Giving Compass' Take:

· Resettlement programs have brought thousands of new refugees to the welcoming Atlanta area. The 74 talks with members of the community and explains how the influx of refugees is helping the economy grow. 

· In what ways do refugees contribute to the community and economic growth?

· Here are four things you can do to support refugees.

n 1878, the Georgia Department of Agriculture published a little book under the odd title A Manual of Georgia for the Use of Immigrants and Capitalists. “Georgia,” it began, “is, perhaps, less known in foreign lands, and to their inhabitants who have sought homes in the Western World, than any other State.”

Outside of the state’s large population of freed slaves, brought forcibly from Africa, Georgia’s last significant wave of new residents came with the original British colonists. “She lies geographically remote from the old thoroughfares of international commerce,” the Manual notes. “Few immigrants from the Old World have landed on her shores.”

In the wake of the Civil War, however, Georgia was ready to become more “known” overseas — the Manual is a paean to the state’s many supposed charms. Georgia, it notes, is home to “the finest timber country on the continent,” and its death rate compares favorably to Michigan’s (“one of the healthiest States in the Union”). The book reflects a relatively straightforward theory of economics and demographics: Georgia needed to reinvent itself and its economy — so it needed an influx of new people.

Nearly a century and a half later, the Manual’s mission appears to be accomplished. Since 1990, Georgia’s foreign-born community has quadrupled as a share of the population, from 2.7 percent to 10 percent. In 2000, 1 in 10 Georgia children had at least one immigrant parent. By 2015, 1 in 5 Georgia kids did.

Like with many other U.S. communities who have recently become immigrant gateways, these shifts are sparking both economic opportunities and (sometimes ungainly) cultural adjustments. Indeed, the past few weeks of national attention on the administration’s policy of separating asylum-seekers at the border have laid bare the brutality — and ugliness — of American immigration narratives.

Read the full article about immigration by Conor Williams at The 74.