San Joaquin Valley Braces for New Influx of Hmong

A new wave of Hmong refugees appears to be headed for the San Joaquin Valley, daunting news in a heartland already struggling to absorb 65,000 members of the most ill-prepared immigrant group ever to land in America.

About 3,000 Hmong, a tribal people from the highlands of Laos, are expected to arrive this summer from refugee camps in Thailand to be reunited with families. But local officials, familiar with the difficulties of those already here, wonder if there will be enough jobs or government help for the new immigrants.

“We’re talking about people with tremendous needs, people who have never lived outside a refugee camp,” said Ernest Velasquez, head of Fresno County Social Services. “Their whole world view is through the prism of a guard. They think rice comes from bags. . . . We’re going to have a very tough time providing services to them.”

The new Hmong refugees are expected to pose extra problems because many have been trying to avoid coming to America for two decades, lingering in the Thai camps and hoping that the Communist government in Laos would be overthrown so they could return home. They have read too many letters from relatives in Fresno and Merced about gangs and breakdowns in the fabric of Hmong society.

“They lived long enough in the camps to know what’s going on in America,” said Pao Fang, executive director of the Lao Family Community of Fresno. “Many of them don’t want to come. They fear gangs, drive-by shootings, lots of conflict in the family.”

The Hmong were slash-and-burn farmers with almost no concept of Western ways when the CIA recruited them from their isolated mountain villages in the 1960s to fight the Viet Cong. Their experiences in the United States include soaring success and bitter failure. Hmong colonies in Fresno and other cities have produced high school valedictorians and respected strawberry growers, as well as second-generation welfare dependents and opium dens.

Officials estimate that seven out of 10 Hmong families remain on welfare a decade after resettling in the San Joaquin Valley. And because these families typically are large in number--averaging nearly 10 children per family--the cost of this dependency is especially high on the counties.

Velasquez, for one, contends that the clustering of Hmong in Fresno, Merced and Stockton underscores the failure by the federal government to spread the burden of refugee resettlement. In an attempt to nudge them off welfare, he said, Washington has slashed local funding in education and job training for Southeast Asians who have been here five years or longer.

“We’ve gone from $3.2 million in funding a year to $900,000,” he said. “Washington has decided to let them come to Fresno and let the local folks take care of their needs. There’s no private network to help them, so the burden falls to the county.”

Hmong community leaders here agree that the 3,000 newcomers, who could arrive as early as July, will pose a bigger challenge for government and private social service agencies, hospitals and school districts. But this group has one advantage over those who came before: There is a well-established Hmong community to help ease the transition.

“Many of them have no skills at all,” Fang said. “But we’ve been through this transition before. Some will move quicker off of welfare than others. It depends on the support from their families here. For those who want to work, there will be jobs.”

While public and private groups are trying to prepare for the influx, no one can say for sure how many Hmong will come and the date of their arrival.

Last year, Thailand announced that it was closing all its refugee camps, leaving 4,500 Hmong holdouts with a dilemma: Either come to the United States and be reunited with family members in the San Joaquin Valley and elsewhere or take a chance with a Laotian government that drove them into exile.

State Department officials say these Hmong have lived in limbo for so long that they have an almost pathological fear of making a final decision. Signs have been posted throughout the two camps announcing that this is the last chance to come to America. About 98% of the 4,500 Hmong initially signed up for the resettlement program, but several hundred have withdrawn their applications.

“This is the same type of delaying tactics they’ve been using for years,” said a State Department official involved in the refugee program. “They’re still not convinced that this is the last offer, the very last offer. We’re going to play hardball to get that message across.”

Officials believe that most, if not all, eventually will choose to be reunited with family in Fresno, Merced and other large Hmong communities in Minnesota, Wisconsin and North Carolina.

“We’ve been told to expect somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 new Hmong,” said Anna Phillips, director of health services for the Fresno Unified School District. “Unfortunately, there’s not any way to prepare because we don’t know exactly what schools they’ll be impacting.

“It’s business as usual until the child walks through the door. If you get 30 at one school, you deal with those 30.”

Social workers say that the newcomers will probably move into a crowded, crime-ridden section of southeast Fresno that has become a kind of Hmong ghetto.

After two decades of dealing with the Hmong, Velasquez suggested an answer to their dependency on welfare that the federal government is not equipped to try. He cites French Guiana, where he says government officials give the Hmong a parcel of land instead of a monthly check.

“The government there said, ‘Go for it,’ and now they’re the No. 1 growers of vegetables in that country,” he said. “Here we’ve put them in the urban jungle surrounded by hostile people and handed them a welfare check. We’ve confused them, and then we want them to become self-sufficient.”