Mohamed had never attended school, but she put her mind to learning English and catching up on everything else. Meanwhile, her mother found work cleaning hotel rooms. Her older brother drove a taxi. At Lee High School, one of Houston’s most diverse, she became best friends with girls from Azerbaijan and Sudan. She excelled in school and received a scholarship to attend the University of Texas at Dallas but turned it down to stay close to home. “It’s not my choice, but I did it for my mom,” she said, wearing a shy smile and a traditional pink robe and patterned hijab. “Our cultural beliefs are that women are not supposed to be out without family.”

The family lives in Bellaire, an immigrant-heavy neighborhood west of Houston proper, in an apartment complex nicknamed Little Baghdad. They worship at an English-speaking mosque alongside Indian, Pakistani, Nigerian, Egyptian, Ethiopian and Somali families. “I never felt like someone didn’t like me because of my skin color,” Mohamed said.

City policies have adapted to changes in the population. Last year Parker signed an executive order requiring municipal agencies to provide services and information in the city’s top five languages other than English. “Over 100 languages are spoken in Houston,” said Terence O’Neill, division manager of Houston’s Office of International Communities, but “immigrant and refugee populations and services is a very limiting way of thinking about [diversity]. People come here for all kinds of reasons. It’s a prosperous city."

Houston, often called the capital of “the third coast” (on the Gulf of Mexico), is predicted to see continued economic and physical growth from new immigrants and domestic transplants alike. The city’s job base — fueled by the nation’s largest medical center, energy companies, manufacturing, a vast arts district and the service sector — increased 7 percent in the last decade and will add 18 percent in the next, economists say.

Life at the airport taxi depot is distant from yet intimately linked to these larger forces. Passengers and fares track business patterns and housing trends — on Sunday the rush of travelers arriving for weekday meetings, freshly pitched suburban asphalt, the changing faces of the drivers. “Houston had an economic crisis in the 1980s. That’s how I got involved in the [taxi] industry,” said Arnick, the native Houstonian and former petroleum engineer. “People who heard about economic opportunities came here. You could come in and get a vehicle and get to work, get a fresh start ... There’s a lot of guys here with Ph.D.s, businesspeople and senators. But now we’re all here.”