Refugee numbers on the rise in Minnesota

Steve Brandt:

The international refugee pipeline to Minnesota is back in business.

Minnesota zoomed back to its pre-9/11 level of refugee arrivals in 2004 -- and that's even without a well-publicized surge of Hmong. Resumption of East African refugee migration played a big role.

In fact, Minnesota ranked first nationally in the number of foreign refugee arrivals in 2004 on a population-adjusted basis, according to federal figures. One refugee arrived last year for every 875 Minnesotans. That's a rate more than four times the national rate, and it's attributable to the state's long-established concentration of settlement agencies.

The state ranked third in raw numbers of refugees arriving in 2004, trailing only two coastal states, Florida and California. More than 7,300 refugees or people granted political asylum landed in Minnesota last year, according to state Health Department figures (which are based on calendar years and so differ somewhat from federal fiscal-year totals). That's direct arrivals, not counting people who settled in another state before moving here.

It's a big jump from a low of 1,035 in 2002, when refugees were getting special post-9/11 scrutiny. That has meant big adjustments for the government and nonprofit agencies that help them settle here.

"We're like a balloon," said John Borden, executive director of International Institute of Minnesota, which settles the largest share of the state's refugees.

"We expand, we contract to fit the needs of the various programs we're in. That is not fun," Borden said.

"It's difficult to hire up real fast because we want people who are trained and knowledgeable about the cultures we're working with," he said.

Minnesota's refugee population differs from that of other states. Agencies here work only with refugees joining family members already in the state, a contrast from states that also welcome unattached refugees.

The nationalities of leading groups of refugees to Minnesota helped fuel the 2004 boom. A tide of several thousand Hmong long held in a Thai refugee camp came to join a big concentration of relatives who arrived years earlier.

The post-9/11 period was particularly hard on East Africans hoping to join family already here. Minnesota refugee specialists say East Africa's proximity to the Middle East, and the Islamic faith of many Somalis and Ethiopians, caused federal screeners to give them extra scrutiny.

According to Health Department figures, the number of Somali refugee and asylum arrivals plunged from 2,175 in 2000 to a mere 124 in 2002. "It was hard because you knew that refugees were not involved in terror organizations," said Saaed Fahia, executive director of the Confederation of Somali Communities in Minnesota.

"There were more background checks of everybody, especially for young people," he said.

But pressure built politically, especially from relatives and settlement groups, for the State Department to fulfill refugee quotas declared annually by the White House. The state welcomed 2,323 Somali refugees last year.

Refugees are just one subset of immigrants landing directly in Minnesota. The government defines refugees as foreign-born people who can't return to their country because of a well-founded fear of prosecution stemming from such factors as race, religion, nationality, political opinion or social group. Refugees are granted that status overseas, while people granted asylum have met the same criteria while visiting the United States. Other immigrants can enter through nonrefugee quotas.

The refugee share of Minnesota's immigration has hit as high as 40 percent, but more recently is around 20 percent, according to Barbara Ronningen, a state demographic specialist in immigration trends. The refugee share has fallen because Minnesota's strong economy and generally welcoming climate for immigrants are swelling the number of nonrefugee immigrants as well.

Sometimes, previous immigrants can detect a resurgence of refugees even before native Minnesotans who work with them. Meredith Davis is principal of Sanford Middle School in Minneapolis, which enrolls a large share of East African refugees. She recalls her Somali staff forecasting a resurgence of that area's refugees a year and a half ago.

Karen Pedersen, director of multicultural programs for Minneapolis schools, has been around long enough to see several waves of immigrants come and settle. Minneapolis schools serve students with more than 80 home languages.

"We have been asked to be incredibly flexible as the refugees come and go through the various phases of orientation, getting acquainted and getting well-established," she said. Sometimes the district staffs up, only to find one school's ethnic concentration migrates to a suburban district, such as a group of Bosnians who moved from southeast Minneapolis to Columbia Heights. More recently, several hundred Burmese refugees arrived in St. Paul.

Number of refugees in Minnesota rose in 2004