A Surprising Salve for New Yorks Beleaguered Cities: Refugees

[riversedge]

This really is a great story to read.



A Surprising Salve for New York’s Beleaguered Cities: Refugees


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/20/nyregion/a-surprising-salve-for-new-yorks-beleaguered-cities-refugees.html

Communities across upstate New York say an influx of refugees has helped
alleviate decades-long struggles with dwindling populations and opportunities.

By JESSE McKINLEY
FEB. 20, 2017


BUFFALO — Newcomers have filled up hundreds of empty homes and apartments, and poured money and energy into destitute neighborhoods. Former churches have been reborn as mosques and refugee health centers, or found new congregants to fill pews and collection plates. Students have restocked classrooms at public schools where enrollment had been in a decades-long downward spiral. Storefront “For Rent” signs have given way to “Grand Openings.”

While President Trump has cast incoming refugees in a sinister light, the influx into the beleaguered communities along New York’s old Erie Canal has been a surprising salve for decades of dwindling population and opportunity.

The impact has been both low-budget and high-tech: Foreign-born students from countries like Iran have flocked to programs — and paid tuition and fees — at upstate schools offering advanced scientific degrees, while street-level entrepreneurs have started shops offering knickknacks and takeout for curious locals, and exotic staples and calls home for homesick émigrés.

Local businesses have found cheap, willing labor in the rolling stocks of refugees, while resettlement agencies have used federal funding to assist with their assimilation, creating work for everyone from refrigerator sellers to house painters.


And the irony is that it is the cities’ long-term struggles that have inadvertently made them popular locations to settle newcomers.




...................The stance of Mr. Brown and other upstate leaders sharply contrasts to President Trump’s remarks casting refugees as potentially “very bad and dangerous people,” bent on bringing “death and destruction” to America.