Dayton (OH) looks to immigration to revitalize city, create jobs

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Source: Dayton Daily News

While Dayton lost 14.8 percent of its population between 2000 and 2010, bringing the city’s population to a 90-year low of 141,527, according to the U.S. Census, there are thousands of people coming to Dayton. During the same 10-year period, 5,170 foreign-born people came to Montgomery County, 1,727 to Dayton, according to the Census. “People worry that (immigrants) are a drag on economy,” City Commissioner Matt Joseph (D) said. “But it’s been proven time and again that they help the economy. More people working means more jobs and a stronger economy. Which means more jobs for everybody.”

(Tom) Wahlrab (executive director of the city’s Human Relations Council) said the benefits of having an immigrant-friendly community include: greater occupancy and development of housing, creation of new businesses, creation of new jobs and safer neighborhoods.Seventeen Meskhetian Turk — also called Ahiska
Turk — families, stateless since Stalin moved them from the Russian-Turkish border to central Asia in the 1944, arrived in Old North Dayton in 2005. Low-cost housing was plentiful. Pooling their resources from minimum-wage jobs, the families bought vacant or abandoned houses and rehabbed them. Other Meskhetian families who had resettled elsewhere in the U.S. began migrating to Dayton.

lidze remembers when Soviet troops descended on his people’s land in Georgia along the border with Turkey on Nov. 14, 1944. The villages were told they had two hours to pack a bag for each family. Old men, young children and women,
100,000 of them, were packed into cattle cars. For 45 days, the old men, women and children rode the unheated cattle cars across Central Asia during the brutal winter.

At 85, Chakhalidze still recalls the bodies of the dead being thrown off the train into the drifting snow. Of the 100,000, 40,000 died. When the trains arrived in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, the survivors were indiscriminately
parceled out to villages. After Stalin’s death, they prospered for awhile, until the breakup of the Soviet Union unleashed a pogrom against the Meskhetians by the native Uzbeks.

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