From Hell
to Freezing Winters:
Refugee Immigration to Rochester, Minnesota
from 1970 to 2004
By Doug McGill
The McGill
Report
Immigration
to Rochester in late 20th century was dominated by refugees
fleeing civil wars, ethnic cleansings, and genocides around
the world.
Three
groups of such refugees had a particularly deep impact on Rochester
over the past 30 years: those from Indochina
(Vietnam war refugees from
Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia); from East Africa (civil
war and genocide refugees from Somalia, Ethiopia, and
Sudan); and from Bosnia.
The story of Paramon Vin, a 32-year-ld teaching assistant
at Churchill School, is a typical immigrant story
in Rochester’s recent history.
Paramon’s family lived comfortably near Phnom Penh, Cambodia, when
the communist Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975 and began to systematically
kill all of Cambodia’s professionals, all people who wore eyeglasses,
and all workers and officials of the government they had overthrown.
Her father, an army general, was snatched away
in the night, never to return. Her uncle was
executed with
a bullet to the head in front of
her eyes. The remains of the family was sent to a camp where for
four years they worked breaking rocks and digging holes, and survived
by eating the leaves off trees. A daring escape across the border into
Thailand left her sister – who survived and also lives in Rochester
today – with a bullet wound in the leg.
After a year in a Thai refugee camp and a year
in a Philippine camp, the family won refugee
status to the
United States and was flown to live
in a ghetto in Santa Ana, California. Drive-by
shootings
and gang violence there made trips to school
and the grocery store a risky proposition.
Another year spent trying to learn English
and trying to learn job skills in a crime-infested
section of
Lowell, Massachusetts, proved no safer.
When Paramon discovered Rochester in 1992,
it was like finding heaven. She’d heard from other Cambodians about Rochester and so decided
to visit the city on her honeymoon with her new husband, a young Cambodian
who now works at Schmidt Printing, which employs many Cambodians.
“
When I first came to Rochester I said ‘That’s it, I love
it, I’m not going anywhere else,’” Paramon says. “I
said to myself, ‘I’m going to raise my family here. Rochester
is so peaceful. The environment is clean and the people are so friendly.
I love it here and I will never leave.’”
The United States accepts more political
refugees than any other developed nation
by far. Its
annual quota
of 70,000 per year continued until 9/11,
after which the quota remained but the
number actually admitted dropped dramatically. Only
26,300 refugees
were admitted in 2002.
Minnesota has always attracted more refugees
than many states because Lutheran and
Catholic charities
are
active sponsors in the state, and
because of the state’s tradition of strong social services. The
relatively stable and sometimes expansive job market from 1970 to 2000
was also an attraction.
In 1965, the Immigration and Nationality
Amendment opened the floodgates to
a new era of mass
immigration. The Civil Rights-influenced
legislation stressed openness and ended
38 years of exclusionist
immigration policy. By the late 1990s,
the country
was admitting about one million immigrants
a year and immigrants had become the
nation’s leading cause of
population growth.
“Secondary
immigration,” in which immigrants move to a second or
third city in the U.S. after their initial entry, accounted for most
of the refugee influx to Rochester in the 1980s and 1990s. By the year
2000, one in ten city residents was foreign born, and more than half
of those had entered the U.S. as political refugees (asylees) or joined
families here who came as refugees.
The fact that Rochester in 1993 was
listed at the top of Money Magazine’s “Most
Livable Cities” list also helped attract hundreds of refugees to
the city. Jorge Solis, the owner of Fiesta Mexicana Restaurant, and Zacharia
Gaal, a Somali paralegal in Rochester, both chose to move to Rochester
after seeing the article. In Gaal’s case, he saw the magazine in
the lobby of his immigration lawyer’s office in Cairo, Egypt, where
he waited for several years with his family before being cleared to immigrate
to the U.S.
The earliest political refugees
to arrive in Rochester in the
early 1970s were
Russian defectors,
especially
Jews, fleeing religious and political
persecution in the Soviet Union.
Many Russians at the time said
they
were
attracted to
Minnesota because
of its climate which reminded
them of home. A handful came to Rochester
but most settled in Minneapolis
and St. Paul.
VIETNAMESE
The aftershocks of the Vietnam
War triggered the immigration
that changed
Rochester’s social and cultural makeup most markedly from 1970
to 2000.
The war caused three million refugees to eventually flee Vietnam, Laos,
and Cambodia, and forced the United States to expand refugee assistance
to these groups. About 1.5 million Vietnamese immigrated to the U.S.
in the largest immigration resettlement ever undertaken by this country.
The Indochina Immigration
and Refugee Act of 1975
allowed war refugees
to settle in the
United States
with the
sponsorship of voluntary
agencies
such as the United States
Catholic Conference,
the International
Rescue Committee, and
the Church World
Service. The Refugee
Act of 1980 established a federal
agency
for refugee resettlement
services and increased
aid disbursement to individual
states to administer
the funds.
Thanh Hyuhn, who owns
Thanh’s Tailor shop in Rochester, began his
journey to Rochester during this period. As a battleship commander in
the South Vietnamese Army, he was targeted by the victorious Communists
in 1975 for “re-education,” shorthand for internment in a
work camp. The Communists told his wife and four children that Thanh
would be released in three months, but let him free only after ten years
of hard labor in the deep forests of North Vietnam, where he dug ditches
and cut bamboo.
Upon returning to Saigon
in 1986, he set his
sights on
immigrating
to America
with
his family. “I didn’t want to stay in Vietnam
because it was Communist,” he said. “I wanted to live in
the United States because here I could have a free life.”
He arrived as a refugee
in 1993 sponsored
by the United
States
Catholic Conference.
He spent
his
first night
in the U.S. at
the Bethel Lutheran Church
Refugee
House and worked
as an apprentice
at John’s Tailor
Shop, which itself had been started by a Greek immigrant decades earlier.
Finally he opened his own shop which is now an institution in southeast
Rochester.
HMONG
A tribe of highlanders
mainly from
Laos, the Hmong, made
the biggest
impact as
refugees in
Rochester in the late 20th
century. Fierce
fighters who
helped the
U.S. during the Vietnam
War, Hmong
families were given priority
for resettlement
to the United
States after
1975 when Communists
took over
Laos and started
to persecute
and slaughter the Hmong.
“Story
quilts” stitched by Hmong women in Rochester tell the story
of their escape from Laos. These colorful appliqué quilts, ranging
in size up to ten feet square, typically show a tableau of Hmong life
including their oxen, chickens, marriage scenes, and babies – as
well as the Hmong being chased by Lao soldiers firing Soviet-made Kalashnikov
rifles at them as they swim across the Mekong River to safety in Thai
refugee camps.
The Hmong
came to
Rochester in two
waves,
the first from
1975
to 1985,
being resettled
directly
here
from camps
in Thailand.
The
second
wave came in the
1990s in
secondary
migration
of Hmong
who
had originally
settled
in California
moved to
Minnesota.
This second
wave
doubled
the number of
Hmong in
Minnesota
from 16,
833
in
1990 to
41,800 today,
and made
Hmong the
second-most
spoken
language in the Minneapolis
and St.
Paul school
districts.
In the
1990s, many of the
Hmong who
had originally
settled
in Rochester
migrated
to the
Twin Cities, leaving
relatively
few
here.
Today,
there
are 740 Laotians
and
445 Hmong
living
in
Rochester,
according
to the
Rochester
Olmsted
Planning
Department.
Rochester
has
more
non-Hmong Lao
than
Hmong Lao
because
large
numbers of Lao
Tin and
other
Lao groups
settled
here,
along with Hmong.
Christopher
Herr,
a Hmong-American
counselor
at
the International
Mutual
Assistance
Association
in
Rochester,
came
to
the
U.S. as a
14-year-old
refugee
with
his
parents in 1976,
after
spending
a
year
at
the Nongkhai
refugee
camp
in
Thailand. He spent
his
first year
in
the
U.S. in Carrier
Mills,
Illinois,
a town
of
1,700, where
the
culture
shock
was
intense.
“We
had no money and no food,” Herr remembers (he changed his last
name from the Hmong “Her” to avoid confusion). “There
was no program. We were just left in an apartment. We didn’t know
there was such a thing as food stamps. And none of us spoke English.
We were so lonely, so lonely.” School was the worst. “Even
today, I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, thinking ‘When
is my next class? Where is my next class? What is my teacher saying?
Do they all think I’m stupid?’”
A
couple of
times, young
Chris wore
girl’s clothes to high school,
neither having anything else to wear nor knowing any better. “I
still feel the embarrassment of that,” he says. What’s
more, the memory of one day
in Laos, when a helicopter
delivered 30 dead bodies
to his village, has left him
susceptible to flashbacks
whenever he hears airplane
noise. Like
many Hmong and other refugees
from war zones and
genocides, Chris has sought
professional counseling for
his occasional flashbacks.
His
family moved
to Des
Moines after
a year
in Carrier
Mills, and
lived there
for nine
years. He
finished high
school there,
and community
college in
Centerville, Iowa,
with a
degree in
mechanical engineering.
He’s
now married with four children
and has worked at the IMAA
since 1988.
SOMALIS
The
downfall of
the Somali
dictator Siad
Barre in
1991, followed
by the
disintegration of
that country
into clan
warfare, triggered
the biggest
influx of
refugee immigrants
to Rochester
since the
Hmong in
the 1970s.
A famine
in Somalia
in 1992
and 1993
worsened the
crisis, sending
more than
a million
refugees into
camps into
neighboring Kenya
and Ethiopia.
Catholic
and Lutheran
resettlement agencies,
acting as
subcontractors to
the U.S.
government, sponsored
the first
groups of
Somali refugees
to Minnesota
in 1993.
Subsequently, word-of-mouth
attracted other
Somalis to
the state
who had
originally been
resettled to
other cities. “Family
reunification,” an
immigration category that accounts
for more immigration to this
country than any other, was
used extensively by Somali
families, where two parents
often raise up to eight or
more children.
The
2000 U.S.
Census found
1,131 Somalis
living in
Rochester, and
11,164 in
the entire
state. However,
most immigration
experts, as
well as
Somali community
members, believe
the census
seriously undercounted
the true
number by
as much
as a
factor of
three. According
to the
Wilder Research
Center in
St. Paul,
66 percent
of Somali
immigrants have
at least
a high
school education,
and 22
percent have
a college
degree or
higher.
BOSNIA
The
ethnic cleansing
in Bosnia
also left
an imprint
on Rochester’s
population in the 1990s.
Of the two million total
refugees from the slaughter,
roughly 100,000 resettled
in the United States, including
2,000 to Minnesota. By 1994,
approximately 700 had settled
in the Rochester area.
One
of those
is Ismeta
Latic, 28
years old,
who works
today as
the receptionist
at the
IMAA. She
left her
hometown of
Bosanska Kostajnica
in Bosnia
in 1995,
after three
years of
war had
left the
nation’s
economy in tatters. Then 17
years old, her high school
education had been cut short
in its first year. With no
education and no prospects
of a job, she left
Bosnia with her sister and
two brothers. After six months
being transferred to one after
another United Nations refugee
camp, she boarded a plane
in Amsterdam and arrived
in Rochester on September
19, 1995.
“It
was scary sitting on the plane from Minneapolis to Rochester,” she
said. “I didn’t speak English and didn’t know if anyone
would greet us, or where we would spend the night. But many people were
at the airport -- my sponsor, lots of Bosnians, and five or six Americans.” Like
many refugees, years of war and travel as a refugee left Ismeta relishing
Rochester’s relative quiet and stability. “It’s safe
and it’s really good for families,” she
said.
EAST
AFRICA
The
civil
wars
and famine
in Sudan
and neighboring
Ethiopia
in
the 1980s
and 1990s
also dramatically
increased
the
numbers
of
refugees
to
Rochester
during
that
period,
especially
the
late 1990s
and early
2000s.
The
IMAA
estimates
that about
1,000
Sudanese
lived in
southeastern
Minnesota
in 2004.
One group
in particular,
the Anuak
tribe
straddling
the border
of eastern
Sudan and
western
Ethiopia,
found
southern
Minnesota
a
particularly
good
place to
resettle,
with
some
1,200
of them
now living
in Minneapolis,
St. Paul,
Rochester,
Austin,
and small
towns throughout
southern
Minnesota.
MEXICANS
AND
HISPANICS
Another
immigration
trend,
driven
less
by
politics
than
economics
and
thus
very
similar
to the
trend
that
brought
America’s
first immigrants to Rochester,
put its stamp on the community
in 1990s. This was an explosion
in Hispanic immigrants,
especially from Mexico.
Migrant
Mexican
laborers
have
passed
through
Olmsted
County
and
elsewhere
in
southern
Minnesota
for
more
than
50
years,
to
help
with
summer
harvesting
and
packing
vegetable
crops.
Companies
including
Libby’s
(later Seneca) in Rochester
have actively recruited Mexican
seasonal workers
directly from southern Texas
towns like Eagle Pass and
San Houston. At food processing
plants they typically work
12-hour days for $7.50 an
hour over a period of only
several weeks before moving
on.
Nationally,
Hispanics
were
by
far
the
fastest-growing
segment
of
the
immigrant
population
in
Rochester
as
in
the
U.S
in
the
1990s.
Between
1970
and
2000,
the
number
of
all
foreign-born
people
in
the
U.S.
more
than
tripled,
from
9.6
to
28.4
million,
with
Mexicans
alone
counting
for
more
than
a
quarter
of
all
immigrants
in
2000,
according
to
that
year’s
Census.
In
Minnesota,
the
number
of
Hispanic
immigrants
jumped
166
percent
during
the
1990s,
for
a
total
of
143,000
in
the
entire
state.
About
70
percent
of
these
came
from
Mexico,
more
than
from
any
country
in
the
world.
The
Rochester
experience
paralleled
the
state’s,
with the number of Hispanic
immigrants within a 15-mile
radius of the city growing
to
3,095 by 2000, with 1,783
of them Mexicans living in
Olmsted County, according
to the Census. That made
Mexican immigrants and their
children
the largest immigrant nationality
in the county, as the Census
recorded 1,242 Somalis, 583
Vietnamese, 466 Cambodians,
425 from Laos and 362
Chinese.
In
some ways
the Hispanic
immigrant explosion
was an
invisible one,
having less
public impact
or notoriety
in the
community than
either the
Hmong or
Somali influx.
There were
several reasons
for this.
First, because
Hispanics had
been coming
to the
area for
many decades,
the newer
immigrants found
ways to
assimilate more
quickly than
those of
other ethnic
groups. Also,
although they
became greater
in number
than other
groups, they
often are
not as
conspicuous as
those groups
that are
strikingly different
in physical
appearance and
dress.
The
main reason
the Hispanic
immigration explosion
was muted,
however, was
that a
great many
of them
had come
illegally. Estimates
are that
between 20
percent and
40 percent
of the
country’s
eight million Mexican immigrants
are illegal. That could translate
into possibly more
than a thousand illegal
Mexican immigrants in southeast
Minnesota.
Of
course,
allowing
large
numbers
of
illegal
Mexican
workers
has
been
America’s
de facto guest worker program
for the past three decades.
In Rochester and throughout
the state and country, deportations
have been rare because corporations
want low wage labor and the
Mexicans have
on the whole been hard workers
and exceptional citizens.
Take
Heriberto
Galindo,
the
33-year-old
proprietor
of
the
El
Carambas
restaurant
at
Eastwood
Plaza
in
Rochester.
As
a
teenager
he
swam
across
the
Rio
Grande
River
from
his
hometown
Chihuahua,
to
El
Paso
for
a
chance
at
a
better
life
in
the
United
States.
After
working
construction
and
odd
jobs
for
a
few
years,
he
moved
to
Rochester,
following
a
brother
who
worked
at
the
Hunan
Garden
restaurant.
Then
it
was
on
to
Zorba’s Greek Restaurant, where over a period
of years he worked his way up a job ladder he can rattle off to this
day: “Dishwasher, Prep, Cook, Chef, Kitchen Manager, Busboy, Waiter,
Restaurant Manager.”
And
now,
on
savings
he
made
from
Zorba’s, restaurant owner. He
got his “green card” for
permanent residency and one
year ago bought El Carambas.
Today business is thriving.
“I love it here,” he says. “I’ve got three kids and
a wife and it’s a great place to raise a family. It’s
a nice little town for living.
I like the restaurant business,
talking to customers,
meeting people, keeping my
place clean.
" Everywhere I go, people know me and I think they like me. There
are more chances here than in a big city. There is not much
to do, so you can
save more. It’s work-home, work-home. No bars, no drinking. That’s
good.
"
One of my dreams is to work hard and have my own house for my family.
Maybe one day a little house, not too big, not too expensive, so I can
handle the payments, build my good credit. Just for my wife and kids.”
INDIA
AND
CHINA
Two
other
immigrant
groups
whose
numbers
rose
steadily
in
Rochester
in
the
late
20th
century – from India and China – also
were more economically than
politically motivated. In
2004, about 250 Indian
families live in the Rochester
area according to Champak
Bhakta, president of a local
Indian-American group. Rice
and Spice, a popular Indian
grocery
in downtown Rochester, is
also thriving at this time
with customers of all ethnicities.
Since
1960,
three
waves
of
Chinese
immigrants
have
settled
in
Rochester – first
from Hong Kong and southern China, who began arriving in the area in
the 1950s. Two of them, brothers Neil and Ben Wong from Guangzhou (then
Canton), started Wong’s Café in
1952. The downtown restaurant
continues to this day. In
the 1970s, immigrants from
Taiwan became more prevalent,
and after mainland China became
more open under Premier Deng
Xiaoping in the 1980s, immigrants
from northern China have dominated.
About
650
Chinese-Americans
live
in
Rochester
today,
making
them
the
fourth
largest
immigrant
group
after
those
from
Mexico,
Somalia,
and
Cambodia.
The
Mayo
Clinic
and
IBM,
the
area’s
two largest employers, have
recruited many highly-skilled Chinese, Indians, and
Russians
to work as scientists, engineers, and programmers as
part of
their efforts to
be globally competitive.
Whether
political refugee
or economic
immigrant, all
immigrants are
by definition
cosmopolitan. Most
would agree
with Sambath
Ouk, a
Cambodian refugee
who in
2002 told
reporter Andrea
Faiad of
the Post-Bulletin: “I
feel like I live in the world and America is just my house.”
And
Rochester,
perhaps,
his
family.
Copyright
@
2003
The
McGill
Report