LEWISTON – Since last fall, when Mayor Larry Raymond made waves by discouraging further Somali migration to the city, a key development has been obscured in the ensuing racially charged maelstrom of protest, counterprotest and international attention.

The mayor got his wish: Large numbers of Somalis have stopped coming to Lewiston.

City officials report, and Somali residents confirm, that after an 18-month period when 1,100 Somalis moved to Lewiston, a drop-off that began around Labor Day has been sustained in the months since the mayor’s Oct. 1 letter shook the city.

There are a number of reasons for the decline, but Somalis both here and outside Maine say a perception has taken hold of this overwhelmingly white city as unwelcoming and unsafe to newcomers.

“There’s not many people coming because they have seen the TV, and they think it’s not safe to come here,” said a 23-year-old named Asha, who feared retaliation and asked that her full name not be used.

In his Oct. 1 letter, the mayor acknowledged that U.S. residents can live wherever they desire, but raised concerns that the influx was straining municipal resources.

“The Somali community must exercise some discipline and reduce the stress on our limited finances and our generosity,” he wrote.

The letter came as an affront to Somali community leaders, whose relationship with the city’s previous mayor had been cordial.

“Everything was going really smoothly, and then the letter came out,” recalled Roda Abdi, owner of A&R Halal Market on Bartlett Street. “There was really no problem before that.”

Omar Jamal, a Somali activist from St. Paul, Minn., said Lewiston had been an attractive destination for Somalis, many of whom were leaving Atlanta and other big cities, because of its reputation for safety.

“The first thing that every Somali I talked to would mention was a very low crime rate,” he said.

The flap over Raymond’s letter brought reporters from CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times to the banks of the Androscoggin River, and views of Lewiston changed.

Roda Abdi said friends in Europe, Africa and Asia have seen news coverage and called to make sure she was safe.

Somalis elsewhere in the United States, many of them civil war refugees, also developed negative views of Maine’s second-largest city.