Immigrant Numbers Continue To Swell In Minnesota

[Rick Dean]

5

http://amren.com/news/news04/06/22/minnimmig.html

Immigrant Numbers Continue To Swell

State report surprises, given economy, 9/11


TwinCities.com, Jun. 18

Latinos, Hmong, Somalis and Vietnamese continued to boost the immigrant population in Minnesota over the past four years despite the recession and restrictions on immigration, according to a state report released Thursday.

The growth of the immigrant groups due to new arrivals and U.S.-born children was surprising because it coincided with the economic slowdown and aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to the auth
r of the report.

Despite the recession and despite 9/11, immigrants are still coming to Minnesota, and they're coming in large numbers, said Barbara J. Ronningen, a senior research analyst at the M

innesota Demographic Center.

Latinos were the largest i
mmigrant group examined in the study. The report estimated the Latino population in Minnesota at 175,000 for 2004, a 22 percent increase from the 2000 census.

The report estimated the Hmong population at 60,000, a 32 percent increase since the 2000 census. The Hmong population will grow with the arrival of about 5,000 refugees from Thailand by the end of this year.

Somalis showed the largest percentage gains of any immigrant group. The report estimated the population of Somalis at 25,000, a jump of 124 percent over the past four years.

Saeed Fahia, executive director of the Confederation of Somali Community in Minnesota, said the most recent growth estimates probably were skewed because he believed the 2000 census numbers wer
e too low.

My feeling is there was probably an undercount to begin with, he said.

Fahia said immigration from Africa only recently had begun picking up after slowing to a trickle fol
lowi
ng the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Secondary migration of Somal
is from other states could not account for such a huge increase, he said.

The Vietnamese population grew to about 25,000 this year, an increase of more than 21 percent since 2000, according to the report.

The study also examined trends among Russians, Laotians, Cambodians and Ethiopians. The full text is available at www.demography.state.mn.us.

In 2002, 13,522 immigrants came to Minnesota from 160 countries on every continent except Antarctica. The largest number came from Somalia, which 10 years earlier had sent only six immigrants to Minnesota, according to the report.

Other populations also showed changing immigration patterns. In 1982, people from Southeast Asia made up two-thirds of immigrants to the state but
10 years later comprised just 8 percent of legal immigrants.

The estimates were derived using school enrollment data for language spoken at home and a formula that takes into account
what po
rtion of an immigrant group is of school age. Ronningen said calculating
immigrant populations is difficult and the estimates may vary as much as 10 percent from the real population.

Three years ago, we didn't think these numbers would go up quite so rapidly because of 9/11, said Ronningen. After 9/11, the United States closed the gates. Refugee arrivals went down after that.

 

[Rick Dean]

5

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews...rld/9183483.htm

Hmong journey

By Ben Stocking

Mercury News Vietnam Bureau


WAT THAM KRABOK, Thailand - Teng Yang and his family live on the other side of the earth from the home they will soon make in California. But in many ways, they inhabit another universe.

If they get sick, they slaughter a pig and two chickens as offerings to the spirits. A 13-year-old bride, a man with two wives -- these are accepted social arrangements in the dusty squatters' colony where they have spent the past 11 years of their drifters&#3
; lives.

Teng and his family -- a Hmong clan of 27 people from the jungles of Laos -- are moving to Fresno, a middle-class, Central Valley town whose social mores will be as baffling to them as the d

rive-through line at McDonald's.

Over the next several mont
hs, 15,000 other Laotian Hmong who live at this makeshift refugee camp will follow them, most settling in California, Minnesota and Wisconsin, the three U.S. states with the largest established Hmong populations.

Teng's younger brother Tong and his wife arrived in Fresno last week, and the rest of the family will follow over the summer and fall.

The new refugees are former soldiers or the children of former soldiers who fought with the United States in the jungles of Laos during the Vietnam War. They fled their homeland after the communist victory and have spent the ensuing years at refugee camps in Thailand, finally settling at this squatters' colony that sprang up around Wat Tham Krabok, a Buddhist temple about 80
miles north of Bangkok.

With the Thai government threatening to shut the place down, the U.S. government agreed late last year to resettle them in the United States.

The Hmong are selec
ted
for resettlement by the U.S. State Department, which allows a certain number of refugee
s from around the world to come to America each year. Virtually all the Hmong at the Wat, as the temple community is known, will be allowed to participate. The fate of thousands of other Hmong who live elsewhere around Thailand has yet to be resolved.

Sticking together
"â┚¬Ã…¡ÃƒÆ’”�Å¡¢ Tradition of clans retained in U.S.

Like thousands of other Hmong immigrants who have come to America since the Vietnam War, they are settling in cities where churches and civic groups were especially hospitable to the first wave of newcomers.

The first refugees were settled around the country. But the Hmong, who come from a clan-based culture, gravitated toward one another in hubs like Fresno, Sacramento and St. Paul, Minn., which is
now home to America's largest Hmong population.

The social networks that have been established in these hubs will make it easier for this new group of Hmong to adapt to life in the
United
States than it was for their predecessors who arrived in the 1980s. Still, it will be a difficult
adjustment.

Teng Yang and three of his seven brothers and sisters live in a one-room house with their wives and 11 children. With bamboo walls, a tin roof and a dirt floor, their home has electricity but no plumbing or running water. Out back, a small stream of sewage trickles past, one of many that crisscross the Wat.

When the grown-ups need to go to the bathroom, they dig a hole outside or walk to an outhouse. When the small children need to go, they use the floor and their mothers swiftly tidy up after them with a broom.

The Yangs have decorated their place with family photos -- their late mother in a traditional Hmong-style dress, their late father looking proud and handsome in a Western busi
ness suit.

Teng's 20-year-old brother, Tong, who stands just over 5 feet, adorned one wall with a blond Playboy centerfold who would tower over him if she walked into the ro
om.


``I think it's disgusting,'' said Mai Lee, Tong's 22-year-old wife, ``but my husband likes it.''

The women
cook indoors, placing pots on burning embers that create blistering heat. The dimly lit abode is about 15 feet by 30 feet, bigger than most houses in the village, but a tight squeeze for 19 people.

They sleep on straw mats on wooden platforms. Tong's family of four shares one bed. Teng and his wife, Shoua, fit six in theirs.

``It gets really crazy when all the kids come back and everyone is shouting and screaming,'' said Teng, at 28 the oldest of the eight Yang siblings, four of whom live elsewhere in the Wat with their children.

The Hmong don't keep track of their ages. They had to make up approximate birthdays to put on the documents they neede
d to go to America.

Before the Thai military took over management of the Wat a year ago, surrounding it with barbed wire, the residents came and went as they pleased. Th
e men often got
jobs as day laborers in the small cities and towns near the Wat, which is surrounded by mountains.

These days, work is scarce. Many of the women make tradi
tional Hmong embroidery, which they sell to relatives in the United States.

Shoua, Teng's wife, was making a funeral jacket -- a black robe with brightly embroidered borders that is placed on the dead before burial.

She earns $200 to $300 a year embroidering these and other traditional Hmong garments, which she sells to friends and relatives overseas.

Families at the camp rely on the good will of their relatives in the States, who send money whenever they can. While many Hmong in the States are stuck in low-wage jobs, some have entered the middle class and purchased homes. In Minnesota, two Hmong have been elected to the state
Legislature.

The Yangs get money from relatives in the United States, including Pheng Yang, an uncle who works as a bilingual educator in the Fresno public school
s. That assistance
has helped them buy a secondhand Yamaha motorbike as well as a Sony television and a DVD player.

``I like Rambo, he's a good fighter,'' Tong said. ``And `The Terminator'
is one of my favorite movies. It's full of action.''

Tong is pleased that a real-life action figure is governing his new state.

``I don't want to live here anymore,'' Tong said. ``I just want to get away as fast as I can.''

But if life is hard in the camp, it is also intimate and familiar. Residents can embrace Hmong traditions without worrying whether Westerners might find them peculiar.

Babies are everywhere, many with mothers who themselves look like children. Five-year-olds care for their infant siblings, carrying them around on their backs with no parents in sight.

If a man here has more than one wife -- and a small percentage do -- nobody bats an eye.

``What a shame for your culture!'' Chong Vang Yang re
plies when told that p
olygamy is illegal in the United States.

Chong, who is not related to Teng and Tong, has two wives and 12 children, nine by his first bride, three by his second.

``When we have meals together, it's always great fun,'' he said, looking d
apper in a bowler hat.

Yang was hard at work in a blacksmithing area at the camp, heating metal rods in a fire and pounding the hot metal into traditional Hmong knives.

The Wat community seems medieval in some ways, but there are modern touches. Kids play in a video-game room; adults who are literate tap out e-mail in a small Internet cafe.

And when the residents bid farewell to friends leaving for the States, many document the occasion with the latest in video technology.

The first groups started leaving in mid-June. And every day, residents w
ander past a bulletin board near the center of the camp to see if their names have appeared on the departure list.

When the buses roll away, a tear
ful crowd gathers to watch
.

Each trip separates extended families that have lived in easy proximity forever. The Hmong have no word for ``goodbye'' -- only ``see you again.'' But it's not clear when they will be reunited.

``I'll miss you,'' Xiong Nhia Lue said as his close friend, Thao V
ue, boarded the bus, carrying a traditional bamboo wind instrument called a khuj. ``When you get to the United States, remember to write me.''

Many of the Hmong here have fathers and grandfathers who fought with U.S. troops in a conflict that claimed the lives of an estimated 20,000 Hmong soldiers. When the war ended, about 120,000 Hmong, nearly half the Hmong population in Laos, had been displaced.

Among the Hmong fighters was Mai Lee's father, Kay Ying Thao, 56, who still remembers a lot of the English
he picked up from American soldiers.

Kay was shot twice, once in the buttocks, once in the head, and he jumped out of two airplanes, losing
consciousness each time he lan
ded.

True Vang relates these details of her husband's war biography with pride. And then she starts to cry.

``I have a lot of regrets,'' she said. ``We're a people with no land. We have no place to call home.''

The couple have become respected members of the Wat community. Both are shamans who conduct ritual
s to heal the sick and bring good fortune.

These involve slaughtering a pig and two chickens, offerings intended to lure back wayward spirits that, by their absence, have thrown the lives of Hmong out of balance.

``The ritual is always the same,'' Kay said, ``but the spiritual journey is always different.''

Kay conducted a farewell ritual for his daughter, Mai Lee, and son-in-law, Tong Yang, before they left for California last week.

Life lesson
s
"â┚¬Ã…¡ÃƒÆ’”�Å¡¢ A chance to learn about future home

Like all the other Hmong leaving the Wat, they also prepared for their journey by attendi
ng a cultural-orientation class co
nducted by staffers from the International Organization for Migration, a group of governments and private organizations that help resettle refugees worldwide.

They learned that they should call 911 in an emergency. They learned that Americans appreciate punctuality. And they learned about concepts like independence and freedom and equality.

Over the centuries, as they h
ave wandered, the Hmong have faced discrimination at every turn -- in China, in Laos, in Vietnam, in Thailand.

``Equality -- they liked that idea a lot,'' said Ka Ying Yang, a Hmong American who teaches one of the classes. ``I tell them we aspire to equality in the United States.''

The students also learned that hitting your children is not acceptable in the United States, a concept that bewildered Tong.

``If we don't di
scipline them, how can we teach them to be a good person?'' he asked.

The classes included a videotaped message from
Alan Autry, Fresno's mayor: ``We
just can't wait to see you. God bless you and God bless America.''

Like immigrants who have come before them from all corners of the globe, Mai Lee and Tong hunger for the basics of the American Dream: a steady job, a comfortable home and a secure future for their children.

``We know nothing about Fresno,'' Tong said, ``but as long as our house is better than this one, everything will be fine.''