On Fri, 24 Nov 2006 17:51:48 -0800, Sylvain wrote:

Jay Honeck wrote:

In little Iowa City (which is extremely diverse) I have a good chance
of meeting nearly any nationality on any given day,

do you mean someone from actually a foreign country, as in, raised
and born there, or one of these ethnically confused hyphenated americans
who list the various percentage of this or that 'nationality' they think
they carry somehow in their DNA, but never left USA nor have any contact
nor any knowledge about the 'old country'? Seriously the latter is indeed
quite common everywhere, meeting the former is trickier unless you live
in the place that attracts immigration.

--Sylvain

The University of Iowa is justifiably prestigious in science and the
arts, particularly letters. If you look at the stats for the fall
semester at the University:
http://www.registrar.uiowa.edu/profi...63_profile.pdf
there are Approximately 30,000 students (undergrad and grad), and 2004
come from outside the USA -- a 15:1 ratio, or 6.7%.

Faculty numbers about 1,700. I can't find any statistics, but based on
my own experience, I'd bet at least 10% of them (concentrated in the
sciences), call it 170, were born outside the USA.

State-wide, Iowa citizens born outside the USA constitute 3.1% of the
population, non-citizens constitute 2.1%, for a total foreign-born
percnentage of 5.2%.

The population of Iowa City in 2005 was approximately 63,000. Probably
half that is University students and faculty, and we've already
counted those university people. If the non-U population is 30,000,
about 1,500 would be foreign-born, applying the statewide percentages.

Boiling that down, during the school year, there are (round numbers):
2000 + 170 + 1500 = 3670 foreign-born people in a city of 63,000, or
about 6% of the population. If Jay meets 17 citizens a day in
cosmopolitan Iowa City, chances are good he'll meet somebody from WAY
out of town.

(That's in a city. In more rural areas, there's probably more
clustering of foreign born citizens and non-citizens, so even with
that statewide 5.2% figure, he could probably go years without seeing
anybody but corn-fed hyphenated Americans.

Don