Despite Problems, People From 99 Countries Are Changing City : Influx of Immigrants Magnifies Capital’s Identity Crisis

The District of Columbia has always suffered from an identity crisis--and with good reason.

Carved from Maryland and Virginia in 1790, it has undergone a series of design plans and styles of government. It is more than a city but not quite the state it yearns to be. It cannot decide whether it is Southern or Northern. It is two cities in one: a federal city with modern office buildings and granite monuments; and a local city, with stately homes but also rotting shells from 1968 riots.

And now, as if it did not have enough trouble getting a handle on itself, the nation’s capital is becoming a city of immigrants.

80,000 Latinos

In a city of 627,000, there are an estimated 80,000 Latinos, mostly Salvadorans. Among Africans, there may be as many as 10,000 Ethiopians and Eritreans alone. Asians are most common in the suburbs, although the mayor’s office counts 6,600 in the city.

In varying numbers there are people here from 99 countries, speaking 112 languages.

They come for many reasons, but one cuts across cultural lines: the belief that the U.S. capital offers refuge from war, fear and poverty back home. Throughout Latin America, said Arlene Fullana Gillespie, director of the city’s office on Latino affairs, people dream of going a la capital .

“The capital cities in the Third World countries are the highly civilized, mostly westernized places,” said Berhane Woldu, an Ethiopian who came here as a student 15 years ago and now counsels immigrants for Catholic Charities. “Like any formula, if that applies there, why not here?”

But once they arrive, many find this is not the promised land. The city is famous for its cabbies who were college professors back home. The jobs available are low-paying and cheap housing is scarce. They also encounter resentment from black Americans who believe the immigrants are crowding them out of economic opportunities and social services.

Changing in Profound Way

Nevertheless, the newcomers are taking a strong hold on the city and changing it in a profound way. As the massive proliferation of new restaurants and businesses geared to ethnics attests, and government concerns about different minority representation reflect, this is no longer the simpler place the 1980 census portrayed as 70% black American and largely white otherwise.

“This is a totally different city from the way it was when I first came here in 1977,” said Wallace Lumpkin, director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

” . . . All of a sudden, Washington has started looking a lot like L.A.,” said the former Los Angeles resident. “I had to pull out my Spanish books again.”

The transformation has brought tension, but also a rich social flavor not in evidence when the city was so distinctly black and white.

“The new people give the city soul,” Lumpkin said.

That a national capital--even one not near an international border--should be so jolted by ethnic diversity may seem unlikely. Foreigners have long been here, staffing embassies and the World Bank. But they were never considered real residents. And the immigrants who did filter in did not come in great numbers, or in large groups suddenly.

That has changed dramatically.

Fled Marxist Government

Since 1974, Ethiopians and Eritreans have poured into the area, fleeing the Marxists who overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie that year. The outbreak of civil war in El Salvador has triggered a wave of Salvadorans that began in 1979 and has continued strong since then.

No comprehensive statistics on the immigrant influx are available, partly because many of the new residents are illegal aliens. But the signs of its magnitude are clear.

The school system is enrolling 25 new non-English-speaking students every week, “primarily from Central America and the Caribbean,” said Janis Cromer, a school district spokeswoman. She said that in the 1981-82 school year, the system had 1,988 bilingual students. In the coming school year, 8,988 are expected.

Police and court officials are seeking translators to help them communicate with the many residents they now encounter who speak languages the average beat cop or public defender cannot understand.

Meanwhile, the granite and glass business district has begun to resemble a Third World marketplace.

All Types of Food

Old-timers in Washington joke that not long ago an exotic meal was pasta or a gyro sandwich. Now, restaurants specializing in everything from Afghan to Vietnamese food are commonplace.

“Se Habla Espanol” signs are showing up in more store windows, and many of the city’s downtown sidewalks are lined with the card-table displays of West Indian entrepreneurs selling everything from popcorn to fake Gucci handbags.

On streets and parks near the White House and national monuments, Asian immigrants hawking T-shirts and souvenirs to tourists are crowding out the political protesters who once dominated the public spaces. And in the Adams Morgan business district, the streets are filled with Central American teen-agers, Latin music and the smell of Jamaican incense.

For his part, Washington Mayor Marion Barry says the new scene suits him fine.

“I like it because it forces you, whether you want to or not, to have a global perspective on life,” he said in a recent interview. “I’ve had to learn a lot about the Hispanic culture. Our diversity is our strength.”

And, more so than many cities, the new residents are spread through many neighborhoods, local officials note.

“It makes the city feel more friendly when it’s all mixed up,” said Nook K. Lee, a native of China who lives in an ethnically mixed area of northeast Washington.

Rita Simon, a sociologist and dean of the school of justice at American University, said the capital’s joining other U.S. cities with large immigrant populations “will make it more likely to find an identity” because it will show that “as the nation’s capital we recognize the broad spectrum of what the nation is all about--its diversity of languages and cultures.”

But Roger Conner, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, worries that the phenomenon will only make a city that already had a lot of poor people even poorer and will overwhelm the scant services available to help them.

Illegal immigrants have “absorbed the available low-income housing,” worsening the city’s homeless problem, he said.

‘Happening Right Here’

“The danger of a two-class society (illegal immigrants and legal residents) has been pointed out in the West,” he said. “Now it’s happening right here in Washington.”

Hostility has already flared between blacks and Asians. In a low-income neighborhood last year, black community leaders lashed out at the growing number of Asian small business owners who have set up shop there, staging a boycott of a Chinese food store merchant who was involved in a confrontation with a black customer.

The incident vented growing resentment that Asian entrepreneurs were exploiting the poor and succeeding where the indigenous black population had not.

Barry, who is black, has formed a commission to study such conflicts. But he stressed that Washington’s American blacks, long the majority, must learn to cope with a changed situation. Blacks here and elsewhere, he said, “have to do better . . . and compete.”

Handy Sawyer, a black handyman at a carpet store in Adams Morgan, complained that some foreigners are “hurting the black people, the poor man” because they are willing to work for very low wages.

‘Blacks Won’t Take Them’

However, Barry said of the abundant minimum-wage hotel and restaurant jobs in the city’s booming service industries, “unfortunately, blacks won’t take them anyway.”

Barry asserted that the city’s social services budget is not overtaxed, and other officials noted that fewer immigrants seek unemployment benefits and other aid than many assume.

At the same time, Barry acknowledged “pockets of immigrants . . . have housing needs that we can’t satisfy.”

That is part of the dark side of the immigrants’ experiences here, especially those who are illegal.

Carmen Monico, director of the Salvadoran Refugee Committee, said some rundown buildings are “completely full of Salvadorans,” many of whom cannot find jobs because the new immigration law fines employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants.

Hellish Eight Months

At the Salvadoran refugee committee, located in the basement of a church, a Salvadoran couple, speaking through an interpreter, told in an interview of a hellish eight months in la capital , including his getting fired for being illegal and getting shot in the chest by a mugger.

They have four children and wonder how they will support them. If he did not fear being caught up in the war in El Salvador, the husband said, he “would not have dreamed of coming here.”

The other problems plaguing Washington’s new residents are numerous--many stemming from an inability to speak English and others, such as alcoholism and family violence, from the shock of adjusting to an alien culture.

The International Counseling Center, a private, nonprofit organization, was formed in 1983 to counsel the influx of immigrants who suffer “fear and rage” from a journey that was “enormously painful,” said Elizabeth Salett, president of the center.

Salett said the center tries to help the troubled immigrants confront the question, “Who am I--who is the new me?”

Eventually, say the experts, most immigrants do come to terms with that question, going on to adjust in the new world.

And now, Washington must do the same.