Tiny Town in Kansas Among Sites : Refugee Study Planned for U.S.

After the fall of Saigon in 1975, refugees from Southeast Asia began arriving in the United States, many settling in places like Garden City, Kan.

Then in 1981, when IBP opened a large meatpacking plant just outside of Garden City, they started coming in droves, drawn by the plant’s good wages. Southeast Asians--most of them from South Vietnam but a few from Laos and Cambodia--now make up about 8% of the town’s population.

Local social service workers know that most of the immigrants come from small fishing villages or large cities along the coast of Vietnam. They came to the United States under the sponsorship of family, friends or church groups and most spent time at a Philippines camp first, learning the basics of American life.

Many Live in Trailer Parks

They also know that many of the immigrants work from 3 p.m. until midnight at the IBP plant, where they earn a starting wage of $6.40 an hour and get health insurance after three months. Many live in trailer parks around the town and almost all send their children to local schools.

But no one has ever examined how the Asian immigrants have adjusted to Garden City, and how the town, including its 20% Latino population, has adjusted to them, social workers say.

With a grant from the Ford Foundation, six researchers from Kansas and Colorado universities will have that chance this summer.

The researchers will look at the town’s schools, workplaces, neighborhoods and social and political groups--including churches, the police department and city government, says Donald Stull, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas who heads the research team.

Isolated Part of Kansas

Garden City, a town of about 20,000 in the isolated southwestern corner of Kansas, may seem out of place in the study, which will dispatch research teams to study recent immigrants to Chicago, Miami, San Francisco, Houston and Philadelphia.

But Stull says it’s a misconception that small towns don’t attract immigrants.

“These communities are much more widespread than most people think,” he said.

For example, refugees from Southeast Asia are starting to show up in some small Iowa towns to work at meatpacking plants opened by IBP in recent years, one in Storm Lake, population about 9,000, and the other in rural Louisa County.

The Ford Foundation project is different from other studies because it focuses on the relations among different racial groups, instead of just one group, Stull says.

Quick Release of Results

The Ford researchers also are required to release their results as soon as possible, probably by next fall in Garden City’s case, to community groups that can use them. For example, Stull says, the researchers may help the local school district develop teacher-training materials.

In many ways, Garden City has been good to the Vietnamese immigrants, says Ken Erickson, refugee coordinator for the state Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services who also is a member of the research team.

Vietnamese teen-agers play with Latinos and Anglos on the boys’ high school soccer team. The community college offers English-language courses at the trailer parks, and the school district provides bilingual classrooms.

The town’s hospital has an employee who speaks Vietnamese and a local nonprofit group broadcasts a Vietnamese cable television program.

“All the service agencies have tried hard to accommodate people,” Erickson said.

Lack Vietnamese Speakers

Still, the Police Department is without an employee who speaks Vietnamese and the city has struggled to find employees who speak Vietnamese.

Jessie Palacio teaches English to seven Vietnamese men in the trailer home of one in the morning before the men go to work at the beef-packing plant.

But a great deal of her time is spent teaching them basic survival skills, she says.

She will be taking them to tour the city’s police station. In the past, she has taught her students how to pay utility bills and dial 911.

“We do a lot of social service things,” Palacio says.

The class is offered by the Garden City Community College’s Adult Learning Center. Palacio, who has taught at the center for five years, says many Vietnamese immigrants join an English class for a while, but then drop out, mostly because work at the plant is so tiring. Most end up coming back.

Want to Speak to Americans

“They realize they need it,” she says. “Most of them say they want to be able to speak to Americans.”

Her students range in age from 30 to 68. Three have been in the United States less than three years, and three for more than six years, but only two know enough English to go in a store and buy something without assistance, she says.

Palacio speaks no Vietnamese herself, but she does have years of experience as a bilingual teacher’s aide in Garden City’s public school system--teaching Latino students.

“I don’t speak a word of it,” she said with a laugh. “They speak to me in broken English and I just listen and pick up what they say. It’s just something that comes from experience.”

Garden City’s school district takes every new teacher it hires on a tour of the IBP beef-packing plant so they can see firsthand the “backbreaking” way many of their students’ parents earn a living, says Dr. Tulio Tablada, director of bilingual services for the 6,000-student district.

Bilingual Programs

More than 600 students--547 in elementary school and 73 in junior and senior high--were enrolled in the district’s bilingual and English-as-a-second-language programs last spring. Those numbers don’t include students who have moved out of the bilingual classrooms into other classrooms.

“We try to get them out as soon as we feel they can handle it,” Tablada said.

Tablada says the district’s biggest problem is attracting bilingual teachers from big cities in other parts of the nation, especially the East and West coasts.

The high school has two Vietnamese teachers and a Vietnamese counselor. But at the elementary level, the district has only seven teachers who speak Spanish and none who speak Vietnamese. Instead, they employ teacher’s aides who speak Vietnamese.

Recently, the district announced a scholarship program to train recent Vietnamese immigrants to become teachers.

“We’re planning to grow our own,” Tablada said.