One of smallest cities that has received thousands of Somali refugees over the years is Lewiston, Maine. But, unlike the Minnesota Muslims from Somalia, this group appears to fly under the radar.
Minnesota's U.S. attorney, Andrew Luger, publicly declared in April that the state has a "terror recruitment problem," as hundreds of young Somalis have been investigated for ties to terrorist organizations overseas.
But in Lewiston, there is a recruitment of a different sort going on.
Lewiston's police chief, Michael Bussiere, made news this week when he told Reuters he was focused on recruiting Somalis to work as cops in his department.
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It's part of his "diversity" program to make the local police force look more like the community it serves, he said.
And, with the help of the U.S. State Department's refugee resettlement program, Lewiston has gone from one of the whitest cities in America to an increasingly diverse one.
"One place in Lewiston where that growing diversity is not evident is the city's 82-member police force, but Chief Michael Bussiere aims to change that amid an intense national debate over race and policing," Reuters reports.
The Lewiston-Auburn area now has a Somali population of 7,000, which accounts for nearly 10 percent of its total population. They arrived in the U.S. either as refugees or were born in the U.S. as children of refugees.
About a quarter of Bussiere's officers will become eligible to retire in the next few years, so he figures to have quite a few openings.
"We have to think about who is living here now and who's going to live here 10 years from now," he told Reuters reporter Scott Malone. "We need a department that is reflective of the demographics of the community it serves."
Lewiston, a city of 36,000 people that spent decades struggling through job losses from mill closings and a shrinking population, may seem an unlikely place for such a rebirth given that Maine is among the whitest U.S. states, Malone reports.
But, according to U.S. Census data, 8.7 percent of Lewiston's population identifies as black or African-American, a rate higher than any other city in the state and more than seven times the 1.2 percent state average.
And the Somali population is exploding not just in Lewiston. It has spread to nearby Auburn and Portland.
Many Somalis originally came as refugees to larger cities, Atlanta in particular, but then moved to Maine after hearing that it had a wider array of subsidized housing available and also was easier to get on the welfare rolls. This is called "secondary migration" when a refugee is assigned to one city but then moves elsewhere after arrival in the U.S.
The Somali influence in Lewiston is visible along the city's main downtown corridor, Lisbon Street. Shops offer Halal meat and brightly colored African clothing.
Muhidin Libah, head of a local Somali Bantu community organization, is among those Somalis who moved to Lewiston and attended one of the Lewiston Police Department's recruiting meetings last month. He told Reuters he was surprised by the outreach effort.
"People were thinking, to be a police officer, you have to be born in the U.S. ... you have to be white," Libah told the news agency. "They never thought they could be a police officer."
The diversity program takes on heightened meaning in light of race riots in U.S. cities such as Ferguson, Missouri, Baltimore and Cleveland after police killings of unarmed black men. All of the cities where violence has flared have been criticized by activists for having police forces that are "too white."
Reuters followed that theme in its article.
"Right now America is trying to reconnect with the idea of police," John DeCarlo, an associate professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and a former chief of police in Branford, Connecticut, told the news agency. "When we look like our communities, when we embrace the values of our communities, it increases the legitimacy of the police department."
"When you're trying to live in a place, then you need to look like that place," Zam Zam Mohamud, who serves on Lewiston's school board, told Reuters. "If we have Somali police officers, Somali lawyers, Somali judges ... That is a sign the community is assimilating, people are feeling comfortable."
Mohamud, 40, said she would encourage her children, in their early 20s, to consider a career in law enforcement.
A sore spot in Maine politics
Maine's growing Somali community has long served as a source of controversy in the Lewiston area dating back to 2002. That's when then-Mayor Laurier Raymond wrote an open letter addressed to leaders of the Somali community, predicting a burdensome impact on the city's social services and requesting they discourage further resettlement in Lewiston.
Protest rallies were held in Lewiston, both by those who supported the immigrants' presence and those who opposed it.
In 2012 Mayor Robert McDonald encountered a storm of media controversy when he made comments that Somalis and any other immigrants that came to Lewiston needed to assimilate into the local culture, rather than make demands that the existing culture accommodate them.
In a Sept. 11 BBC interview, McDonald said of immigrants coming to America, "You come here, you come and you accept our culture and you leave your culture at the door."
Asked by local TV news station WGME to clarify his remarks, Macdonald said, "I don't care if you're white, you're black, you're yellow. I don't care what color you are; when you come into the country, you have to accept our culture. Don't try to insert your culture into ours."
That prompted leaders of the local Somali community to respond that they were offended by the "tone" of the mayor's comments. They asked him to resign. He refused, saying his comments were taken out of context.
"Would he ask that of the other cultures in Lewiston?" Hussein Ahmed, a Somali-American community leader, told the newspaper. "Would he ask that of the Franco-Americans and of the Irish?"
McDonald stood by his comments. He is up for re-election in November and Democrat Ben Chin has already said he will seek to unseat the two-term incumbent. Chin is an activist with the Maine People's Alliance, a leftist pro-immigrant, community-organizing group.
McDonald won re-election in 2013 with broad support over former Mayor Larry Gilbert, who was largely supportive of the Somali refugee pipeline to his city although he said he thought the federal government ought to pay more to help the Somalis "integrate" into the community.
"I think the Maine People’s Alliance is the enemy of Lewiston,” McDonald told the Bangor Daily News. "I'm ready for that battle – that’s fine. The voters will have the choice of whether they want to take care of the whole city or whether they just want to take care of the downtown part of the city. That's the choice right there."
About 100,000 Somalis have been brought to the U.S. since 1990 and permanently resettled as refugees. About 99 percent of them are Muslim. They continue to come to the U.S. from Somalia at a rate of about 800 a month, fleeing the never-ending chaos and civil war in their home country.
The refugee resettlement program as a whole brings about 70,000 displaced persons to the U.S. every year, approximately half of those are from predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East and Africa.
The program also accepts refugees from Iraq, Afghanistan, the Congo, Sudan, Yemen and Burma.
The program is carried out with little to no oversight by Congress under the authority of the Refugee Act of 1980. The United Nations high commissioner for refugees selects the refugees and the U.S. is responsible for screening them before distributing them to more than 190 cities and towns across the country.
Nine private nonprofit groups contract with the federal government to carry out the resettlement work in cooperation with state government offices under the control of the governors. The actual cities and towns, called "receiving communities," have very little input on how many refugees arrive in their towns and from what countries. The program has come under increasing criticism of late for its lack of transparency and the government has been dealing with "pockets of resistance" in places like Spartanburg, South Carolina, St. Cloud, Minnesota, Manchester, New Hampshire, Athens, Georgia, and Lynn and Springfield, Massachusetts.
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