The Changing Face of American Immigrants

The faces of American Immigrants are changing. This year, thousands of refugees are being flown in from Somalia (from NY Times report). They have been flown to 22 cities across the United States, the first wave of one of the government's largest recent refugee resettlement efforts. By the end of next year, officials plan to resettle nearly 13,000 Bantu, who were enslaved and persecuted for generations in Somalia until civil war scattered them to desolate and violent refugee camps in Kenya in the early 1990's.
Over the past decade, State Department officials have increasingly shifted their focus toward Africa as wars there have displaced millions of people. The end of the cold war has resulted in a sharp decline in refugees from the former Soviet Union and Vietnam. Today, Africans are among those filling the gap.

It is well known the Somalian refugees come from desolate circumstances and are rejoicing in the escape from their homelands. Mr. Yarrow, one new Somalian Immigrant said: ''I want to work. I want to learn English. I want to leave all my problems behind in Kenya.'' His enthusiasm is clear, but challenges await him. The Bantu here are practicing Muslims in a country that has become increasingly ambivalent about Arab and Islamic immigrants. Mr. Yarrow and his family do not speak English and cannot read or write in their own language. They are farmers looking for jobs anywhere they can find them.

Some Somalians found work in Meat Packing plants. Two recent articles indicate they found work at Tyson Foods in Tennessee and at Agriprocessors in Postville.

AP Reports: SHELBYVILLE, Tenn. - Workers at the Tyson Foods poultry processing plant in Shelbyville will no longer have a paid day off on Labor Day but will instead be given the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr as a holiday. According to a news release from the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, a new five-year contract at the plant included the change to accommodate the hundreds of Somali Muslims who work at the plant .
Eid al-Fitr — which falls on Oct. 1 this year — marks the end of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting.Union leaders say implementing the holiday was important for the nearly 700 Muslims, many of them Somalis, who work at the plant that employs a total of 1,200 people. The Shelbyville Times-Gazette newspaper quotes union spokesman Randy Hadley as saying the negotiating team felt this change was "extremely crucial, since this holiday is as important to Muslims as Christmas is to Christians." The newspaper also quotes the union as saying two prayer rooms have been created at the Shelbyville Tyson Foods' plant " to allow Muslim workers to pray twice a day and return to work without leaving the plant."

Des Moines Register reports: Postville, Ia. – African immigrants are adding to Postville’s multi-cultural story, but their chapter could wind up being short. Scores of people from Somalia have arrived here in recent weeks to work at the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant. Most of them are young men who are filling jobs previously held by hundreds of Guatemalan and Mexican workers seized in an immigration raid May 12. Several of the Somalians said they came to the United States legally as refugees from the chaos and death that civil war brought to their east-African homeland. They said many of them were living in the Minneapolis area when labor-recruiting firms or word-of-mouth recommendations drew them to Postville. Several expressed displeasure with what they found here, and predicted they and most of their countrymen would leave.