Vietnamese Leaving Biloxi and the City Feels a Loss

When they arrived on the Gulf Coast a decade ago to take up fishing, Indochinese refugees found bitter resentment among many natives here.

Now the immigrants are beginning to leave amid hard times in the fishing industry. And many of their neighbors are sorry to see them go.

The exodus ironically comes as tensions between the newcomers and native-born fishermen had sunk beneath the surface of life in this Gulf of Mexico town of 49,000 people.

Violent clashes were common when the Southeast Asians--mostly Vietnamese--began arriving in the late 1970s. Shotgun-wielding Americans claimed the immigrants broke with accepted practices and overfished the waters. Several of the refugees’ boats were burned, and two American fishermen were shot to death in one gulf confrontation.

The competition exacerbated racial tensions. Like immigrants from Yugoslavia before them, the Vietnamese launched into the seafood business with a vengeance, buying boats, working long hours, often taking jobs that others would not touch. They formed a clannish community of 5,000, with 90% of the workers involved in fishing or seafood processing.

Now escalating operating costs and plummeting prices have torpedoed the fishing industry here, and the Vietnamese are going elsewhere.

They will be leaving a place they had begun to feel was home, where Americans had gone through a change of heart.

Carroll Kovacevich, plant manager of a wholesale seafood company, remembers once having big problems with Vietnamese workers he supervised. “I would find them stealing shrimp, and things like that,” he said. “We had some violent times with them.

“Looking back and seeing the conditions they came from, I understand. Now, we’ve become good friends.” Kovacevich said.

Kovacevich and others were won over by the Vietnamese immigrants’ hard work, their dedication to family, their education and their practice of paying their bills on time. “They got out and busted their butts,” he said, “and gained a lot of respect.”

For example, he cited his mother’s neighborhood, in the east end of town, as one area that the Vietnamese “came in and rejuvenated. They were like a shot in the arm.”

Many people around here worry that losing members of the Vietnamese community will drain the Gulf Coast of needed cultural diversity and educational excellence.

Mike Olivier, executive director of the Harrison County Development Commission, cited the “successful settlement” of Vietnamese, adding that “many have done very well in the school system. You don’t want to lose that element in any community.”

“They’ve turned out to be our brightest students,” said Cliff Kirkland, director of marketing and media for the city. “They’ve applied themselves in the classroom as well as they did on the sea.”

Jude Lupinetti, director of bilingual education for the Biloxi school system, said that since the bilingual program began in 1987, several Vietnamese students in coastal Mississippi have been valedictorians of their high school classes. “There is a feeling (among non-Vietnamese) that they have earned their place in the society,” she said.

In recent years, Vietnamese and native fishermen stood shoulder to shoulder, railing against foreign competition, which experts cite as a principal affliction of the industry. They also joined forces to complain about federal regulations requiring “turtle excluder devices” that allow endangered sea turtles to escape from shrimp trawls and the increasingly stringent environmental regulations that have led to increased operating costs.

The federal Health and Human Services Department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement reports that 925,000 Southeast Asians have been resettled in this country, with California’s 365,000 leading all states.

No one knows how many of the immigrants have left the Biloxi area because of the fishing industry’s problems, but experts say the numbers are growing, and predictable.

“Money talks, especially when you have children,” said Loan Vu, program director at the Catholic Social Services migration and refugee center. “If you can’t find a job here, you’re going someplace where you can find one.”

The problems of the seafood industry affect native-born fishermen, too, but the refugees are especially hard hit because many do not have marketable skills beyond fishing. The older Vietnamese also are hindered by lack of proficiency in English, although language is less of a problem among their sons and daughters.

Many of the refugees who have contacted the refugee center say they are going to other Sun Belt states, including North Carolina, Georgia and California.

Thi Le, a 38-year-old shrimper, told a visitor, through an interpreter, that he was getting ready to head for North Carolina, where he hopes the shrimping is better. He said he will leave his wife and 18-month-old child behind, “and if the going is good, they will join me.”

Le said he came here four years ago from Vietnam because he has relatives here and would prefer to stay, but “there are no real jobs for me. North Carolina offers me more opportunities.”

Vietnamese fishermen are leaving nearby Gulfport, Miss., too. In Washington, Tanya Dang, program director of the Catholic Charities refugee service center, recently assisted two brothers from Gulfport, Minh and Tuan Nguyen, 24 and 26, respectively.

Dang quoted the brothers, who had worked as shrimpers, as saying they left the coast because they “had nothing to do.”

Not all Biloxians are sorry to see the Vietnamese go, of course. Linda Jumonville, who owns an electrical supplies business, acknowledged that the newcomers have been “good customers,” but she said: “I feel it would be more fair for our own people to be out on the water catching fish.”

But no matter who is catching fish these days, they aren’t making much money.

While Biloxians used to boast of living in the “seafood capital of the world,” their chief catch, shrimp, has become a worldwide commodity. According to David Burrage, a marine resources specialist with the Mississippi Cooperative Extension Service, the nation’s entire annual harvest of 500 million pounds accounts for only 25% of Americans’ shrimp consumption each year. The rest, much of it pond-grown, comes from countries like China, Ecuador and Thailand, where production costs are lower than those in this country.

The huge increase in the world supply of shrimp has dropped prices drastically, even as costs for fuel, ice, insurance and supplies keep rising. The price of large shrimp fell from more than $7 a pound in 1988 to $4.40 last year.

What to do to bring back the industry and the Vietnamese as well?

There is talk of pushing hard in Congress for tariffs on imported shrimp, and some angry supporters of U.S. shrimpers even suggest forcing restaurants to notify customers that they are serving foreign-grown shrimp. But few people think either proposal has much of a chance of enactment. Some boosters around here would like to see Gulf Coast businessmen grow shrimp in ponds the way their counterparts in the Delta grow catfish.

In Jackson, the state capital, Phoebe Clark, the state refugee coordinator, said a $105,000 program aims to provide job training, education and English lessons for Vietnamese refugees. But even that small sum is further stretched by transient fishermen from neighboring states who “come through and stay three months, six months to a year” and use the programs.

If Clark makes the situation seem bleak, she gets no argument from Vietnamese fishermen here.

Down on Bayview Drive, which winds along the harbor, where battered shrimp boats bob in the water next to seafood processing plants, many boat owners and their crews spend these days preparing their craft for shrimping, which will begin in the next few weeks.

Joseph Bui, 33, taking time out from replacing ladders and a boom on his blue-and-white boat, the South Seas, explained how business has taken a dive in recent years. “Four years ago,” he said, “business was fine. Two years ago, just fair. Last year was bad. I really don’t know how long I can continue.”

Bui said that if he is forced out of the business, he would resort to carpentry, although selling his boat would be a problem. Some Vietnamese, like other fishermen here, are unable to pay loans and have lost their boats to the repossessors.

Vu said some who leave shrimping and Biloxi are beginning to find jobs as diverse as working in factories, driving taxis and working in gambling casinos. Tuan Nguyen, who left Gulfport for the nation’s capital, already has landed a restaurant job.

Vu talks matter-of-factly about the pattern of leaving, a pattern as old as American immigration itself. “First, the son goes,” she said, “then the brother goes, then the parents go because they want to stick together.”

The pattern emerges here just as Biloxians were beginning to feel comfortable with the latest newcomers.

Eddie Geiser, a lumber salesman, said: “You can go over to their houses, and trust them like everybody else. Some come by here and want you to join in weddings and things. I’d probably go to something if I had the time.”

Vu said that Biloxi, which, to be sure, has some Vietnamese who do quite well without the shrimp industry, will always have a Vietnamese population. “But how large that is, it’s hard to say, unless the shrimping industry picks up again.”

Staff researcher Edith Stanley contributed to this story.