Photo by ELIZABETH A. MUNDSCHENK With an American flag decal shaped like America on the door, Hau Truong, left, teaches a job club class for Vietnamese students at the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees in Utica. The class deals with U.S. employment issues.

New groups add culture, shape area

By KELLY HASSETT
Observer-Dispatch

Utica’s long history of accepting newcomers not only continues 185 years after Irish immigrants started to build the Erie Canal — new groups are arriving from more distant corners of the globe almost every year.

The arrival of Sudanese, Burmese, Russians and other groups is overshadowed by that of the Bosnians, who came by the thousands in the 1990s. But each of these cultures is changing the city in often subtle ways — in schools, in workplaces and in neighborhoods.

"Their contributions are just as significant to the community," said Peter Vogelaar, executive director of the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees.

In two months, refugees are due from Somalia, on the eastern coast of Africa.

The Somali Bantu are an agricultural people from southern Somalia and a traditionally marginalized group, said refugee center volunteer Tiffany Imes. Their ancestors were taken in the 19th century from Tanzania and Mozambique to be used as slave labor on plantations in Somalia.

As in the past, the newest arrivals are here because of hardship or persecution in their homelands:

• Refugees from the Soviet Union came en masse to the Mohawk Valley after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many of them Russian Pentacostals fleeing religious persecution. They are the second-largest refugee population, after the Bosnians.
• More than 750 Vietnamese have resettled since 1979, when the post-Vietnam War era forced many to flee their homeland on boats.
• Hispanics are among Utica’s fastest-growing groups, representing 3.2 percent of Oneida County’s population, according to Census 2000 figures. Many came from islands in the Caribbean, such as the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.
• About 80 refugees came from Myanmar (formerly Burma), a Southeast Asian country where a repressive regime led many to flee for their lives.
• In recent years, Sudanese refugees have come to Utica. Sudan has been split by civil war between Muslims and Christians.

Refugee arrivals took a dramatic downturn after Sept. 11, 2001, when America’s borders closed to new arrivals.

The numbers have not fully rebounded. Vogelaar said the refugee center resettled only 240 people last year, well below the previous average of 700 a year.
"It’s way down," he said.

Imes said she anticipates two Somali families to arrive in June, with about 25 individuals coming to Utica over the next two years. Once again, overseas turmoil will mean new Uticans.

"I think most of (the Bantu) fled to some refugee camps in Somalia and some went to Kenya," Imes said. "In many cases, there was just outright discrimination."