From Hollywood to Utica, refugees enrich America
At Sunday’s Academy Awards, an unexpected winner emerged to steal the spotlight from Old Hollywood’s golden morass of glitz and glamor. I’m talking, of course, about refugees.
The show opened with Ke Huy Quan winning best supporting
▶ Charles Hailer of Coxsackie is a graduate student at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy. actor for his role in the evening’s other big winner, “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” In his moving acceptance speech, Quan tearfully recounted how his journey to Hollywood’s biggest stage started in a refugee camp after his family fled Vietnam in the late 1970s.
Remarkably, Quan wasn’t the only resettled refugee up for a major award. Before earning a nod for best supporting actress, “The Whale”’s Hong Chau was born in a refugee camp, later finding refuge in Louisiana. Additionally, some of Tinseltown’s brightest stars took to the red – ahem, champagne – carpet and accepted Oscars wearing blue ribbons to show solidarity and raise awareness for the United Nations Refugee Agency’s #Withrefugees campaign.
Anyone surprised that refugees helped resuscitate a longdeclining institution should add “Utica: The Last Refuge,” a new documentary premiering in Albany this weekend, to their post-oscars watch list.
Far from the California limelight, Utica’s is an archetypical Rust Belt story. From a peak population of over 100,000 in the 1960s, the city lost nearly half of its residents to industrial decline and urban disinvestment. By 2000, Utica had hit rock bottom, with only about 60,000 people living in a city haunted by empty factories, shuttered storefronts and boarded-up homes.
But Utica’s story didn’t end there. Today the city is growing, and businesses are once again investing in the area. Utica has engineered its remarkable recovery by welcoming over 16,000 refugees from around the world.
“Utica: The Last Refuge” follows the Azeins, a family of refugees from Sudan, as they settle into their new home in the Mohawk Valley, weaving their journey into the broader story of
how Utica went from New York’s Sin City to “the town that loves refugees.”
The Azeins are among the lucky 1 percent of the 25 million refugees worldwide selected for resettlement. Resettled refugees are chosen by the UN Refugee Agency and carefully vetted by the federal government before being admitted to the U.S. with permanent resident status.
The U.S. has long led the world in refugee resettlement, taking in more people fleeing violence and persecution than any other country on Earth. Unsurprisingly, New York is a top choice for resettlement, trailing just California and Texas in welcoming refugees over the past decade.
Most refugees resettled in the Empire State wind up in towns like Utica. Of the 1,775 refugees resettled in New York state last year, over 90 percent were resettled in five upstate counties: Erie, Onondaga, Monroe, Albany and Oneida. At one point in the documentary, Republican Anthony Picente, the Oneida County executive, proclaims: “We are in the business of helping people and we are in the business of welcoming people.”
Utica’s not the only town in upstate New York that’s found new life by opening its doors to refugees and immigrants. Buffalo engineered a “refugee renaissance” in recent years, growing its population by 6 percent after decades of decline. A similar story is unfolding in Syracuse, where refugee-owned businesses are taking over once-empty storefronts and “recharging” the local economy. These examples should give pause to policymakers in Albany as they ponder ways of reversing the state’s nation-leading population decline.
“Utica: The Last Refuge” serves as a potent reminder that the shining accomplishments of stars like Chau and Quan belong to a much larger constellation of impressive accomplishments from refugees, some even closer to life here in the Capital Region.