Primary refugees in Garden City?

Mae La is the largest of seven refugee camps along Thailand’s border with Burma (the country renamed Myanmar by the military dictatorship). Many of Garden City's Burmese residents say they arrived in the U.S. after spending years in camps like this one. (Source: flickr.com)

I heard a surprising fact today: Refugees have been relocating to Garden City for a long time, but now many are coming directly here, to raise their families and hopefully find work at the Tyson plant in our backyard.

That from Velia Mendoza, the refugee coordinator at the Adult Learning Center at Garden City Community College. I spoke with her and several other staff at the refugee center located there, which the federal government designated earlier last year to track the movements and whereabouts of these families in this corner of the state, including in and around Dodge City and Liberal. (A little late on the ball, I would add, on the fed’s part.) Dubbed ‘primary refugees,’ many of these newest families of Somalian and Burmese descent are moving to Garden City directly after they are brought to the U.S., in part because they hope to find work at the local beef-packing plant and mostly because many already know some of the other hundreds of families that already live and work here, Mendoza said.

And that raises several additional challenges for both the community college staff and the other organizations that help these families, such as the local SRS, Catholic Social Services and private church groups, because unlike ’secondary refugees’ (many of the Somalian families in Garden City relocated here after the Emporia beef-packing plant shut down) they are completely new to American life and culture. On top of that, Tyson isn’t hiring as much as it used to, the staff added, and many heads of households are out of work currently. The center’s staff is having an awfully hard time helping them find work in the area — with the language, cultural and limited-education barriers for several breadwinners, finding work outside meatpacking is extremely difficult.

“So now what?” Hector Martinez, the director of the Adult Learning Center asked today. Good question. I don’t know. But there are several issues to be explored here about Garden City’s newest residents, and I plan to explore several of them over the next few months as the center continues to try to meet its ever-increasing demand for services. (The center offers ESL and driving classes, translation assistance, and more). Stay turned for many of these stories, and I welcome input below about what kinds of questions you have, as well.

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