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If recent immigrants to America looking for a place to settle can be compared to a high school dance, Pittsburgh is the pimply-faced geek with braces and a bow tie, leaning against the gymnasium wall.

While international newcomers have flooded into many American cities over the last decade, they are ignoring the Steel City, despite Oakland and its university campuses.

Census numbers released this year show that of the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the nation, Pittsburgh ranks second to last in its share of foreign-born residents, with 3 percent of the region's population having been born outside the United States. Only Cincinnati has fewer foreign-born residents.

"This is a big issue for Pittsburgh," said Richard Florida, a professor of regional economic development at Carnegie Mellon University and author of "The Rise of the Creative Class and How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life."

"It's not something people here are serious about, to their own disadvantage," Florida said. "But they need to look at the problem. Pittsburgh is a patient in need of electrotherapy."

Pittsburgh's political and civic leaders say they want more immigrants, but there is little, if any, action to back it up, say Florida and other labor and economic development experts.

As a result, they say, Pittsburgh, with all its amenities and close-knit neighborhoods, is missing out on the economic benefits that accompany recent arrivals.

What's more, if Pittsburgh doesn't reverse the trend, the region faces a work force crisis in the next 10 to 20 years.

A Duquesne University report released this summer says that as older people retire and fewer young ones are available to take their place, the region may face a shortage of as many as 125,000 workers within a decade, limiting growth and development. The shortage could reach 400,000 in 20 years.

"Immigration is not the sole solution, but it is a big part of it," said Silvio Baretta, director of research for the Center for Competitive Workforce Development at Duquesne University. "Regions are in competition for these people … and we are not doing well."

Part of the problem is that the issue is not visible, said Brian Kelley, the economic development director for the Heinz Endowments, which work with agencies trying to attract immigrants to the region. About a half-dozen agencies focus on various aspects, but no one coordinates their efforts, he said.

"The question for the region is: How painful does it need to be before everybody wakes up?" Kelley said. "It's like the ozone layer. You can't see it."

Kelley said other cities faced similar issues, but they saw growth because of large numbers of foreign-born settlers.

A study of census data, released earlier this month, backs him up, showing that immigrants account for half of all workers who joined the U.S. labor force in the last 10 years.

Without them, regions such as New England and New York would have seen no labor or population growth, according to the study by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Boston's Northeastern University.

The report shows that immigration is redefining the profile of the American work force and in some cases transforming entire industries. The study said immigrants were overrepresented in retail trade, manufacturing and service occupations, such as short-order cooks, barbers and nurses' aides.

But not in Pittsburgh.

It's not that the city isn't seeing any new immigrants. Between 1990 and 2000, the region experienced a 12 percent increase in the foreign-born population, with most of the newcomers arriving from India, China and Korea. They come through the universities or to work in technology or health care.

They are just not arriving in Pittsburgh in the kind of numbers that they were during the first half of the 1900s, when Eastern Europeans dramatically changed the region's industrial towns.

"I've seen it open up in the last two to three years," said Ravitej Reddy, an information technology consultant who settled in Pittsburgh 15 years ago from his native India.

He's in a good place to know. Jitters, the Shadyside coffee shop he opened in 1996, has become a magnet for nearby residents, including many new immigrants.

Reddy attributes the changes to the heavy recruiting in the high-tech industry that has brought immigrants from around the world, particularly India. It took time, though, he said. Back in the early 1990s, when high-tech companies around the country were recruiting foreigners, traditional Pittsburgh firms were hesitant. But they finally came around, he said.

He and others point to the recruiting success of younger local companies such as iGate, a high-tech company founded by a foreign-born resident. Locally, more than two-thirds of iGate's 250 employees were born outside the United States.

Reddy, who came to Pittsburgh as a student, owns Velocity Computer Consulting, with clients throughout the tri-state area. He started a subdivision called Velocity Healthcare, which focuses on recruiting foreign nurses to help ease the nursing shortage crippling the health care industry.

His company has so far recruited 20 nurses from India, but none are coming to Pittsburgh. Local hospitals like his concept but haven't committed, he said. Larger hospitals, such as Allegheny General Hospital, are recruiting nurses from the Philippines and other countries, but it is not a standard.

Companies in all industries, as well as local government and other institutions, have to recruit more if Pittsburgh is to reverse its immigration trend, Florida said. Part of the problem, however, is the area's pervasive resistance to change, he said.

"Pittsburgh is a closed town," Florida said. "Look at the foreign-born students — most don't stay. They don't see Pittsburgh as a welcoming place."

In short, Pittsburgh needs an attitude adjustment.

"It's a city that wants to stay in the 1950s," Florida said. "Pittsburgh wants to recreate its glory days."

Florida said the city could learn from places such as Schenectady, N.Y., where the mayor of the aging town of 62,000 recruits Guyanese immigrants from New York City, leading them on bus tours and touting the low cost of living.

"It's a typical Northeast industrial-type city," said Mayor Albert Jurczynski, a Republican serving his second term. "It's home to General Electric. When I graduated from high school in ’74, there were 29,000 people working at GE. Today, there are 4,000."

The town hemorrhaged residents and home values spiraled as more abandoned houses littered the property rolls.

Sound familiar?

Schenectady, though, had a small but growing population of Guyanese immigrants who had fled the crowded streets of New York. The mayor befriended leaders in the community, who asked him if he and his staff would be willing to talk to the newcomers about Schenectady.

The talks evolved this summer into weekend trips in which busloads of New York Guyanese residents schlepped to Schenectady for a day to hear the mayor's sales pitch. The excursions ended with a stop at the home of the mayor's in-laws for a taste of the homemade wines made by the elderly Italian couple.

The mayor has immersed himself in all things Guyanese not only to make the 3,000 or so residents living in his city feel at home, but also to attract new ones. He's visited their communities in Queens, hobnobbed with their business leaders and sampled their famed El Dorado rum.

"They're a hard-working people," Jurczynski said. "They do not believe in public assistance as a group, unless it's absolutely necessary. So right away I felt good about them. What mayor wouldn't?"

Beth Osborne Daponte, a senior research scientist at CMU's H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management, says the problem in dying industrial cities isn't a lack of immigrants. It's an unhealthy economy.

If Pittsburgh wants to attract domestic or international newcomers, it needs to create more jobs. Businesses, universities and civic and political leaders need to come up with a long-term effort to fuel job growth, Daponte said.

"There's a flaw in the logic that if we had more immigrants, we would have more jobs," she said. "Immigrants come because we have jobs.

"What I see is everyone running around like a chicken with its head cut off, but there is no well-thought-out strategy," she said. "How we go there is a huge conversation that I think the community is trying to have, but it gets distracted."

If Reddy is any indication, there is hope that new immigrants will choose Pittsburgh before the dance to find a home ends.

Reddy planned to leave Pittsburgh after graduation, but he stayed when offered a job at a local high-tech company, deciding to see if the ’Burgh was for him.

"Pittsburgh offers a lot more opportunities than bigger cities," he said. "You can look around, see what Pittsburgh lacks and bring it here."

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