English key to jobs for Somalis in Maine

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LEWISTON – Sahra Habib still speaks English in short bursts, with pronouns missing and verb tenses sometimes mangled. But, after a job search in which she was rejected by four employers, there is at least one Americanism she can now repeat from memory.

“Don’t call,” she said it goes, “We’re going to call you.”

Hers is the story of Lewiston today, as sky-high unemployment among the city’s 2,500 Somali refugees is adding a difficult new chapter to one of the most unlikely stories in U.S. immigration.

Five years after African immigrants began flocking to this former mill town, city officials say they still are not qualified for many of the jobs the city has to offer. In response, Lewiston is enforcing one of the country’s most aggressive policies aimed at speeding assimilation: Somalis here often must take English classes, or risk losing some welfare benefits.

“ESL,” said assistant city administrator Phil Nadeau, summing up the city’s English-as-a-second-language philosophy, “is everything.”

The city’s Somali influx began in 2001, when refugees who had fled a brutal civil war in Africa began migrating again, leaving larger American cities in search of safer streets and cheaper housing. They found both in Lewiston, a city of almost 36,000 in Maine’s lower midsection.

In late 2002, after the Somali population had reached 1,000, then-Mayor Laurier Raymond set off a national controversy by asking Somali community leaders to stop the influx. “Pass the word: We have been overwhelmed,” he wrote.

Since then, Somalis have continued to flow into Lewiston: The most recent arrivals are about 300 Somali Bantus. The African immigrant community’s presence shows up here in colorful hijabs worn by female passers-by and in the Mogadishu Store and the Red Sea restaurant, which face each other across downtown’s Lisbon Street.

But, for all that has changed about this struggling old town, one thing has not.

“Without English, no job,” said a woman who gave her name as Salima Maalim A., 20, who was talking with Habib, 30, in the Mogadishu Store.

Indeed, Lewiston is too small and too poor to have many of the landscaping, construction or housekeeping jobs that immigrants take in larger cities. The Bates bedspread factory, which gave generations of French-speaking Canadian immigrants their first paychecks, is closed, leaving only a hulk at the edge of downtown.

Instead, what Lewiston can offer is employers such as TD Banknorth, a financial services company that has moved into part of the old Bates building. There, even filing work requires employees to read the names on the files. Out of more than 1,000 employees in Lewiston, about six are Somali, a Banknorth spokeswoman said.

To the south, in big-city Portland, officials say the jobless rate among Somali immigrants is less than 10 percent. In Lewiston, “it’s easily over 50 percent,” Nadeau said. He said the city does not have an exact figure because it has trouble tracking the demographics of the Somali population.

The solution, city officials think, is to compress the traditional arc of an immigrant family’s assimilation – from low-skill jobs to English fluency and the service economy – into a single generation.

To that end, Somalis who apply for “General Assistance” – a few hundred dollars a month in local funds for housing, food and other expenses – are usually required to take English classes.

“If they don’t do it, they’re not eligible,” said Sue Charron, who administers the program. She noted, however, that exceptions are made for those who cannot attend classes because of disabilities or having to care for young children. She said only a few Somalis have been taken off for noncompliance.

Other welfare programs around the country require participants to work, perform community service or attend employment-related training. But immigration experts say it is rare for any jurisdiction to have an across-the-board English requirement, and they question how much good such a program would do.

“For most people, solitary English language acquisition is not the way to get them into work quickly,” said Jonathan Blazer, a lawyer at the National Immigration Law Center. He said it is more common to require vocational training, instead, or to teach job skills and English together.

Many Somalis interviewed in Lewiston recently said they welcome the English requirement. But others questioned whether it works as intended. Ismail Ahmed, 33, said many students went just because they had to, and learned little.

“They are just coming to pass time,” said Ahmed, who is an example of Lewiston’s difficult job environment. He said he received a master’s degree in leadership studies from the University of Southern Maine – and then had to move to Baltimore early this year because he still could not find a job he wanted in Lewiston.

The difficulties of the path that Lewiston has chosen for itself are nowhere more evident than in the English classes themselves. One recent morning at the town’s bunkerlike Adult Learning Center, teacher Kate Brennan was going through the basics of English sentence construction. She asked Weheliye Ali, 21, to make a sentence out of “I” and “grow” in the past tense.

“I grew up,” Ali said after a pause.

“Where did you grow up?” Brennan asked, looking for a slightly more complex sentence.

“I grew up in Somalia,” replied Ali, who said later that he wanted to learn English because he had found it hard to understand his boss at a local hotel.

At times, Brennan’s students seemed to be firmly on the track that Lewiston officials have in mind for them, talking about plans to work as a nurse, become a shop owner or even earn a doctorate. Asked to form a sentence using the word “GED,” meaning the high school equivalency General Educational Development test, one student came out with “The GED is on the way to higher education.”

But then came the next vocabulary word, “scared,” and another sign of the huge adjustment that Lewiston is hoping these students can make in one lifetime.

When Brennan asked the class “What makes you feel scared?” one student responded, “When I see the lion.”

Brennan looked puzzled. Then, from across the room, another Somali student spoke up.

“In Maine,” she told her classmate, “is not lion.”