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Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town. Warren John St.
Читать онлайн.Название Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007380947
Автор произведения Warren John St.
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
In the 1980s whites began to leave the apartments in Clarkston. The migration paralleled the white flight from other old residential neighborhoods close to downtown Atlanta. Crime was rising, and newer suburbs farther from town were roomier and more ethnically homogenous. Middle-class whites in Clarkston, flush from Atlanta’s economic boom following the opening of the airport, could afford to move. Vacancies rose and rents fell. Crime surged. Landlords filled the apartment complexes through government housing programs, which brought in African American tenants, and simultaneously cut back on upkeep, allowing the complexes to fall into disrepair. Pretty soon, Clarkston, or at least the part of Clarkston consisting of apartment complexes, found itself caught in a familiar cycle of urban decay.
In the late 1980s, another group of outsiders took note of Clarkston: the nonprofit agencies that resettle the tens of thousands of refugees accepted into the United States each year. The agencies—which include the International Rescue Committee, the organization founded in 1933 by Albert Einstein to help bring Jewish refugees from Europe to the United States, as well as World Relief, Lutheran Family Services, and others—are contracted by the government to help refugee families settle in to their new lives. They help find the families schools, jobs, and access to social services. But first they have to find a place for them to live.
From the perspective of the resettlement agencies, Clarkston, Georgia, was a textbook example of a community ripe for refugee resettlement. It was not quite thirteen miles from downtown Atlanta, a city with a growing economy and a bottomless need for low-skilled workers to labor in construction, at distribution centers and packaging plants, and in the city’s hotels and restaurants. Atlanta had public transportation in the form of bus and rail, which made getting to those jobs relatively easy even for those too poor to own cars, and Clarkston had its own rail stop—at the end of the line. With all those decaying apartment complexes in town, Clarkston had a surplus of cheap housing. And though the town was cut through by two busy thoroughfares, Ponce de Leon Avenue and Indian Creek Drive, as well as a set of active railroad tracks, it had enough navigable sidewalks to qualify as pedestrian-friendly—important for a large group of people who couldn’t afford automobiles. The apartment complexes were within walking distance of the main shopping center, which was now drooping and tired, with a porn shop across the parking lot from a day-care center, but its proximity to the complexes meant that residents could get their food without hitching a ride or taking a train or bus.
The first refugees arrived in Clarkston in the late 1980s and early 1990s from Southeast Asia—mostly Vietnamese and Cambodians fleeing Communist governments. Their resettlement went smoothly, and none of the older residents in town raised any objection, if they even noticed these newcomers. After all, the apartments were still a world away from the houses across town. So the agencies, encouraged by the success of that early round of resettlement, brought in other refugees—survivors of the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo, and oppressed minorities from the former Soviet Union. World Relief and the International Rescue Committee opened offices in Clarkston to better serve the newcomers, and resettled still more refugees—now from war-ravaged African countries including Liberia, Congo, Burundi, Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea. Between 1996 and 2001, more than nineteen thousand refugees were resettled in Georgia, and many of those ended up in or around Clarkston. The 2000 census revealed that fully one-third of Clarkston’s population was foreign-born, though almost everyone suspected the number was higher because census estimates did not account for large numbers of refugees and immigrants living together in Clarkston’s apartments. In a relatively short amount of time, Clarkston had completely changed.
NEARLY ALL OF Clarkston’s longtime residents had a story about the moment they noticed this change. For Emanuel Ransom, an African American who had moved to Clarkston from Pennsylvania in the 1960s and who served on the city council, it was when he picked up on a sudden spike in the amount of garbage the town was producing each year. When he investigated, he found that the singles and nuclear families that had inhabited the town’s apartment complexes were being displaced by families of refugees living eight or ten to an apartment—and producing a proportionate amount of garbage, which the town had to haul away.
“The city didn’t realize that we were being inundated with people coming in, because it was a gradual thing,” Ransom said. “Nobody understood.”
For Karen Feltz, a chain-smoking anthropologist and city council member, it was when she noticed a Liberian woman in her neighborhood walking up and down the street with a jug on her head, cursing at the devil. After seeing the woman talking to herself on several occasions, Feltz began to fear she might be suffering a psychiatric breakdown. She approached the woman’s husband, a minister, who shrugged off her concerns.
“He said, ‘She can talk to the devil if she wants to,’” Feltz recalled, with a laugh. “I thought, Oh my God—I’m living in the twilight zone!”
To many Clarkston residents, it felt as if their town had transformed overnight.
“You wake up one morning,” said Rita Thomas, a longtime home-owner in Clarkston, “and there it is.”
THE CHANGE IN Clarkston was an accelerated version of demographic changes taking place all across America because of immigration and refugee resettlement. But in at least one way it was unique. While some towns such as Lewiston, Maine, and Merced, California, have attracted large numbers of a single ethnic group or nationality—in Lewiston’s case, Somalis, in Merced’s case, Hmong, and in countless cities in the Southwest and West, Latinos—Clarkston was seeing new residents who were from everywhere. If a group of people had come to the United States legally in the last fifteen years, chances are they were represented in Clarkston in perfect proportion to the numbers in which they were accepted into the country at large. The town became a microcosm of the world itself, or at least of the parts plagued with society-shattering violence. And in the process, in less than a decade, little Clarkston, Georgia, became one of the most diverse communities in the country.
INDEED, WHILE THE freight trains continued to rumble through town a dozen times a day, little in Clarkston looked familiar to the people who’d spent their lives there. Women walked down the street in hijabs and even in full burkas, or jalabib. The shopping center transformed: while Thriftown, the grocery store, remained, restaurants such as Hungry Harry’s pizza joint were replaced by Vietnamese and Eritrean restaurants, a Halal butcher, and a “global pharmacy” that catered to the refugee community by selling, among other things, international phone cards. A mosque opened up on Indian Creek Drive, just across the street from the elementary and high schools, and began to draw hundreds. (Longtime Clarkston residents now know to avoid Indian Creek Drive on Friday afternoons because of the traffic jam caused by Friday prayers.) As newcomers arrived, many older white residents simply left, and the demographic change was reflected in nearly all of Clarkston’s institutions. Clarkston High School became home to students from more than fifty countries. Fully a third of the local elementary school skips lunch during Ramadan. Attendance at the old Clarkston Baptist Church dwindled from around seven hundred to fewer than a hundred as many white residents left town.
While many of the changes in Clarkston were incremental and hard to notice at first, other events occurred that called attention to the changes and caused the locals to wonder what exactly was happening to their town. A group of Bosnian refugees who had come from the town of Bosanski Samac came face-to-face in Clarkston with a Serbian soldier named Nikola Vukovic, who they said had tortured them during the war, beating them bloody in the town police station for days. (They eventually sued Vukovic, who was living just outside of Clarkston in the town of Stone Mountain and laboring at a compressor factory for eight dollars an hour, and won a $140 million judgment, but not before Vukovic fled the United States.)
A mentally disturbed Sudanese man who was left at home with his five-year-old nephew went into a rage for reasons unknown and beheaded the boy with a butcher knife. He was found by a policeman walking by the railroad tracks