Refugee worker arrives in Lewiston

LEWISTON – A woman whose parents were immigrants and who was a multicultural officer for Canada starts her work today helping Maine’s second-largest city adjust to the arrival of about 1,100 Somali refugees.

The atmosphere has grown tense in the city of 36,000 since February 2001, when Somalis started arriving from other U.S. cities.

City officials were criticized after saying the new arrivals put an economic strain on the city. Now, a white supremacist group is planning a rally in Lewiston on Jan. 11.

The new refugee coordinator, Victoria Scott, does not claim to have all the answers on how to help the former mill city cope with such sudden diversity and change, but she’s up for the challenge.

“This is a job I’ve been planning for all my life,” said Scott, 49. “This doesn’t have to be a bad thing for Lewiston.

“The long-term goal is to have economic development, equal opportunity and prosperity across the board. Every citizen of Lewiston deserves that, and the people of Maine deserve that,” Scott said.

Scott, who was selected from more than 20 applicants and is an immigrant herself, seems well-suited for her new job as the city’s manager of immigrant and refugee programs.

The daughter of Slovak immigrants, she was raised in an ethnically diverse neighborhood in Windsor, Ontario, and worked as a multicultural officer for the Canadian government.

She helped start a newspaper for the Filipino community in Virginia and Washington, D.C., and coordinated a management research project involving China and Argentina. She became a U.S. citizen in 1995.

Scott’s job is funded by a two-year, $100,000 grant from the Maine Department of Labor.

Assistant City Administrator Phil Nadeau said he chose Scott for many reasons, but was especially impressed with her work with the Multicultural Council of Windsor in 1982.

At the time, the car-making region was going through economic difficulties and tensions were high between longtime residents and recent immigrants who included Vietnamese refugees.

Scott coordinated community-building initiatives, including a cultural festival with representatives from 30 ethnic groups.

“The combination of sudden ethnic diversification and economic flux made things incredibly challenging for that community,” Nadeau said. “She was in a particular situation in which you needed to be creative, you needed to be resourceful and you needed to be able to communicate in a way that was going to have a positive outcome.”

Somali elders said they decided to move to Maine because of its low crime rate, rural setting, inexpensive housing and relatively good schools.

Scott’s arrival follows the first meeting last week of a task force created to forge a coordinated response to Maine’s growing diversity.