Indochinese Refugee Settlement Patterns in Garden City, Kansas

Abstract

Over 800,000 Indochinese refugees have been resettled in the United States since 1975. Despite the initial attempts to disperse the refugees throughout the U.S. the processes of family reunification and secondary migration have resulted in the refugee population becoming increasingly concentrated in the western United States. Previous studies on refugee settlement patterns have focused either on the national level or, specific urban areas. This paper addresses this imbalance by identifying the factors that explain the refugee settlement pattern within Garden City, a small town located in rural western Kansas. Within Kansas, beginning in the early 1980's, the three small southwestern communities of Dodge City (1980 pop. 18,041), Garden City (1980 pop. 18,256), and Liberal (1980 pop. 14,911) have witnessed an influx of approximately 4000 Indochinese refugees by 1986. Two thousand of these refugees reside within Garden City, and a thousand each in Liberal and Dodge City (Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services, 1986). Most of the refugees are secondary migrants (i.e., they have previously resided in another area of the United States) who have moved into the area to find employment among the region's beef packing plants (Broadway, 1985). Since the early 1980's, all three communities have experienced a massive expansion of employment opportunities in the beef packing industry. In 1981, the world's largest beef packing plant opened in Holcomb, seven miles west of Garden City. The plant is owned by Iowa Beef Packers, and during the mid-1980's it employed over 2400 persons, one-quarter of whom were Indochinese refugees. The opening of this plant and the expansion of others between 1980 and 1985, one-third of whom were Indochinese (Kansas Department of Economic Development, 1987). This rapid population increase within the region resulted in over 6000 persons moving to Garden City has created major problems in the provision of housing, education, health This content downloaded from 207.46.13.28 on Tue, 30 Aug 2016 04:58:12 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 128 TRANSACTIONS OF THE KANSAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE care and other basic services. Schools, hospitals and employers, for example, have begun to meet some of the needs of the refugee community by providing bilingual workers and English-as-a-second-language courses, while the housing shortage has been alleviated to some extent by the expansion of several mobile home parks within the area. The sudden influx of refugees has dramatically altered the region's social geography. However, little is known about the specific factors which affect refugee settlement within small towns such as Garden City. Moreover, those studies which have been concerned with Indochinese refugee settlement patterns have either been concerned with the national level or with specific urban areas (Desbarats and Holland, 1983; Gordon, 1980; Montero, 1979). This paper is an attempt to redress this imbalance by identifying the factors that explain the refugee settlement pattern within Garden City, a small town located in a sparsely populated rural area of the country.