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Second Chance City

A wave of refugees is bringing new life to a dying American town.

By Derek Burnett

From Reader's Digest

Utica, New York

For the first time in his 22 years, Abdi Ibrahim is living in luxury. But his new residence isn't a mansion with a million-dollar view. "I have my own room," he says, laughing at his good fortune. That's right: a rented room in the small upstate New York city of Utica. A member of a persecuted minority group from Somalia, Ibrahim, who at age seven found an older female cousin after she'd been shot by marauders, spent most of his life in violent refugee camps in Kenya. There he shared a mud-walled hut, scarce food and water with several family members. But in 2005 he heard that he'd be joining dozens of Somali Bantu refugees already settled in Utica. For decades, the city has opened its doors to some of the world's neediest people. In exchange, the newcomers bring the kind of energy and drive that most cities would pay recruiters to attract.

Utica has long been a city of immigrants, with waves of Irish, Poles and Italians working its factories in its heyday in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But refugees didn't enter the picture until the late 1970s, after Utica had begun a plunge into economic meltdown. By then, major employers had begun downsizing, and most would eventually leave town. The city's population dwindled, and some streets were lined with homes sitting empty. A bumper sticker seen around town read "Would the last person to leave Utica please turn out the lights. "

Then, in 1978, a farmer's wife living just outside Utica sponsored a family from Vietnam. Roberta Douglas's husband was a medic in the Vietnam War, and the couple had been riveted by heartbreaking stories of people fleeing the conflict. Douglas decided to open their home to a family of boat people. Through a Catholic charity, she arranged for a Vietnamese couple and their children to share her farmhouse until she found permanent housing for them. Once they were established, Douglas helped settle a family -- 12 people in all -- from Laos.

After that, things snowballed. If Douglas could assist this many people, why not more? She teamed up with a resettlement agency the State Department uses, wrote grants and, in 1981, incorporated. "Everybody was willing to help -- the county manager, the churches," she says. There was a wing-and-a-prayer feel to the work; her group might have only 36 hours to find housing for an incoming family, but somehow they provided everything necessary. "It was like it was meant to be," Douglas says.

Escaping the Nightmare of Violence

By 1985, her nonprofit, the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees (MVRCR), had processed some 2,000 Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, Haitian and Polish émigrés. Utica, it turned out, was in many ways a perfect place for refugees to start over. Because of the city's history of immigration, residents were welcoming toward newcomers. "And the low housing costs were a real advantage," says Douglas. "We could put families into very nice housing for not much."

Though many of the skilled manufacturing jobs were gone, there was still enough entry-level work for the immigrants to gain a fingerhold on the American Dream. And without the labor pool provided by the new workers, many of those smaller Utica companies might have disappeared along with the larger corporations. Donald Chichester manages the second shift at Keymark Corporation's Keyano division, an aluminum extrusion facility outside the city. Fully half of the division's workforce consists of refugees, he says, many from Somalia. "They're the most motivated workers I've ever seen," he adds.

One of the earliest arrivals in Utica was a Cambodian named Synath Buth. When Communist dictator Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime seized power in 1975, it unleashed a nightmare of violence, forced labor and starvation. Buth somehow made it through the next four years, though 36 of his relatives, including his father, did not. "The situation was very tough," he remembers. "I would go farther every day trying to find food for my family, and if you get caught by the Khmer, they can kill you."

During those years, Buth married a woman named Saram; when they decided to leave Cambodia in 1979, she was nine months pregnant with their second child. Walking to Thailand, Buth says, "if you step on the wrong place, you're blown up by the land mine. We'd see all the dead bodies lying on the ground." In the jungle, his wife gave birth to a daughter, Saramoroth.

Fenced for two years inside refugee camps in Thailand, the couple had a third child. Then the UN told Buth that he and his family were to be resettled in the United States. Through old movies and books, Buth had already fallen in love with the country; he was ecstatic. Standing in the airport near Utica on chilly November 11, 1981, wearing sandals and carrying three small bags that held his family's earthly belongings, he took a look around. "I said to myself and my wife, 'We are born again.'"

The MVRCR placed them in a comfortable home, and Buth began an intensive six-month English course. Neighbors came by, bringing food and clothing. "I don't know how to thank them," Buth says.

For three years, he worked in a commercial laundry. But as one of the earliest in a wave of Cambodian refugees, he realized he had a valuable asset and offered his interpreting services to the small staff of the MVRCR. Soon he became director of resettlement and for nearly two decades threw himself into the work, honored to be able to help others like himself.

No Free Ride

Buth bought a home in Utica and gave his children a comfortable, middle-class American upbringing. Now retired, he also owns rental properties in Baltimore. Saramoroth -- the daughter born in the jungle -- last year married an American man in a traditional Cambodian ceremony. "I'm still Asian," Buth says, "but this is my country now. I'd do anything for it."
 
The biggest wave of refugees to come to Utica has been the nearly 4,500 Bosnians who escaped civil war in the Balkans in the early 1990s. They have most radically changed the look of the city. "Somebody's garbage became our treasure," says Nezir Jasarevic, who arrived in 1993 after being imprisoned and tortured by the Serbs. The Bosnian refugees pooled their labor to make some astounding transformations of hundreds of homes, some bought for a song from the city's urban renewal agency. Says Utica mayor Timothy Julian, "They used their skill in stucco to make places that were about to collapse into houses that look like large stone castles."
 
They've made it seem easy. But Peter Vogelaar, MVRCR's executive director, points out that the newcomers don't get a free ride. "Every refugee that our center resettles is allotted $425," Vogelaar says. "From that money, we give each person $50 cash. With what remains, we have to get them an apartment, paying the first month's rent and security deposit."
 
At MVRCR, refugees can get free English classes and, for up to five years, job placement services. Beyond that, says Vogelaar, "they get nothing more than any other low-income people in the community." In fact, refugees begin their life in America in debt: They're required to repay the government, interest-free, the price of their plane fare from their home countries.
 
"We know very well nothing is given," says Jasarevic, sitting in his remodeled two-story home with his ten-year-old son, Danny, who is web-surfing on a laptop. "You have to make it with your hands." Jasarevic was a student of architecture when he fled Bosnia. After arriving in Utica, he took a menial job in a greenhouse, gradually trading up to his current white-collar position with a health insurance nonprofit. He and his wife, Azira, are raising their two children with all the trappings of the American lifestyle. Jasarevic is forever grateful to Utica for that. "When your whole world is turned upside down," he says, "the opportunity to start a normal life is like one tiny dot of light in a dark room."
 
Murithi Hassan Mudey carried one of his children on each shoulder and led the rest by hand when he fled from Somalia to Kenya to escape civil war in 1992. After more than a decade in refugee camps, he has landed in Utica, where he lives with eight family members in a small apartment unit across from a National Guard armory.
 

In an otherwise empty room, its walls and floors lined with colorful African mats, Mudey sits in one of the family's two wooden chairs and recounts his life journey. His 21-year-old daughter, Bisharo, settles on the floor to interpret, a toddler playing in her lap. Despite the sensational subject matter -- a dangerous evacuation, hyenas eating people alive, babies lying on the road beside their dead mothers -- Mudey speaks dispassionately until talk turns to the future, when his face brightens. "I want to buy a house," he says. "I want my kids to go to college."

Starting a New Life

Utica is still a long way from its former prominence as one of New York's most prosperous cities. But housing values increased 52 percent between 2001 and 2006. In a fiscal analysis, Paul Hagstrom, a local economics professor at Hamilton College, found that the initial costs of refugee resettlement may be high, but after about 15 years, the city's investment bears fruit. Which is to say, Utica has developed a very effective long-term strategy for its economic survival.

And for those who value diversity, there are cultural payoffs as well. About 12 percent of the city's population of 60,000 come from more than 30 foreign countries, and 31 different languages are spoken in the public schools. Utica now boasts a mosque, a Cambodian Buddhist temple, a Russian Orthodox church, and a dizzying array of ethnic restaurants and shops. Mayor Julian owns a laundry whose employees are all Asians and Bosnians -- and whose clientele is even more diverse. "The place will be jammed, and nobody's speaking English," Julian says. "Different cultures coming together though they don't understand each other's language: That's what makes a city."

Since 9/11, the United States has curtailed the influx of refugees because of security concerns. Only 41,277 were resettled in the last fiscal year, down from 99,974 in 1995. Still, refugees continue to land in Utica: the Somali Bantus, the Karen people of Burma and, in the spring of 2006, a group of Meskhetian Turks from Russia. Like some 11,000 others before them, they have a chance to start a new life.

If anyone is poised to seize that opportunity, it is Abdi Ibrahim, the young Somali Bantu so thrilled to be living in his own room. Having never encountered a flush toilet before coming to the United States, he has made remarkable progress. Since arriving, Ibrahim has learned English, gotten his driver's license, translated for the coach of a local soccer team and held a succession of upwardly mobile jobs -- the latest as an academic coach in Utica city schools. He is determined to one day become a doctor and says he won't rest until it happens. "That is my goal," he adds. "I am praying to God to help me." In a little-known American city that's become, for many, a land of opportunity, Ibrahim is likely to find the answer to those prayers.

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