t citizens of those seven countries have been caught up in Homeland Security bureaucracy. Our hospitals and institutions of higher learning rely on students and faculty from around the globe — the University of Houston alone has more than 200 students from the seven restricted nations. What happens when our schools have trouble recruiting the best and brightest? Houston’s culinary scene also relies on the creative infusion of chefs who came here from abroad. Diners who booked a reservation at Hugo Ortega’s new restaurant downtown, Xochi, might be surprised to learn that Ortega originally came to Houston as an illegal immigrant. The Greater Houston Partnership and other Houston boosters are hoping that visitors will be impressed enough by Super Bowl weekend to think about moving their businesses or holding conventions here, and maybe booking a vacation or two. We hope visitors will be inspired in a different way. Houston’s diverse demographics model what the rest of the nation will look like in 50 years. The excitement, energy and, yes, food, of our city’s Super Bowl weekend presents an optimistic image of these decades to come. Instead of crafting policy that yearns for the past, our lawmakers should be working to make this future great. It starts with standing up for the city of Houston and everyone who lives here, even if they were born somewhere else.