Refugee influx brings new faces to Midwest

Nate Jenkins

LEXINGTON, Neb. — Home is a shabby apartment building on the outskirts of town. Work is the late shift at a meatpacking plant.

This is Degmo Ali’s life. And it seems to have been misplaced in this rural town: Dressed in ornate African garb, the graceful 24-year-old is hard to picture on a Nebraska slaughterhouse floor.

“I want to go back,” she says, referring to her native Somalia.

While Ali dreams of returning to the country she fled as a refugee after her father was killed in the political violence that has riddled Somalia for nearly two decades, she’s comforted by the fact she is not alone in this town of 10,250 — far from it.

For years, Hispanic immigrants have moved to small and mid-sized meatpacking towns like Lexington that dot rural Nebraska, taking slaughterhouse jobs considered to be some of the most dangerous in the country. Now, a combination of factors — from a six-state federal raid that cleared illegal Hispanic immigrants from packing houses, to word-of-mouth advertising of meatpacking jobs by African refugees who want to flee big U.S. cities — is bringing Africans like Ali to towns like Lexington.

The change has sometimes been jarring, coming at a time when towns such as Lexington are still struggling to adapt to the large influx of Hispanics. In a poll last year of rural residents by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, just 14 percent of respondents said Latin American immigration had been good for rural Nebraska.

“When we first moved here, they used to look at us funny, but it’s all right now,” said Omar Abib.

A refugee like Ali, Abib recently moved to Lexington to work at the Tyson Foods meatpacking plant. After fleeing Somalia, the articulate, serious Abib, who has some college education, originally settled in Texas and slaughtered chickens.

He heard about Lexington, like many others, from a friend. He was attracted to the job, cheap living in a quiet town, and the chance to be surrounded by other Somalians.

“It’s a good town with good money. The job is hard, but the money is good,” Abib said inside a small apartment he shares with several other Somalians.

Just how many African refugees have moved to Lexington and other meatpacking towns in the state and across the Midwest is unclear. But refugee resettlement officials and local immigration specialists say there has been a sharp increase.

A few years ago, Ana Castaneda barely knew what a refugee was. An immigration specialist with Lutheran Family Services who helps immigrants in Lexington get legal status, she used to see blacks only rarely, “but now they’re everywhere.”

“I have more African refugees now than Hispanics,” as clients, Castaneda said. “I always thought there would be more Hispanics looking for benefits, it surprised me.”

“They start in big cities — New York, Columbus, Ohio — and this is really good for them,” Castaneda said. Ali, for example, came to Lexington from Seattle. “They’re kind of afraid of a lot of people and traffic and the freeways, they’re not used to that. They don’t come from big cities originally, they come from rural areas.”

The rural areas some come from are more elemental than what people who live in even the most remote corners of the U.S. can imagine. Conveniences most take for granted are sometimes completely foreign.

One problem landlords faced when African refugees first began flowing into Lexington: burning wood on top of indoor stovetops to cook food.


“They may not have seen an automobile or a telephone,” said Christine Kutschkau, the state coordinator for refugee resettlement. “Some of our refugees come from very primitive areas.”

The rapid change in towns like Lexington has been a shock to the system of services immigrants rely on, such as health care. Kutschkau said there has been a shortage of medicine for an influx of refugees who needed to be treated for tuberculosis.

“They really are unprepared for these people,” Kutschkau said.

Many of the refugees also suffer trauma from the experiences in their home countries that caused them to leave and are in need of mental-health services, she said.

The word-of-mouth advertising about Nebraska that is passed among refugees in distant U.S. cities gained steam late last year after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials raided Swift & Co. meatpacking plants in six states, including the one in Grand Island. It resulted in 1,200 arrests at the plants in December.

Word of the raids and open jobs encouraged many refugees to come to the state. And the new and growing population is self-perpetuating: As more Africans live in rural Nebraska, more Africans may come to live alongside them.

Some, however, have lived the life of Ali long enough to aspire to more than long days in a small-town slaughterhouse.

Asha Mohamed, a fresh-faced, charismatic young woman who moved to Lexington from Minneapolis dreams of going to California, maybe New York.

“It’s too hard,” she said of her life now.

(Associated Press)