PASSPORTS AND VISAS 101

Seattle is the largest city in the state of Washington and is also the largest city in America’s Pacific Northwest region.  Known as the “Emerald City”, Seattle is situated in a magnificent natural environment along the Puget Sound, surrounded by evergreen forests, mountains, and water.  The Seattle metropolitan area (the fifteenth-largest metropolis in the United States) has a population of 4 million people and includes the cities of Tacoma, Bellevue, Kent, Everett, Renton, Kirkland, and Redmond.  The area is home to several famous companies such as Nordstrom, Costco, Amazon, Microsoft, Expedia, Redfin, Zillow, and Starbucks.  This base of companies makes Seattle an attractive destination for jobseekers from around the world, including workers from India specializing in information technology.  There are now over 75,000 Indians in the Seattle metropolitan area, and they make up nearly half of the city’s foreign-born technology workers.  Indian culture runs deep in Seattle, which is home to several organizations representing the various ethnolinguistic groups of India such as Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Bengali, Marathi, and others.  Ties between Seattle and India will be further cemented with the introduction of a nonstop flight to Bangalore on American Airlines starting October 2022.  

Greater Boston is the eleventh-most populous metropolitan area in the United States with a population of 4.9 million people, and includes towns such as Cambridge, Brookline, Quincy, Brockton, Lynn, Newton, Waltham, and Medford.  Boston is one of America’s oldest cities and has a rich history that attracts over 20 million tourists each year.  Known as the “intellectual capital of the United States”, Boston is a center of education that has more than 350,000 college students from around the world, including students from Vietnam.  Schools like Boston University, Northeastern University, Harvard, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology all have Vietnamese student organizations.  The city of Boston has about 15,000 ethnic Vietnamese and there are well over triple that number living in the Boston suburbs and state of Massachusetts.  There is a “Boston Little Saigon” cultural district in the Fields Corner neighborhood of Dorchester that is a great place for local Bostonians to enjoy Vietnamese restaurants, cafes, and markets.  This area is also home to the Vietnamese American Community Center, which serves as gathering point for civic and cultural activities.  The city plays hosts to Tet in Boston, an annual event celebrating the Vietnamese Lunar New Year that attracts over 10,000 attendees. 

Atlanta has a population of over 6 million people, making it the 9th most populous metropolitan area in the United States.  The city and surrounding area—known as Metro Atlanta—is also the commercial capital of the Southeast United States.  The metropolitan area includes the municipalities of Dunwoody, Sandy Springs, Roswell, Alpharetta, Marietta, Duluth, Norcross, Tucker, Lithonia, Decatur, Mableton, and others.  Atlanta is a diverse and international city that in recent years has attracted a growing number of immigrants from Latin America, now numbering over 600,000 residents with origins from Mexico, Central and South America, and Spanish-speaking countries in the Caribbean, including Cuba.  There are an estimated 10,000 people living in Metro Atlanta with Cuban heritage.  Although many of these immigrants came to Atlanta as refugees during the early 1960’s, there have also been new arrivals to the city directly from Cuba, as well as arrivals of Cuban Americans relocating from other U.S. cities.  The past decade there has been much excitement and fanfare from Metro Atlanta businesspeople and tourists about the opening of Cuba to Americans, however, travel to the country has waned recently due to the virus situation and renewed political tension between our two countries. 

UPDATED November 26, 2022 (Please see information below under "Other things to consider")

Las Vegas is the largest city in the state of Nevada and is located in the Mojave Desert, bordering California and Arizona.  The Las Vegas metropolitan area, known as the Las Vegas Valley, includes Clark County and the cities of North Las Vegas, Henderson, and Boulder City, as well as several other unincorporated communities.  The Las Vegas Valley has a population of 2.3 million people and has been America’s fastest growing city the past decade.  Although Las Vegas ranks only as the 28th-most populous city in the United States, there could be as many as 300,000 tourists visiting here on any given day.  Las Vegas is known as “America’s Playground” and is one of the country’s most popular tourist destinations.  Las Vegas has become a diverse city with a growing population of Asian residents.  Filipinos are the largest Asian group in Las Vegas and there are now over 150,000 people in the metro area with ethnic heritage from the Philippines.  Filipinos have been in Las Vegas for over 100 years but have been moving to the city in record numbers the past two decades.  They are attracted to the low cost of living (compared to California) and abundance of jobs in Las Vegas’s health care and gaming industries.  This year the city will be hosting the Las Vegas Filipino-American Festival. 

Atlanta has a population of 6.2 million people, making it the 9th most populous metropolitan area in the United States.  Atlanta is the capital of Georgia, which is the 8th most populous of the 50 states.  The city and surrounding area—known as the Atlanta metropolitan area—is also the commercial capital of the Southeast United States.  The metropolitan area includes the municipalities of Dunwoody, Sandy Springs, Chamblee, Roswell, Alpharetta, Marietta, Duluth, Norcross, Tucker, Decatur, Mableton, Conyers, and others.  Atlanta has become a diverse and international city that includes a growing Asian population, which itself includes several thousand Taiwanese immigrants and American-born citizens whose parents migrated from Taiwan starting in the 1970’s.  There are also a few hundred international students from Taiwan studying at Georgia Tech, Emory, Georgia State University, and University of Georgia.  Historically, the Taiwanese community in Atlanta has been centered around Chamblee, home to a shopping plaza on New Peachtree Road known as “Chinatown”, and a Chinese community center, today known as the Culture Center of Taipei Economic and Cultural Office.  Nowadays, Taiwanese Americans in Atlanta have spread northward to Norcross, Duluth, and Johns Creek.

UPDATED November 26, 2022 (Please see information below under "Other things to consider")

Los Angeles is America’s second most populous city after New York.  Greater Los Angeles—which includes Los Angeles County, San Bernardino County, Riverside County, Ventura County, and Orange County—has a population of nearly 19 million people.  If Greater Los Angeles were its own country, it would be the 15th largest economy in the world (its GDP is slightly less than the GDP of Indonesia).  Known for its endless sprawl, Greater Los Angeles is the largest metropolitan region in the United States by land area and includes over 200 cities such as Santa Monica, Pasadena, Culver City, Burbank, Long Beach, Carson, Irvine, Anaheim, and Inglewood.  Los Angeles is one of the most multicultural cities on the planet and attracts people from all over the word.  There are more than 600,000 ethnic Filipinos in Greater Los Angeles, making it the largest “Filipino city” in the United States.  Filipinos are the largest Asian group in Los Angeles and are found all throughout the metropolitan area.  The city of Los Angeles is home to Historic Filipinotown, which has several landmarks, including a WWII memorial recognizing the contributions of Filipino soldiers, and the largest Filipino mural in the country.  Los Angeles is connected to the Philippines by direct flights to Manila on Philippines Airlines. 

New York is America’s most-populous city, and its metropolitan area has over 20 million people.  New York City contains the five boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx.  The New York metropolitan area includes New York City, Long Island, and the Mid and Lower Hudson Valley.  It also includes several large cities in New Jersey such as Newark, Edison, Elizabeth, Paterson, Jersey City, and Hoboken, along with cities in Connecticut that include New Haven, Bridgeport, and Stamford.  New York is one of the most important economic regions in the world and has the highest concentration of Fortune 500 companies in the United States.  New York is considered “Capital of the World”, not only due to its economic power, but also because it is a center of diplomacy and culture.  The city is home to the United Nations and there are over 800 languages spoken here.  The island nation of The Bahamas is represented at the United Nations, and their government also has a consulate and tourism office located in New York.  There are several thousand Bahamian people living in New York and the city is home to the Bahamian American Association.  New York’s three major airports have direct flights to The Bahamas and cruise lines operate itineraries from Cape Liberty Port.

The city of Dallas and the surrounding metropolitan area is the most populous metropolis in the southern United States and fourth-most populous in the country.  The Dallas metropolitan area—known as the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, or DFW by local residents—has a population of 7.6 million people and includes the cities of Fort Worth, Arlington, Plano, Irving, Garland, Richardson, Frisco, Mesquite, Denton, Grand Prairie, and McKinney.  The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is one of the fastest growing regions in the country thanks to its low cost of living, low taxes, abundance of resources, and ease of doing business.  Dallas and the state of Texas have become an attractive destination for immigrants seeking economic freedom and new business opportunities.  One such group that has found great success in Dallas are the Vietnamese.  Initially coming to Texas in 1975 to escape the poverty and destruction of their homeland after the Vietnam War, Vietnamese have found a new home in Dallas and are some our country’s most patriotic citizens.  There are now over 100,000 ethnic Vietnamese in DFW, making Dallas the fourth largest “Vietnamese city” in America.  The city is home to several Vietnamese cultural organizations and a Vietnamese community center located in Garland.

UPDATED November 26, 2022 (Please see information below under "Other things to consider")

San Francisco, known as the “City by the Bay”, is one of America’s most famous and beautiful cities.  Located in Northern California, San Francisco is just one of the many cities that together make up the San Francisco Bay Area, or Bay Area for short.  The 14-county combined statistical area (that comprises the Bay Area) has nearly 10 million people, making it the fifth-most populous region in the United States.  The Bay Area includes cities such as Oakland, Berkeley, Vallejo, Concord, Pleasanton, Fremont, San Jose, San Mateo, and Palo Alto.  The Bay Area is well known for its cultural diversity and large Asian and Pacific Islander population.  There are 500,000 ethnic Filipino people living in the Bay Area, making this the second-largest metropolitan area in the country with immigrants from the Philippines.  In San Francisco, Tagalog (Filipino), is the third most used language in the city after English.  However, there are other cities with even larger Filipino communities, such as Daly City, South San Francisco, Vallejo, and Milpitas, where it seems like Tagalog is number one.  These are places where you will find plenty of Filipino restaurants and grocery stores, like Jollibee and Seafood City, along with LBC Express stores where Filipinos can ship ‘balikbayan’ boxes to family members back home.

The Greater Miami Area is the seventh-largest metropolitan area in the United States and has a population of 6.2 million people.  The metropolitan area is composed of Miami-Dade County, Broward County, and Palm Beach County.  Its main cities include Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, Hialeah, Coral Gables, Miramar, Davie, Pembroke Pines, Hollywood, and Boca Raton.  This is a diverse community where 40% of the population was born in another country, and it is one of America’s most important cities for international trade.  Miami is a business hub for the Latin American region and is often thought of as the unofficial “Capital of Latin America”.  Miami is also known as the “Cruise Capital of the World” and is home to several cruise companies and cruise ships.  The Bahamas is easily one of the top destinations for cruise ships leaving the Port of Miami and other ports in South Florida, such as Port Everglades.  There are also dozens of flights to The Bahamas leaving from South Florida’s three big airports: Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach.  Miami and The Bahamas have historic connections.  In fact, Bahamian people were some of the first settlers in Miami and built the town of Coconut Grove.  Today there are over 20,000 Bahamian people living in the Miami area.