In Maine Town, Sudden Diversity And Controversy
By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 14, 2002; Page A01
LEWISTON, Maine -- They arrived as Greyhound nomads, Somali refugees riding buses in search of a new life in this chilly northern world by the Androscoggin River.
Two years ago, not a single Somali lived in this stout little city in central Maine, a place of 35,000 people. Today the Somalis, slim and lithe, and black and Muslim, number perhaps 1,500 -- 300 arrived between Memorial Day and Labor Day alone. Their halal food store stands cheek to jowl with Frenchy's barbershop, and a mosque has taken its place amid the town's towering Catholic churches.
High-cheekboned young Somali girls tote their books onto school buses alongside the sons and daughters of fifth-generation Lewistonians.
Now the city's mayor, Laurier T. Raymond, has asked the Somali elders to put a stop to that immigration. In a public letter earlier this month, Raymond warned of the toll taken by so many immigrants on the city's finances and cultural fabric, and asked the elders to help stanch the flow.
"This large number of new arrivals cannot continue without negative results for all," Raymond wrote. "I am well aware of the legal right of a U.S. citizen to move anywhere . . . but it is time for the Somali community to exercise discipline.
"Please pass the word," he concluded. "We have been overwhelmed . . . our city is maxed out financially, physically and emotionally."
Raymond's letter has stirred a tempest in this old mill town in the nation's whitest state. But it's an American dilemma. From Wausau, Wis., where thousands of ethnic Hmong have settled, to Holyoke, Mass., where city officials last week asked the federal government to rescind a grant to resettle other Somali refugees, small cities and towns now wrestle with issues once seen as the province of large cities.
"If you ask most Americans about immigration, they would agree that it's fine, but not too much at one time," said Christopher Jencks, a professor of social policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "Now that immigration is no longer concentrated in urban areas, a lot more people are engaged in the debate."
Many Somali immigrants, and some white Lewiston residents, detect in Raymond's words a whiff of xenophobia, and a fear of those with a different skin hue. They have called on the Justice Department to investigate Lewiston to ensure that city officials do not discriminate on the basis of national origin.
Yesterday, about 250 people marched five blocks from a Methodist church to the mosque where many Somalis worship to show solidarity with the newcomers. Old-time residents outnumbered the Somali demonstrators 3 to 1 by one estimate.
"Why couldn't he approach us privately?" said Hussein Ahmmed, who paused in the well of the city's library to consider the mayor's letter. "We are helping this town, too, by opening a bridge between black and white and expanding its vision."
City administrators say the mayor -- himself a descendant of poor French Canadian immigrants -- intended no such message of disrespect, no matter how clumsy some saw his words. Theirs is a small city, they say, confronted with sudden demographic and financial strain.
Welfare rolls and rents have gone up, and school officials are scrambling to provide health checkups -- more than a dozen children showed up with no immigration papers -- and language instruction, though the majority of Somali children speak excellent English.
"This happened so quickly and so suddenly that we couldn't prepare," said Phil Nadeau, the assistant city administrator. "We inherited the responsibility for resettling 2,000 Somali refugees with no warning at all."
North Woods Home
It was not chance that drew the Somalis to this place in the northern woods. They chose Lewiston because they saw something familiar in its pastoral and family rhythms.
They had spent years adrift in their diaspora, fleeing from civil war in their homeland in the Horn of Africa to United Nations refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia to the United States in the late 1990s. Most settled in Atlanta and Tennessee. They found multicultural cities with ethnic stores and jobs, but soon many of the Somalians were desperately unhappy.
Their children fell into the life of American teenagers, which is to say MTV and gangsta rapping and doo-rags, and the risk -- if not necessarily the reality -- of easy sex and drugs.
"The parents were working nights and coming home in neighborhoods with prostitution and drugs," said Abdiaziz Ali, a father of five who migrated here from Atlanta and now works as an immigration caseworker for the city. "The black American kids picked on our children on the bus. Eventually, the elders sit down and say: 'Why are we fighting to stay here?' "
They sent seven young men out to find a new homeland, spreading south, east, west and north. Known as "sahan," this is an ages-old nomadic practice used to find water for the cattle in Somalia's arid hinterlands.
"They found Lewiston," Ali said. "They check the crime statistics, they see the last policeman killed here was in 1882. They see the unemployment rate is low. There is housing and close family values like Somalia.
"The young men tell us: 'This is a dream place.' "
The first Somalis took the bus to Lewiston about February 2001, and in the next year about 1,000 followed. "They came in droves off the buses," said Renee Bernier, the City Council president. "But some made the welfare office their first stop."
There's some truth to this. As it was their second move after arriving in the United States, they could not receive federal relocation money. Some Somalis quickly applied for welfare benefits, which are higher here than in Georgia. That angered many in a working-class city that prides itself on its work ethic.
Grumbles metastasized into false rumors: The Somalians were getting free cars and apartments and $10,000 a piece in federal benefits. There were whispers that Somali children wash their feet in the sink at school, that they want a special room for prayer.
This September, fistfights broke out after school. The Somalis' new home town began to seem a forbidding place.
Immigrant Blues
Lewiston has gone through the immigrant blues before. Irish laborers made their way here in the 1850s and found sharp-elbowed Yankee mill owners who kept them on the wrong side of the Androscoggin River. A mob burned down the first Catholic Church in 1855.
The French Canadians followed, and led an immigrant life so separate that their newspaper was in French for decades. But the textile mills and shoe factories boomed, and the economy trumped all. People with French and Irish surnames now dominate the political and business establishment.
Then the shoe factories and textile plants were shuttered. Only recently has the economy turned around. "Our population was static for half a century," said City Council member Roger G. Phillipon. "We could use a little cultural richness and diversity."
As Phillipon notes, the Somalis are adapting. There are 415 Somali adults and about half are employed, some in several jobs. This past month, the number of Somalis on welfare dropped in half. Lewiston has spent $450,000 to accommodate the new refugees, which is less than 1 percent of its $70 million budget. Months ago, the Somalis reacted to private complaints by paying for radio ads in Atlanta, asking their countrymen not to follow them here just now.
That in part accounts for the betrayal felt by many Somalis when they read the mayor's letter.
Isha Muhamud studies in the century-old town library, with four of her friends. She is 18, in college-level English and biology, and intent on going to Harvard to become a doctor. Her English is impeccable and teen-talk flavored. "It's a poor leader who arouses resentment," she said. "Things were getting better. There are fewer fights and fewer Somalians coming in now."
In fact, the tensions can be overstated. Ask Bob Jones, a thickly built bus driver, about the Somalis and he shrugs. He drives this city's hills each morning and two dozen of his passengers are Somalis now -- on their way to jobs. "One guy says 'Bye-bye, sir' every day," Jones said. "So I say, 'Call me Bob.' Now he calls me 'Sir Bob.'
"These people are okay by me."
© 2002 The Washington Post Company |
