A lesson in allaying immigrant tensions

Two years ago, not a few heads turned when a handful of African women with brilliantly colored head scarves appeared in this small city carved out of the Maine pine forests. Before long, hundreds of Somali immigrants had flocked to Lewiston.

Tensions surfaced. Last fall, Lewiston's mayor urged Somalis to dissuade others from joining them. Then an out-of-state white supremacist group came to town.

But now, thanks to a grass-roots response, the city is rebounding. While some reservations and hostilities linger, the townsfolk have rallied around several key efforts: campaigns to educate the ethnic groups about one another, programs that target specific needs such as language skills, and, perhaps most important, smaller cultural gestures, like culinary exchanges.

Indeed, Lewiston is one example of how a community can work through immigrant tensions and become a more vibrant place to live. "Immigrants are breathing life into sleepy towns across the country," says Stanton Wortham, a professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania.

Throughout the US, immigrants are heading to old industrial cities and rural towns, in many cases bypassing historic welcome centers such as New York City or Los Angeles. They are drawn to cheaper housing, safer streets, and better schools.

Many city leaders, desperate to reverse negative population trends, see an opportunity with influxes of immigrants. And while making a community multicultural can cause growing pains, the very lack of experience with diversity can offer an opportunity to build relationships on a clean slate.

"The entrenched power battles in urban settings" aren't usually found in small-town America, says Mr. Wortham.

Lewiston was the epitome of industrial USA some 100 years ago, when French-Canadians came in droves to work in the textile mills along the Androscoggin River. When the mills shut down, however, newcomers stopped coming.

Yet fast-forward to 2001, when the first Somalis - the majority of whom had initially been resettled as refugees in Atlanta or Minneapolis - arrived in Lewiston. Over the next year, their number would grow to 1,100.

Kader Said was among the first to arrive, after relocating from Chicago. "At first they looked at you like you were a stranger," he says, but feeling like an outsider was a small price to pay. Chicago was too big, and the single father worried that his teenage children would get wrapped up in gangs or drugs. "Lewiston was more manageable. Somalis take care of each other here."

Frenchy Langlois was one resident taken off guard. On the way to open his barbershop last winter, Mr. Langlois - a bear of a man - was startled by young people standing in door frames in the first rays of morning. "I didn't know what was going on. I thought something bad was going to happen," he says. He learned later they were waiting for the mosque - an abandoned store - to open. "Now those same people are my customers."

Page: 1 | 2