How did Norfolk handle Refugees?
By Bobbi Mlynar
Originally published 01:50 p.m., November 19, 2007
Updated 01:50 p.m., November 19, 2007
EDITOR’S NOTE: As Emporia debates how to adjust to an influx of Somali refugees, The Gazette examines the experience of Norfolk, Neb., which faced similar challenges.
The city of Norfolk, Neb., continues to try to work its way through an economic dip that resulted when Tyson Foods closed its Norfolk plant.
The end of Tyson in the city of 25,000 dealt a double blow, with the loss of the meatpacker’s $32 million payroll and the exodus of about 1,000 people who left to take jobs elsewhere.
“In a town of 25,000, that’s a big deal. We haven’t fully recovered economically from that loss, but we’re doing ok,” said Dan Mauk, president of the Norfolk Chamber of Commerce. “Things instead of growing have kind of stagnated.”
Norfolk had come to rely on the economic boost that immigrants, refugees and others had contributed when they came to work for Tyson.
“Sales tax receipts are only going up a percent or two rather than the three or four or five percent that they had gone up,” he said, comparing economic circumstances now to the growth the city had been experiencing.
“After the plant closed, virtually every one of the Africans left,” he said. “We lost 1,000 population. We still have a big Latino population, but the Africans left.”
Grocery stores and other businesses in the area had stocked goods and services that appealed to immigrants and refugees, as well as to townspeople.
Immigrants came first
Norfolk had grown in diversity beginning in the early 1990s, when Hispanic workers began immigrating there and going to work primarily for Tyson.
“We were about as white a town as you could have until the early 1990s,” Mauk said.
Initially, the city experienced “that clashing cultures kind of problem,” he said.
Norfolk responded by organizing forums and an immigration task force.
“We did some outreach to landlords to let them know what the laws were because we had some people taking advantage of the situation,” he said.
The task force also worked with the Hispanics.
“We had tried to find and nurture some leadership within the Latino community, and things kind of settled down and was pretty comfortable. A lot of Latino businesses opened up,” he said. “There was some baggage with the influx of immigrants, crime increased a little.”
Influx of refugees
The immigration task force disbanded as problems began to be solved and the Hispanics were absorbed into community life. After a lull of several years, refugees from Sudan and Somalia began arriving.
Local government and school officials were not included in plans to bring in the refugees, and they found themselves scrambling to cope with the needs of both the refugees and the home community.
Officials at first thought the refugees were being sponsored by a local church. The truth was that the refugees came in and the members of that church, seeing a need, did try to work with them.
“As we dug into it, that church was getting some bigoted flack for helping,” Mauk said. “They found a church that had maybe a little more Christian heart than the other ones and (the church) took them under their wing.”
The community again pitched in to work with the newcomers to help simplify their transition into Norfolk and ease the townspeople’s acceptance of them.
“It took the community and the leadership of the community that was willing not to be racist and bigoted,” Mauk said. “I feel kind of proud. The rare letter to the editor that was clearly somebody that hasn’t read their Bible very closely would speak out. But it wasn’t very often.”
The immigration task force that had disbanded was resurrected and reshaped.
“We brought it back together, and social service agencies, Salvation Army and some other related agencies that provided social services,” Mauk said.
“Getting ahead of the problems you know you’re going to have” was the best advice Mauk said he could give.
Housing
Because of poor communication from the entities sending Sudanese and Somali refugees to Norfolk, Mauk said the influx at first wasn’t handled as well as it could have been.
“We could have helped settle them in a more intelligent fashion,” Mauk said. “But what happened, they went to some of the most run-down apartments. ... They just took over some of these, and we had landlords who were taking advantage of them and not putting money back into the properties and the properties got run down very quickly.”
Culture clash apparent
“It was primarily that the new refugees didn’t know what our culture allowed,” he said. “We’d have some neighbors get all in a tizzy because (a refugee) was slaughtering goats in the back yard.”
On the other hand, he said, during certain seasons, long-time community members were doing the same thing to deer they had shot.
Finding help
Townspeople created the New American Center to help refugees find the services they needed.
“If they needed housing, we plugged them in; if they needed short-term gap financing ... we found it,” Mauk said.
Townspeople also arranged for them to have a building that could be used as a mosque. The building was provided for six months at no cost, with the understanding that the Muslims would take responsibility for its finances after that time.
Norfolk leaders became involved in working with refugees, again to determine who the leaders were and how best to work with them.
“It was easier to find leadership within the African refugee communities than the Latino community,” Mauk said. The tribal customs of many Somalis relied heavily on the use of elders to make decisions and settle disputes. Those leaders usually were clearly defined and readily accepted.
“For us, they were easy to work with, once they understood that we really wanted to understand their problems and really wanted them to be comfortable there.”
Education
Mauk said that Norfolk found that the African refugees, who came in with little or no job skills, did not want to remain in low-paying jobs. They enrolled at Northeast Community College to study English and take courses to improve their employment opportunities. And culture clash in the male-dominated community surfaced again, this time in a humorous way, when two Somali men misunderstood how to handle homework.
“They didn’t understand their role. Two Somali men walked into the secretary’s office and gave her their homework and told her to type it up, and they’d be back tomorrow,” Mauk said.
Health
Norfolk developed a free clinic to provide health care — especially preventive health care — to the refugees. Preventive treatment, he said, kept the refugees from using ambulance, emergency room, or hospitalization services that otherwise might have been used at a higher cost.
“We got the hospitals and doctors together and chased a little grant money,” Mauk said.
The clinic served several hundred people each month.
“They were mostly the people who hadn’t gotten on the company health care yet,” he said. “We didn’t really see any inordinate amount of illness. That forward-thinking way of treating it was probably in the long run a lot less expensive than if they hadn’t run it.”
Students in grades kindergarten through 12 seemed to be “pretty well integrated,” rather than segregated, Mauk said, adding that at one point, 39 different languages were spoken in Norfolk schools.
Tyson and religion
While the Sudanese, who primarily were Catholic, had religious habits more compatible with the Norfolk residents, the Somalis, who were almost exclusively Muslim, had rituals that needed to be performed more frequently.
“Tyson was a little bit better at managing the needs of the workers than IBP was,” Mauk said. “They let the Muslims have their prayer times during work, and they gave them a space in the building which they considered their mosque.”
Prospects
Tyson’s closing had come as a shock to Norfolk, Mauk said. About 30 days prior to Tyson’s announcement, the company had brought city leaders to the plant to talk to them about the successes the company was having and to tell them that Tyson at Norfolk had reached full employment.
Mauk said that about a month later, he got a call at 7:30 a.m., advising him that the plant would close. The plant handled only the processing and packaging of meat; slaughtering was done elsewhere and carcasses were hauled in. Because the plant was located within the city limits, Mauk said that a slaughtering plant could not be added. Starting from the ground-up outside the city was not a consideration.
The city and its residents have missed Tyson’s $32 million payroll and the money its employees spent on goods and services, as well as income, sales and property taxes. Small and locally owned businesses have struggled to stay open, and some have failed.
Mauk remains concerned about the future of Norfolk and other cities because the number of available workers is dwindling. Without an available work force, it is difficult to attract business and industry.
“I think we did what every American town ought to do. If you look at demographics, absent immigration, we haven’t grown in Nebraska for 15 years. ... We’re going to simply run out of workers here pretty soon,” Mauk said. “I think a lot of towns that are faced with this challenge (refugees and immigrants) ought to look at it as an opportunity. ...
“It won’t be the incentives or who’s got the nicest industrial parks, it will be who’s got the workers.”
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