Achorage: cosmopolitan Pacific Rim city: international connections foster global relationships.

AuthorWolf, Greg
PositionSPECIAL SECTION: World Trade Alaska

While many know Anchorage as Alaska's largest community and center of commerce, it is also a culturally diverse, cosmopolitan Pacific Rim city with extensive international connections and relationships.

Just over 40 percent of all Alaskans live in Anchorage. Of Alaska's 730,000 residents, some 300,000 make their home in Anchorage. The demographics reveal a multi-cultural community with sizeable numbers of residents of American Indian or Alaskan Native (8.1 percent), Asian (8.7 percent), Black or African American (6.2 percent), Hispanic or Latino (8.2 percent), and Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander (2.2 percent) heritages, according to a recent US Census Bureau report. The same report indicates that in almost 17 percent of Anchorage households, a language other than English is also spoken.

An estimated 16,000 people of Mexican descent live in Anchorage and between 5,000 and 6,000 Koreans reside in the city.

This diversity is reflected in the city's educational system. Minority students make up more than half of the student population in the Anchorage School District, and some ninety-three different languages are spoken at the homes of city students. The most common of these are Spanish, Hmong, Samoan, Tagalog, and Yup'ik.

Air Cargo Thriving

Anchorage's role as the "Air Crossroads of the World" held sway for several decades as international passenger flights between Asia, Europe, and North America transited through the Anchorage airport on a regular basis. One result of this was a highly successful Duty Free store at the airport that, at one point, ranked second highest in the world, trailing only Hong Kong based on sales per square foot. These days, most of those passenger flights now bypass Anchorage, with the advent of longer range aircraft and the opening of the Russian airspace allowing the airlines to fly non-stop.

While international passenger flights have dwindled, air cargo operations at the airport have thrived. Driven by its strategic location, Anchorage plays a major role for international air cargo carriers, especially those operating between Asia and North America. The Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport is currently ranked among the top five in the world for cargo throughput and the second largest in the United States based on the landed weight of the cargo aircraft. It is an important stop on Trans-Pacific flights for refueling and to change crews. Both FedEx and UPS have established major clearance and sorting...

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