So successful are Cleveland's recent refugees, an economist says the city would be wise to welcome more of them. Watch video
CLEVELAND, Ohio-- When a series of flights brought him from Kathmandu to Cleveland in the fall of 2008, Nar Pradhan was free of a refugee camp for the first time in 17 years. He wasted not a moment.
Within weeks, the earnest 27 year old found work at an Indian restaurant and commenced the family enterprise. Later arriving brothers and sisters fanned out across a recession-weary city, stringing together part-time jobs and pooling meager savings.
In early 2011, Nar and his siblings bought Flavors of India, the North Olmsted restaurant that had hired him as a dishwasher, and added Nepali flourishes to the menu. Recently, they opened a South Asian grocery on Cleveland's west side, continuing a striking ascent from poverty that is not uncommon for families like theirs.
A new study reveals that refugees -- the world's most desperate immigrants -- tend to do well in Cleveland and often out-achieve their U.S.-born neighbors over time.
Eye-opening revelations include the fact that refugees are more likely to hold a job than native-born residents and more likely to send their children to college. After two years in Cleveland, researchers found, only 8 percent of refugee households are still receiving public assistance, a level of self-sufficiency that beats national norms.
The study by Chmura Economics & Analytics, which is being released Monday, challenges stereotypes and may illuminate a new economic development strategy. Far from burdening a community, refugees tend to assimilate quickly, find work, buy houses and often start businesses.
"Basically, we are business minded. That's our caste," Nar Pradhan explained in a soft Himalayan accent. "Cleveland is perfect for us. All of our family is here. All of us are employed."
The study's lead author, economist Daniel Meges, cautions the refugee community is minute -- numbering fewer than 20,000 people in Greater Cleveland -- and its economic impact would not match, say, a major new manufacturing plant.
Still, he said, he was surprised by the scale of economic activity generated by a little-known class of immigrants and concluded a depopulated city would be wise to welcome more of them.
"For a rather small investment, most of which is federal dollars, you bring in people who quickly find jobs and spend money," Meges said. "These are people who would not be coming here otherwise and who tend to stay. By and a large, our refugees do OK."
Looking for a place to start anew
Refugees are legal immigrants who can never go home. Typically, they fled a homeland in turmoil and, in the judgement of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, would face persecution or worse if they returned.
The Pradhan family escaped Bhutan and pogroms that targeted their ethnic group. They lived corralled with thousands of other Bhutanese in refugee camps in neighboring Nepal, where their father died and where his children grew up and waited years for a country to take them in.
The United States accepts a limited number of refugees each year -- 58,179 in 2012 -- and works with community-based nonprofit agencies to see them started in a new life.
In Greater Cleveland, the resettlement efforts fall to Catholic Charities, the International Services Center and US Together, an affiliate of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.
Recently, those three groups teamed up with several nonprofit and faith-based groups to form the Refugee Services Collaborative of Greater Cleveland.
With a grant from the Cleveland Foundation, the collaborative commissioned a study of the refugee community to gauge how it was faring and to plan how they could best help.
Researchers limited their survey to the 4,500 refugees who arrived since 2000 and to Cuyahoga County, where most of them live. From the study emerged unexpected discoveries.
- Seventy-five percent of the county's refugees over age 16 are employed, compared to 57 percent of the general population.
- Most refugee families have more than one wage earner, allowing a decent standard of living even at minimum wage jobs. Nearly 250 refugees have bought houses.
- Refugees are more likely than U.S.-born citizens to start a business and to create a business that succeeds. They founded at least 38 businesses here in the last decade.
- Refugee households and refuge businesses combined contributed $45 million to the regional economy in 2012.
"Our hunch was this was true," said Brian Upton, the assistant director of Building Hope in the City, a church-based group that works with refugees and that is part of the collaborative. "They are not takers. They are not a drain on our community. They are very entrepreneurial."
Why not welcome more?
Upton argues the study shows the city should try to attract more refugees, to stoke the economy and to bring culture and vitality to depressed neighborhoods.
Kafaya Mohamed is widely known as the best cook in the Somali community of Cleveland. She and her son, Ahmed, just opened Kafaya's Kitchen on West 117th Street near the family's home. Cleveland, once a national gateway for refugees, has become less so in recent years. The local nonprofit agencies resettled 598 refugees last year. Per capita, that trails the numbers resettled in Pittsburgh, Columbus, Buffalo and Akron.
The U.S. State Department is always looking for communities willing to take more refugees and refugees like to know where they are welcomed. Cleveland could lift the lamp of welcome, Upton and others say.
"We'd like to improve our good numbers and make them great numbers," said Janus Small, one of the organizers of the collaborative. "Because it's good for the city in so many ways."
Tom Mrosko agrees with her view but cautions patience. He directs the Office of Migration and Refugee Services of Cleveland Catholic Charities, the region's busiest resettlement agency.
Cleveland-area refugees may do better than most because they arrive in modest numbers, Mrosko said. In a region that attracts few immigrants overall, refugee families get more attention from the schools, clinics and libraries that help assimilate new Americans.
He also credits the personal strengths and resilience of the refugees, who often possess more skills than people realize.
The study touches upon the story of Vladimir, a refugee from the former Soviet Union who started in Cleveland as a home health aid and eventually founded his own construction company. In Russia, he was a doctor.
Mrosko worries accepting too many new refugees at once would stretch limited resources and allow some to flounder.
"It has to be incremental. It has to be steps," he said.
In five years, the three local resettlement agencies in Cleveland could probably double their combined caseloads, to 1,000 or so arrivals a year, he said. A drop in the pond, yes. But he promises ripples.
A city of opportunity
He said this over a plate of goat meat and rice and beans at Kafaya's Kitchen, which opened last month in a long-vacant storefront next to Halloran Park on West 117th Street in Cleveland.
Mrosko had greeted Kafaya Mohamed at the airport seven years ago, welcoming a penniless widow with seven children.
He said he sensed a drive and work ethic that has apparently been absorbed by her children.
Daughter Dina, a junior at Lincoln West High School, came home from school and went right to the kitchen to handle cooking while mom was at citizenship class. The eldest, Ahmed Galeb, 22, was in the dining room, greeting and serving the cab drivers and freight handlers who drove over from the airport for meals like they knew in Somalia.
Galeb had just finished an eight-hour shift delivering packages for Federal Express and would be working late at the family restaurant. He shrugged. It was where he wanted to be.
A thin, serious young man with a happy smile, he encouraged his mother to start the business. He's plotting a home-health transportation service with his younger brother.
He said he wants to be a businessman like his father, who did not survive the refugee odyssey. He sees in Cleveland boundless opportunity.
"Since I got to America, I was thinking about this," he said, as African languages resounded around him. "I knew it was going to work."
The Refugee Services Collaborative of Greater Cleveland will release its study "The Impact of Refugees in the Cleveland Area," at a press conference at 9:30 am Monday in the offices of Migration and Refugee Services of Catholic Charities. The address is 7800 Detroit Avenue (St. Augustine Towers), Cleveland. A reception with coffee and pastries begins at 9 a.m.