At the turn of the millennium, demographers agreed: Philadelphia would lose its claim to being one of the five most populous cities in the country. It was viewed as an inevitability. The only question was: How soon?

And then we waited. And waited. Contrary to several declarations — made by everyone from a Penn urban studies professor to The Inquirer — the census numbers kept getting revised in the city’s favor. For the first time in a half-century, Philadelphia began to gain more residents than it lost.

Millennials and immigrants were soon given credit for the phenomenon. Yet the “Millennial Revolution” — despite receiving far more headlines than the role of immigration in the early-2000s population rebound — soon faded. Philadelphia’s under-35 population has actually declined since 2012 while the uptick in the foreign-born population has continued to trend up.

That was not an accident. Rather, Philly’s resurgence as an immigrant hub was due to deliberate choices and investments, says Anuj Gupta, CEO of the Welcoming Center, a nonprofit focused on improving the economic opportunities of foreign-born residents. “It was not a coincidence.”

“If you play the long game of fueling small businesses among immigrants, you will get some unicorns. Even if you subscribe to the position that immigrants will cost a community more … it might be for a year or two, and then the dividends start paying off right after that.” — Anuj Gupta, The Welcoming Center

The establishment of the Welcoming Center in 2003 (originally known as the Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvanians) was a key part of those efforts. What began as a tiny nonprofit eventually evolved into a bulwark against “brain waste” — the phenomenon of highly-skilled immigrants who end up in underpaid or lower-skilled jobs due to obstacles like language, credentialing issues and discrimination.

Now, in the wake of the pandemic, Philadelphia is once again seeing its population decline (following a decade-plus of unabated growth), and the state isn’t doing much better: Pennsylvania is projected to start shrinking in the near future.

Taken together, the trend lines raise serious questions about the future of the region. Yet Gupta, who became the Welcome Center’s CEO in 2023, believes there is a way forward, one that has its roots in the not so distant past — that the city and state could take a page from Philadelphia’s experience two decades ago.

“If leaders believe that a growing population is something they want to aspire to — if they want to preserve a tax base, if they want new business startups — then they need to understand this is all going to happen through immigration,” Gupta says.

How Philly became a hub for immigrants

Throughout the 1990s, New York and Boston witnessed a major influx of foreign-born residents while undergoing economic transformations. Gupta, a grad student at Penn at the time, wondered why Philly wasn’t experiencing the same boost. “We were not seeing the population renaissance that all these other cities were experiencing — all through immigration,” says Gupta. “Nobody cared.”

The city’s population had slipped to levels unseen since World War I. Though there was a mayoral race in 1999 to replace the outgoing Ed Rendell, as Gupta recalls, “none of the candidates spoke about immigration — not once.”

During an internship at the Economy League, one of the region’s leading economic think tanks, Gupta asked his bosses why Philly — once a bastion of foreign-born settlement — had fallen so far behind other East Coast cities in attracting foreign-born residents. They didn’t have a clear answer. So he took it upon himself to find out.

After five months of research, Gupta published a paper theorizing why: For one thing, the airport had yet to expand direct flights from South America, Asia and Africa — places where immigrants were increasingly coming from. But the city also had limited services, such as access to English classes for professionals.

Further, there wasn’t a coalition of supporters for the cause inside City Hall. Throughout the 90s, New York City had expanded the budget of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs and promoted a path to citizenship for undocumented citizens; the five boroughs took in an additional 700,000 people. But until 2013, Philly didn’t even have an office. “The perception was that it was an entirely white and Black city,” Gupta says.

His research found its way into the hands of Councilmember Jim Kenney, who, in 2000, initiated a hearing to explore how Philly could better compete with other municipalities for immigrants. “The Welcoming Center was sparked by the coverage of the research that Kenney’s hearings created,” says Gupta. (Kenney later served on the nonprofit’s board.)

One person the coverage reached was Anne O’Callaghan, an Irish immigrant who’d arrived in Philly in the 1970s. O’Callaghan was hardly a victim to brain waste: She went on to teach collegiately and founded a successful software business. But when she volunteered with immigrant families and communities in the area, O’Callaghan struggled to point people in the right services.

“If leaders believe that a growing population is something they want to aspire to — if they want to preserve a tax base, if they want new business startups — then they need to understand this is all going to happen through immigration.” — Anuj Gupta

“I was volunteering with immigrants who wanted jobs, and to learn English. I thought, no problem, there must be all kinds of services out there,” O’Callaghan, who is now in her 80s, told the Inquirer in 2012. “It took me weeks to find anything, and I speak English!”

O’Callaghan set out to create a centralized service provider for immigrants who were not the focus of programs targeting refugees, undocumented people or specific ethnicities. With the idea that the initiative could help offset a graying population in the state, O’Callaghan got initial funding pledges from elected officials, including former Pennsylvania House Speaker John Perzel. After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, however, almost all of those commitments dried up.

Still, with $90,000 in start-up capital provided by the William Penn Foundation and some office space donated by the AFL-CIO, O’Callaghan founded the Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvanians. (The name was shortened in 2021.) Initially, the nonprofit was focused on enrolling immigrants in benefit programs like TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) and improving their English skills, but it quickly expanded. One decade into its existence, the nonprofit had a budget of $1.6 million and had helped immigrants from 150 countries find new skills and jobs.

When O’Callaghan stepped down as president in 2012, the Welcoming Center had done more than buoy the city’s census. Between 2000 and 2006, there was an influx of 113,000 foreign-born people to the Greater Philadelphia region, almost the same number who’d arrived in the entire decade before. Simultaneously, the number of patent filings began to grow in our area. So did the number of small-business owners. The tax base grew, along with the rate of educational attainment.

Of course, these demographic changes also created challenges for the city. The school system absorbed more students from families with limited English proficiency, which made the goal of improving reading test scores more difficult while increasing the demand for language assistance in the classroom. The need for translation services across all city services grew. And occasionally, there were cultural clashes between U.S.-born Philadelphians and newcomers, at a time when politicians like Donald Trump actively stoked those tensions.

Yet the anti-immigrant fervor among right wing politicians has done little to deter arrivals in Philadelphia. The city’s share of foreign-born residents — most of whom spent time in other U.S. locations before settling here — increased from 6 percent in 2000 to 16 percent in 2022. And even as thousands of residents have fled Philadelphia for the suburbs over the past four years, the number of foreign-born population has continued to rise, as noted in a recent Pew report: “pandemic-related [population] decline from 2020 to 2022 would have been steeper without immigrants, whose numbers had risen — but by less than before.”

Playing the long game

Today, the Welcoming Center occupies a Center City office between the Convention Center and Chinatown, a physical reminder of the two tentpoles of its mission, immigration and the economy.

The space serves as the offices for the nonprofit’s two dozen employees, but also its educational programs and events. In April, I observed a class on “English for the Job Search,” where one of the participants was practicing how to highlight their skills in robotic surgical equipment. They had experience working in the medical field but didn’t have the confidence to talk about it in English.

“If I could point to the single biggest barrier for people to integrate and accelerate their advancement, it’s English proficiency,” says Gupta, who often talks about the technical aspects of learning the language being secondary to the challenges brought on by anxiety and self-doubt. “Confidence spills over and everything else.”

Beyond his role in the nonprofit’s origin story, Gupta has a personal connection to the work. His parents both immigrated to the United States from India in the 1960s before settling in South Jersey, where he was raised. “They were in a unique position, which a lot of the folks that we serve are not: They were fluent in English,” he says. (Gupta is married to Center City District President and CEO Prema Katari Gupta.)

Their journeys inspired Gupta to give back to immigrant communities throughout his career. After getting a law degree and a master’s in government administration from Penn, he worked as an attorney at Ballard Spahr, where he represented developers who sought to build affordable housing. In 2010, after a three-year stint as deputy to Mayor Nutter in the Department of Licenses and Inspections, he was named executive director of the nonprofit Mt. Airy USA, a community development corporation. There, he began to seed projects that furthered his knowledge of strategies for bolstering immigrant resettlement. Although Northwest Philadelphia was one of the sections of the city least populated by immigrants, the organization launched the Philadelphia Immigrant Innovation Hub, which provides a business training program for immigrant entrepreneurs who are given access to tools like app developers, co-working spaces, and business planning workshops.

“If you play the long game of fueling small businesses among immigrants, you will get some unicorns,” Gupta says. “Even if you subscribe to the position that immigrants will cost a community more … it might be for a year or two, and then the dividends start paying off right after that.”

Gupta continued with that philosophy in 2015, when he was named the general manager of Reading Terminal Market Corporation, where he stayed for five years. Shortly into his tenure, President Trump took office and the Philadelphia office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement began to aggressively step up its activity, which led to heightened anxiety among both undocumented and legal immigrants. That’s when Gupta created Breaking Bread, Breaking Barriers, a culinary exchange project that fostered dialogue between immigrant communities and native-born Philadelphians.

According to Gupta, there was one stop of his career that stands out in doing little to change the perception of immigrants in the city: Working in Congress. In 2020, he was hired as chief of staff to Congressman Dwight Evans. However, Evans did not sit on the Judiciary Committee, where most immigration policy gets handled in the House. So instead, Gupta got a front row seat to the national gridlock that exists surrounding immigration policy.

“[Immigration] is such a politically toxic issue,” Gupta says. Yet the importance of immigrants to the future of the country remains evident to a wide spectrum of economic experts. Promoting that message is inherently political, which is something he’s embraced at the Welcoming Center. “There is still receptivity to our model because it’s entirely based on the economy.”

Taking the message to rural PA

In his recent book, The Truth About Immigration: Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers, Wharton economist Zeke Hernandez synthesizes more than 20 years of research on the economic impact of immigration. Hernandez shows that immigrants pay more taxes, create more jobs, and make more investments in other entrepreneurs than the average native-born American.

Hernandez spoke during a book signing hosted by the Welcoming Center in June. Despite the country’s political polarization, Hernandez suggested that members of both parties understand the importance of immigration, even if that’s often only apparent behind closed doors. The national rhetoric around the southern border and immigration has obscured a practical urgency that exists in many parts of the country to grow their populations or risk economic ruin.

The situation in PA is especially troubling. The Center for Rural Pennsylvania, which makes policy recommendations to the General Assembly, recently released population estimates for 2050 that stated 41 out of 67 counties “are projected to face significant population decline,” including some that are tracking to lose upwards of 15 percent of their residents over the next 20 years. “This trend, contrasted with a declining statewide birth rate, means that rural Pennsylvanians over the age of 65 will soon outnumber those under 20,” the report said.

Population loss can be countered with concerted efforts, even if some variables are out of policymakers’ control. While it’s true that there’s a lot of overlap between the cities and states with the most robust job markets and the ones with the fastest-growing populations, there’s a lot more to the story of immigrant geography.

“Philadelphia is relatively affordable when it comes to housing compared to other East Coast cities,” says Thomas Ginsberg, a senior researcher at Pew and part of a team that recently released new research on the evolving immigrant population of Philly. “That’s a clear way that Philly has an advantage over some of these pricier places where we [now] see immigrants coming from.”

Another reason why immigrants settle where they do, says Ginsberg, is the extent to which a location has a rich network of social services, along with the perception of how immigrant-friendly they are. In this sense, the Welcoming Center has been an indispensable resource, helping immigrants to feel a sense of agency in their communities and careers. Beyond job training and referrals, the nonprofit offers a range of other programs, such as the Immigrant Leadership Institute, which tries to get participants more involved in the civic life of the city. Experts point to initiatives like these as being influential in where immigrants plant roots, and, over time, impact the population trends.

But Gupta also believes the city and state governments can and should be doing more to broadcast the benefits of what Philly and PA have to offer, especially for immigrants who live in other parts of the U.S., not unlike what Baltimore has with its “Live Baltimore” campaign.

“We should have intentional efforts in communities where secondary migration is occurring from” to better promote Philadelphia and PA, he says, “not just as a place to visit, but as a place to live.”

During his first year as president of the Welcoming Center, Gupta has taken that message to chambers of commerce and legislators throughout the state. Although many of them are located in deeply red parts of the state, Gupta says, “they see that their towns and cities will disappear if they don’t do something.”

That’s not to say that, especially during a presidential election year, national politics don’t interfere. “I worry about what things will look like if people are living in a constant state of fear,” Gupta says, speaking of a second Trump administration.

But the practical needs of the city and state aren’t going anywhere. The urgency of the issue, and the reception Gupta has gotten so far, has led him to explore a fundraising campaign that would support “Welcoming Center outposts” around the state, even amid a political environment that treats immigration as a divisive issue.

“The Philadelphia delegation has been very supportive, and they know that other parts of the state can benefit from the same story that we wrote here in Philadelphia,” he says.

MORE ON IMMIGRATION FROM THE PHILADELPHIA CITIZEN