WBEZ | demographics

By the numbers: Refugees in Illinois

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 14:28:00 -0600

A listener’s question prompted our recent examination of refugee resettlement patterns in Chicago. That inquiry looked at how, and why, refugees have come to occupy apartments mostly in far North Side neighborhoods. It also got us wondering: Who were these refugees, anyhow?

Well, we can’t answer that exact question because nobody keeps precise records of how many refugees live within Chicago’s city limits. But we found that there are good data at the statewide level. Once we tumbled down that rabbit hole, we learned a lot — not just about Illinois’s shifting refugee population, but also about recent world history and shifts in American foreign policy.

Here’s the data in chart form. It’s a moving timeline that shows how many refugees arrived in Illinois each year since 1980. For each year, the refugees are sorted by country of origin:

Refugee arrivals in Illinois by country of origin (FFY1980-FFY2012)
Notes on the data

Early resettlement history

The data on the bar chart start at 1980, when Congress passed The Refugee Act, the legislation that formalized the US resettlement program. But that’s not to say refugees did not arrive earlier. “The refugee program came into public consciousness in a big way because of the drama of the fall of Saigon and the effort to rescue a lot of people who had helped us in Vietnam,” said David Martin, a law professor at the University of Virginia. “But it did build on much smaller programs that had been around before that.”

In particular, the US had been admitting refugees from Eastern Europe after World War II. “They came through Western Europe,” explained Martin. “They were processed by voluntary agencies in a cooperative relationship with the US government to do some screening and bring them to this country.” Among them were Hungarians, Czechs, and Poles, and large numbers of Jews from Eastern European countries. American non-governmental organizations that claimed ties to those nations, or to the refugees’ religions, took the lead in bringing them to the US and resettling them. The federal government played a small role.

Martin said the fall of Saigon in 1975 challenged the US government to assume a larger role in the refugee resettlement process. The sheer number of refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia dwarfed the inflows from earlier years, demanding a more orderly intake system. And refugees from these nations could not tap into existing communities of co-religionists or compatriots, as could their Eastern European predecessors.

Today the US State Department works with the Executive Office to determine how many refugees will be allowed in each year, and from which regions of the world. The Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services manage the intake and placement processes. Non-governmental agencies, known as “voluntary agencies,” perform the on-the-ground work of finding apartments for new arrivals and providing them other assistance needed for a fresh start.

The Cold War and refugee patterns

As you scroll through the chart, you’ll notice a few striking things in the years before 2000. First, the number of refugees that Illinois resettled in the early 1980s was markedly higher than any time since, yet the they arrived from very few countries. The primary primary points of origin at that time were Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the USSR and Cuba. See a pattern there?

“One way of viewing the refugee program, particularly since 1955, is that the program was influenced by the Cold War,” said Dr. Edwin Silverman, Chief of the Bureau of Refugee and Immigrant Services at the Illinois Department of Human Services. “Refugee resettlement was mainly focused on those refugees fleeing communism or communist regimes.”

Check out what happens in the chart in 1989, where you can watch the number of refugees from the former USSR suddenly jump — from 731 to nearly 3,000. The number remains high even after the 1991 dissolution of the USSR, and the trend doesn’t stop until 1996, when the refugee count from the former USSR plummets abruptly to four. The change is largely an accounting artifact: There was a lag between when the USSR broke up, and when the refugee processing records reflected that. The lag appears to have ended in 1996, when the former USSR number drops, and a slew of new countries suddenly appear in the chart. Many of those are the post-Soviet states, registering their own numbers for the first time.

Another notable change happened in 1996, when Illinois started receiving refugees from many more African countries. The reason? The US had tapped out the pool of refugees coming from the Cold War countries. “We had been processing those populations for 15-20 years,” said Kelly Gauger, Deputy Director of the Refugee Admissions Office in the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration at the U.S. State Department. Finally, there was room in the program for refugees from other nations. “We started to work more closely with the UN High Commission for Refugees, and they started referring more African cases to us for our consideration,” said Gauger.

Another significant development in the 1990s was the increased flow of refugees from the conflict that embroiled Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Between 1996 and 2001, this was the largest group to come to Illinois.

The 9/11 lockout, then a new norm

Perhaps you noticed the major dropoff in 2002 and 2003. Those are the only years since the Refugee Resettlement Act that Illinois admitted fewer than 1000 refugees. This is no anomaly, as the same dip occurred across the country.

“There were significantly increased requirements for refugee security checks in the wake of September 11th,” said Gauger. “So those two years reflected the difficulty in pushing tens of thousands of new security checks through the system.” The dropoff had significant financial impact on local resettlement agencies because they receive federal funding on a per-refugee basis. But those difficulties were somewhat resolved by 2004, Gauger said, when the refugee resettlement process worked through kinks in the new security procedures.

More recently, Illinois has hovered around 2,000 refugees per year, a figure lower than those of the early ‘80s, but it’s still greater than the lull of 2003. This, too, mirrors a recovery and stabilization at the national level during this decade. But the picture of the refugee program is significantly different from its early years.

“The program has just become less political and more humanitarian in nature over the last ten to fifteen years” said Gauger, alluding to the time when refugee status was mainly designated for those fleeing communist regimes. Today, most refugees are referred by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees, which deemed them to have a legitimate fear of persecution in their home country.

This has meant that in recent years, Illinois and other states have been resettling refugees from a greater diversity of countries. Many local resettlement agencies have struggled to develop the language competency required to assist such distinct groups. This year, the largest number of refugees to Illinois will be coming from Iraq, Burma, and Bhutan.

Notes on our data

The data come from the Refugee Processing Center, a division of the U.S. State Department. Each year represented is the federal fiscal year, meaning October 1 through September 30. This is particularly notable when you consider the aforementioned dip in refugees in 2002; That federal fiscal year began just days after the September 11 attacks.

The refugee numbers from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in 1981 and 1982 are estimates. While the original data record total refugees to Illinois from East Asia in those years, they are not broken down by country. These estimates are based on the proportion that each of those countries represented in the total East Asian intake to the U.S. during those years.

Another interesting artifact of the data: You will find, among the listed countries, “Amerasian.” According to Martin, “Amerasian” was a designation mainly applied to children of mixed heritage after the Vietnam War. “With a large presence of US troops there, there were a number of children who were born to basically the Vietnamese women, fathered by U.S. citizens,” he explained. “Because of their parentage, they were sufficiently different in appearance that they suffered a lot of discrimination, many of them did.”

Characters of color in 'The Hunger Games' are buoys in a sea of whiteness

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 14:38:00 -0500

Leaving a screening of The Hunger Games this weekend -- a movie I found mostly fun and enjoyable -- I walked away with a singular thought: The film was unnecessarily overwhelmingly white.

So imagine how stunned I was when I learned that the actual racial controversy with the film is that it’s true to its author’s descriptions of specific characters.

It seems that some of the movie’s fans were surprised -- and, in some cases, turned off -- upon discovering that character Rue and Thresh are black, in spite of the fact that the book clearly describes them as such. Many were also annoyed that Cinna was played by Lenny Kravitz, when author Suzanne Collins had very clearly described him in a race neutral way; in other words, his was a role that could technically be played by an actor of any color.

My complaint? That The Hunger Games was colorblind in the casting of its heroine, Katniss Everdeen, originally described as having “straight black hair” and “olive skin,” and put the excellent blonde-haired/blue-eyed Jennifer Lawrence in the role (with her hair dyed), but lacked the nerve to be color-blind in some of its other casting.

Sure, Cinna is black now, but the opportunity was there. Why not colorblind cast more of the other tributes? We hardly get to know them in the movie so it doesn’t really matter what they look like. There’s one Asian tribute in the film...I think; [spoiler alert!] you can catch a glimpse of him out of the corner of your eye in the training scenes, and he’s immediately killed. But why not some of the others? How about Latino or Middle Eastern or even just ambiguously ethnic tributes?

But I’m annoyed about more that: Other than those characters specifically designated as “of color” in the book, the general use of non-white racial characters in The Hunger Games, especially in crowd scenes, is tokenistic and, frankly, insulting.

Hear me out: The story takes place in a post-apocalyptic North America (more precisely: the U.S.A.). That’s a lot of geography. But that expanse is shrunk dramatically when we look at precisely what kinds of locales the novel encompasses.

The Hunger Games opens up in District 12, an impoverished mining province. Director Gary Ross seems to be using Appalachia as a model. That’s fine -- there’s plenty of mining, poverty and white people in Appalachia. In fact, about 83 percent of the population is white and, according to the U.S. Census, people in Appalachia are generally whiter than the non-Appalachia population in the states that make up the region.

So what’s my beef? Well, then, why bother to sprinkle the District 12 crowd scene with one or two singular minority faces? And the point here is singular: The minority actors stand alone, unconnected, unpartnered, as if each and every one of them is the head of a one-person household. Being so terribly few, wouldn’t they perhaps seek each other out, at the very least at a moment like the Reaping, when a child among them is chosen to be sacrificed?

The movie then moves to the Capitol -- a gleaming futuristic city on the water. Here the population is colorfully decorated, effete, and much better off than in District 12. And yet the racial situation remains the same: The population is overwhelmingly white, with a sprinkling of individual people of color -- mostly blacks and Asians (I couldn’t pick out any Latinos), racial buoys in a sea of whiteness.

What city in North America is this? The actual capital of the U.S., Washington D.C. is only about 31 percent white. New York is 44.6 percent white (and 36 percent of New York is foreign-born, with the top ten contributors being the Dominican Republican, China, Jamaica, Guyana, Mexico, Ecuador, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, Colombia and Russia). Los Angeles is 49.8 percent white, Chicago 45 percent, Houston 49 percent and Philadelphia 39 percent.

Those are the top five cities in the U.S. -- and in each and every one of them, whites are a minority. In other words, it might make sense in these cities -- and perhaps in some futuristic version of one of them -- to see groups, families, couples, gaggles of kids of color. (The only kids spotlighted in the Capitol are two white kids, also a very selective rendering of what a multi-racial city would actually look like.)

In fact, in the movie’s one chance to focus on a population of color -- when we see Rue and Thresh’s District 11 -- we're introduced to a citizenry that is still majority white, though noticeably darker. Some folks on fan sites complained that it was disturbing to see the “black” district be the one that erupts in violence. I was floored that District 11 was seen that way by some viewers, given the scarcity of people of color, and even more surprised that the nature of the violence was missed entirely: District 11 is the cradle of the revolution in The Hunger Games.

The use of people of color in The Hunger Games is so deliberate and unnatural -- clearly a strategic integration rather than an organic result -- that it can't help but feel artificial and awkward.

Reasons behind Humboldt Park's changing demographics

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 14:18:00 -0500

Humboldt Park has historically been the heart of Chicago’s Puerto Rican community. But the actual Puerto Rican population here began thinning in the 1980s. That was partly due to whites moving back to the city from the suburbs.

Along with new populations came higher rents and property taxes. That priced out some folks with lower incomes. The latest census data suggest Puerto Ricans are still leaving. To find out more Eight Forty-Eight talked with WBEZ’s West Side reporter Chip Mitchell.

Music Button: Arroyo, Hernandez, Martinez, Rodriguez perform Freddy Hubert's "Little Sunflower"

Hispanic youth now largest-growing demographic in U.S.

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 22:39:00 -0600

Young Hispanics are now the fastest-growing part of the U.S. population, according to new data released in the U.S. Census Bureau's Demographic Analysis.

Kenneth Johnson is a demographer at the University of New Hampshire. He said in Chicago, the Hispanic population makes up the majority of the city’s population growth.

“Chicago is losing many of its other populations,” he said. “The growth of the Hispanic population through natural increase is one of the few new sources of growth for the city of Chicago and an important area of growth for the Chicago metropolitan area.”

The Demographic Analysis shows the nation’s population was roughly 308 million as of April 1. That estimate falls in the middle of the population analysis. The high end of the analysis reaches up to over 312 million people.

The results of the demographic study will be used to help analyze the 2010 Census results due out later this month.