Over the last few decades, as a manufacturing decline left homes vacant and storefronts dark, New York’s upstate cities opened their doors to refugees. The influx, while modest, gave new life to neighbourhoods, helped alleviate labour shortages and shored up city budgets.
Published : 14 May 2019, 09:28 PM
But that rejuvenating bounce for cities such as Utica, Buffalo and Syracuse ended after the Trump administration drastically cut the number of refugees allowed into the country. New York received 1,281 refugees in the last fiscal year, compared with 5,026 just two years before, according to the State Department. Officials in those cities worried they had lost a small but important bulwark against population decline.
Now, some are testing out a new strategy: luring refugees who have settled in other parts of the United States to move to New York. They are advertising job placement, English language and housing services, hoping to draw enough people to offset the shortfall.
New York is not alone in trying novel ways to reverse its dwindling population. Maine, for example, has offered an outstretched hand to refugees in hope of expanding its workforce. Vermont has dangled $10,000 grants to entice people to move to the state and work from home, in a bid to attract young tech workers. And Wyoming is trying to woo people born there back home by deploying recruiters to help them find jobs.
“If the message gets out that we have job opportunities, and it’s a great place to raise a family, that’s what we want,” said Anthony Picente, the Oneida County executive, a Republican whose county includes Utica. “That is the message we are moving out there.”
Though Picente believes in cracking down on illegal immigration, he and other state officials are concerned that curtailing legal avenues for immigrants could harm small American cities.
“Why are we capping the legal point of entry unless we can’t handle them, and no one is saying we can’t handle them?” Picente said.
While asylum-seekers arrive on their own and then make a case for protection, refugees are vetted by the United Nations, the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department while they are overseas. Those agencies then determine if a person will be granted the right to come to the United States.
In an era when immigration policy has drawn sharp political lines throughout the country, enticing refugees to New York has held bipartisan local appeal.
“The real fear for upstate cities is that if we don’t keep our population growing, we will fall into an endless cycle of decline,” said Assemblyman Sean Ryan, D-Buffalo. “We’re not at that tipping point yet, but we are very close.”
Between 1950 and 2000, Rochester and Syracuse lost roughly 30% of their populations, Utica lost about 40% of inhabitants and Buffalo lost half its residents, according to the New York state comptroller’s office. Buffalo’s decline was the fourth highest nationwide.
But as refugees moved into abandoned homes and leased empty storefronts, deserted neighbourhoods in these cities started to transform — although these towns have not seen enough growth to reach population numbers of nearly 70 years ago.
Across town on the East Side — notorious 30 years ago for its crime — a Bengali community helped turn apartments that had housed brothels into community-oriented spaces.
“There were shootings, there were prostitutes, we used to see maybe 200 cars coming by at night for people to buy drugs,” said Atiqur Rahman, 56, a refugee from Bangladesh who was one of the first in his community to move to the East Side of Buffalo in 2006. “But where most people saw abandoned houses and crime, I thought, ‘The houses are cheap, I can move in, put a light outside my front door, be nice to my neighbours and make a good future.’”
For the last five years, Rahman has run his own hardware business and accounting firm on the neighbourhood’s main drag, Broadway Street, where other immigrants like him have also started their own businesses.
Some refugees have become new recruits for New York firms hungry for employees.
Only 229 refugees were resettled in Utica in 2017, about half the number of refugees resettled the previous year.
And that may not be enough.
Joe Carubba, the regional vice president of Gerber Collision & Glass, a body shop chain, said his company had not been able to fill 40 jobs for auto body technicians. He oversees 18 shops but plans to expand to 50 locations across the state.
“Now when we look at adding a new location, our biggest consideration is — can we find the people to fill the jobs?” Carubba said. “The answer is often no.”
© 2019 New York Times News Service