Despite the community’s reluctance to believe it, Lewiston’s Somali residents are a great resource.

According to economic theory, immigration is to labor what trade is to products. Just as trade provides goods and services where they are needed, the free flow of immigrants across borders encourages growth where economic opportunity exists. For proof, look to Canada, particularly Toronto and Vancouver, where liberal immigration laws and social tolerance have generated a blockbuster economy in the past 20 years, one that seems immune to the economic troubles of their southern neighbor.

Or look within the United States. Regions where immigration is more common typically outperform other regions economically. Along the Mexican border, immigration is tightly regulated, but because Mexicans want to work in the United States and because United States businesses (from urban restaurants and hotels to rural farms) want to employ them, the black market subverts the law.

Immigration is important to economic development for several reasons. In the short term, it provides relatively inexpensive labor to local businesses, which in turn are able to provide goods and services at lower prices to consumers. In the longer term, immigration is a spectacular investment in human capital. Within one generation or less, immigrant families are typically able to raise themselves to a higher standard of living through hard work and an emphasis on education.

Al Jurczynski, the mayor of Schenectady, N.Y., literally goes out of his way to meet the opportunities of immigration. During his tenure, he recruited African immigrants living in the outer boroughs of New York to consider moving to his city, which, like Lewiston, is predominantly white, and is struggling from the loss of manufacturing jobs. The city charters tour buses to take prospective residents from their homes in New York City on daylong tours of Schenectady, led by the mayor himself.

These tours are financed by Schenectady taxpayers, but the public supports them with the understanding that immigrant recruitment is an important investment in the future of the city. After all, chambers of commerce regularly woo corporate offices, retailers and industries with even more elaborate recruitment campaigns, but a reliable workforce is a necessary prerequisite to any business development.

Lewiston has much in common with Schenectady, but it has the lucky advantage of having attracted hundreds of Somali immigrants in the past year without any recruitment campaign at all. Lewiston has been blessed with remarkable fortune. Somalis already have started several small businesses and supported existing firms with their labor, and their community has begun to enhance the city’s cultural resources, which are what distinguish a big town from a small city. Their economic impact will almost certainly be many times greater than the proposed Wal-Mart distribution center, which will cost taxpayers $18 million in local and state incentives.

In spite of this, there still exist racist and xenophobic attitudes toward the Somalis. Granted, these problems have not been as great as past flare-ups that Franco-American and Irish immigrants have experienced, but they are still troublesome, particularly in a 21st-century environment. It’s sometimes difficult to understand why the Somalis should put up with it, when dozens of cities across the continent would be able to accept their community more gracefully than Lewiston has.

But Lewiston and Auburn offer opportunity: in area industries, in inexpensive office and residential space, and in educational institutions. By taking these opportunities as their own, the Somalis are occupying empty storefronts and increasing productivity for area businesses. Their success already is developing into new opportunities for everyone in Maine. We would do well not to alienate this community, one of the strongest economic prospects to have visited Androscoggin County in decades.

Christian McNeil, who grew up in Steep Falls, earned an interdisciplinary degree in math and economics from Reed College in Portland, Ore., and is now living in Lewiston.

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