A documentary that focuses on the ever-present question of immigration and refugee resettlement in upstate New York is beginning a weeklong run in Albany starting Friday. “Utica: The Last Refuge” is a poignant exploration of how Utica embraced refugees to turn around its falling population, fill vital jobs, and create a new future. The film also shows how political decisions trickle down to individual lives in the Mohawk Valley. Our old pal Dave Chanatry is a co-producer of the film.
Well, let's go back. I know this movie was made a couple of years ago. How did you get involved in the project?
Well, the project originated with the director Loch Phillipps and a cinematographer that he works with frequently, Adam Bedient, who’s a central New Yorker. I had known Loch for years; through other projects and other collaborations we had done. He'd been up to my classes at Utica. And so, when they were interested in the project, Loch called me to sort of sound me out on it, you know, did I think this was a viable story to tell and what did I know about it? As luck would have it, I had done and you have put on your air a number of stories about refugee resettlement in Utica, various aspects of it. So, I was able to answer Loch’s questions and then we just took it from there.
How did Utica become so invested in refugee resettlement? Can you set the scene for us of how the city has been changing in recent decades?
Sure. Well, Utica, like many of the cities along the old Erie Canal had hit a rough patch. Some would say it's still in that rough patch, I would say it's emerging from that. A city that had over 100,000 people in 1960, had lost 40% of its population. So, we were down to about 60,000 by to the year 2000, and it really was the influx of successive waves of refugees through the State Department's Refugee Resettlement Program that helped to turn it around. The biggest, not the first, but the biggest influx was actually Bosnians as the former Yugoslavia fell into civil war and split apart. We had in one year, I think it was 1996, two thousand Bosnian refugees came to Utica and in a couple of years after that, we had another two thousand. So, that was the biggest of several waves. It really started, actually, after the Vietnam War and a group of clergies who wanted to do something and sponsored a family, sponsored some people to come in. That was in the late 1970’s and then that grew into the program we have today. We have a number of, thousands of Russian refugees who have come over the years, Ukrainians prior to everything that's going on right now from the old Soviet Union, under the Lautenberg program. They were some of the initial groups that came in and then of course, Bosnians were the big one, and then people from Myanmar, Burmese and Qur'an from the country formerly known as Burma. So, you know, they're just been these groups that have come in, in number and brought with them their resilience, their skills, their desire to be able to make a life for themselves, and that has helped Utica make a life for itself.
One thing I really enjoy about this film, as a project, as a as a piece of journalism and a time and place, is that it shows you the step-by-step process for a family of refugees to be resettled in the U.S. and it really separates it from the political debates that are so often defined by buzzwords and that kind of thing. And it shows what it's like to start over in a new country when you don't have any money, and you've left with the clothes on your back. So, the question I have for you is, what's the success rate for resettling refugees in Utica? And how do you see the changes brought by refugees?
Well, one of the ways you see it, is just to drive around the city and it's quite apparent. Certainly, in certain parts of the city in East, Utica, and in Corn Hill, where you can see homes that have been renovated, particularly by Bosnians, there's a certain architectural style that you see all over the place. But you also see it in small businesses and you see it in the schools, you see it every year at Proctor High School at graduation, they list the top 10 students and number of them have these names that you know are from refugee families. You said, “what's the success rate?” and I don't know that I can put a number on it. I can tell you that right now there's roughly 20% of the population of Utica are refugees or children of refugees. So, former refugees, I should say. I mean, some of them have been here for 25 years, or 30 years or more at this point. So, a great part of the population now is refugee and you can measure some of that success in what they do. There's always questions and you're right to bring up the current political debate and we should distinguish; I think this is critically important to distinguish when we're talking about refugees. In the Refugee Resettlement Program, that's a distinct program and a distinct group of people from what we're hearing about migrants coming up through Mexico from Central America crossing the border. Some of whom are applying for asylum, which they have the legal right to do. Others are presumably just crossing the border and hoping to get in. That's a very different issue.
These people in the Refugee Resettlement Program are folks who are legal immigrants through this program. They have been identified and gone through a pretty vigorous vetting program, from wherever they happen to be and the US has identified as a place of resettlement for them. So, the broad in that way. It's really important to think about this as a process over time. If you take any given moment and say how many refugees came in this year through this program, and what's the cost to the United States, or to the local area, it's a front-loaded cost. But these people stay and over time, they begin to work and then contribute through various means, including, frankly, expanding the tax base and a huge impact on real estate. So, just to throw a few numbers at you, in the film you've seen that we had a study done by an economist at Hamilton College, Paul Hagstrom, who said that he found that 7 years was the point at which refugees began to turn around, instead of receiving benefits beginning to contribute and at 13 years, it became a net positive, and then it's a positive all the way out from there. There's been many other studies that have looked at similar questions and have come up with similar answers.
There's been a long-term study that looked over the course of 30 years, over a million refugees, and it found that of those 1.1 million, I think it was, 35%, had mortgages, 67% are naturalized citizens, they are in the labor force at a higher rate than other Americans. They generally are earning less. That's initially because they're taking lower wage jobs when they get here. They're expected to have a job within six months when they get here. But over time, they're contributing back in taxes, such that over 20 years, a third study has found that, that they've contributed over $20,000 more in taxes than what they've received in benefits. An additional point there is that it's the next generation. It's the second generation that are among the largest contributors to the US economy and the tax base.
So, the film partially deals with the immigration wars of the Trump administration and the way the Muslim ban, which was put in place, sort of affected local operations like the one featured in this film in Utica, among many other issues. And I found myself wondering how are things operating today under the Biden administration, which has had, in some ways, a different policy toward refugees and immigrants, although not totally. How are things running today in Utica?
Well, they're running better. I can't speak for the Center, the folks at the Refugee Center, but I think they would say that there's still a long way to go to get back to where things were. You're right, that during the Trump administration, and the shooting of this film, coincidentally, started just about at the same time as the Trump administration. So, all of the cutbacks we saw on those programs, we were there filming at the Center while they were having to deal with that, and how would they deal with that? The Biden administration established a cap. The President in consultation with Congress sets a cap every year for what the total number that we would take, the max number of refugees we would take, and the Biden ministration has set that for this year at 125,000, but we're nowhere near that and we won't get anywhere near that for years. Last year, the 25,465 refugees were resettled into the United States, the year before that it was 11,400. So, there has been more progress towards the end of the year. So, that number is improving. But the system, there's a bottleneck because the system essentially was broken. The pipeline was broken of people coming through the organizations, nonprofit organizations known as VOLAGs, set up overseas and here in the U.S., like the Lutheran Immigration Service, which is the one that works in Utica. About a third of the offices and centers were closed or suspended operations during the Trump era. They didn't have people coming through, so therefore, they didn't have money to run the programs and people left, people were laid off, they closed down. So now they're in the rebuilding process.
It occurs to me, Dave, you'll be showing the film in Albany for a week. There are other cities that share a lot in common with Utica in New York, and in other places in the Northeast. Are other places learning from Utica as experience and maybe rethinking their own approach to becoming a refugee pipeline city?
I can say that the refugee program in Utica is specifically the work at the Center. The people at the Center have had done a fantastic job and one of the things they do there is everything is integrated under one roof. So, you not only have English language classes, and you have social services, and you have job training, you have traffic safety classes, and how to put a car seat in a car, and everything's done in one place, which makes it easier. As the program changed over the last several years, they really focused on providing workers in some industries that are looking for people, helping them find employees. So are other cities, emulating that? Well, other cities know that and other cities have certainly had discussions with Shelly Callahan at the Center. I know the folks in Syracuse are certainly in touch with them, and Rochester and Buffalo. I don't know about Albany. I cannot say to the extent that they're saying “Oh, yeah, let's do what they're doing in Utica,” but they're well aware.
And I just want to say for people listening who might be interested in learning more about the film, we did interview the filmmaker, and we have that interview with Loch available at wamc.org and we'll link to it with this interview with Dave Chanatry. Dave, thank you very much for taking the time. Congratulations on the project and we're excited to have it in town.
Great. Well, thank you very much, and thanks for having me and encouraging your audience to go see it.
“Utica: The Last Refuge” is screening for the next week at The Spectrum in Albany. The film is also the subject of a talk on the University at Albany Downtown Campus on Monday at 4 p.m., featuring immigration officials, the film director, and The Center’s Executive Director.
