The Haven
Ithaca, in central New York state, has become a hub for refugees from around the globe. Photo by Lewis Liu via Shutterstock
Refugees escaping crisis in places like Myanmar, Venezuela and Afghanistan have found a welcoming community in a scenic university town in central New York state
Editor’s Note: This story was first published by Documented, a nonprofit journal chronicling New York’s immigrant communities. Documented and palabra are part of the URL Media Network.
Once the government soldiers began firing into crowds of civilian protesters, May Sabe Phyu said she knew there was no choice but to flee Myanmar.
“In Myanmar nowhere is safe,” said Phyu, a prominent women’s rights activist in the Southeast Asian country. “The military can easily find you. If they arrested me, I could end up living in prison for long years.”
Since the start of the coup and through last fall, at least 1,000 civilians, many of whom participated in peaceful protests, were killed by the military, according to a count by the Reuters news service.
So a year ago and without her husband, son and two daughters, Phyu arrived in Ithaca, New York — 7,971 miles away.
Phyu is now part of a sprawling community of refugees, asylum seekers and dissidents who have settled in Ithaca, a town seemingly in the middle of nowhere in New York state’s Southern Tier. Home to two universities nestled in New York’s scenic Finger Lakes region, the city has become an unlikely destination for those fleeing dangerous situations from Myanmar to Afghanistan, Venezuela and Syria.
Well before the 2021 coup, Phyu said she was sued for organizing an International Peace Day parade without seeking permission from local authorities. The trial lasted 14 months. Ultimately, the case was dropped under an amnesty order by Myanmar’s president, and because it received a lot of scrutiny from the media and international community, Phyu said.
Despite the constant threat of law enforcement and the option to go into hiding at the time, Phyu continued her advocacy, but she always knew she could face far worse than a lawsuit.
A port in the storm
Recently, Ithaca has become one of the major hubs in New York for refugee resettlement. In December the city welcomed 10 Afghan refugees fleeing the Taliban after the fundamentalist group captured Afghanistan amid the U.S. military withdrawal. They joined a growing community in Ithaca, which, In 2016, had begun accepting 50 refugees a year, according to the Ithaca Journal. New York State resettled 820 refugees during the 2020 fiscal year. The majority of refugees — 520 — were resettled in upstate New York.
Ithaca — approximately 223 miles from New York City — may seem like a strange place for a refugee to start a new life. Looking like a time capsule of the 1980s with relics like the Center Ithaca food court and many boxy, modernist apartment buildings in the Collegetown neighborhood, Ithaca is a progressive city situated in one of the few politically red swaths of New York State; Ithaca’s congressional district has consistently voted for Republicans since 2012. The district voted for former President Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. Ithaca and Tompkins County, on the other hand, are liberal bubbles. In the 2020 election Tompkins was the only county in the district, and one of few upstate New York counties, to vote for President Joe Biden.
A portrait honoring refugees in the United States. Photo illustration by Savvapanf Photo via Shutterstock
And Ithaca could hardly be a sharper contrast to Myanmar, a country of approximately 54 million people and home to 135 distinct ethnic groups. It has struggled with democracy, oscillating between military and an ostensibly popularly elected government for decades. A mark of progress came in 2015, when Aung Suu Kyi, a member of the National League for Democracy party (the NLD), was elected Myanmar’s de facto civilian leader in what were widely considered the country’s fairest elections in decades.
But democratic progress has come to a crashing halt. After the NLD won the country’s second national election in a landslide in 2020, military rule came back to Myanmar, Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest, and the military then killed and imprisoned thousands protesting its return to power.
In September, Phyu’s family was able to join her in Ithaca. The family now lives in an apartment, and is supported in part by her appointment at Cornell University as a “Scholar at Risk.” Her Myanmar passport has expired, she said, and she currently is navigating the process of seeking a more permanent residency in the U.S.
So, while Ithaca may be cold, expensive and remote, it’s home for many refugees like Phyu and her family.
“Since we have experienced a lot of stress and trauma,” Phyu said, “it is a place that could heal.”
Becoming a haven
An early account of a “foreigner” arriving in the town is an Ithaca Chronicle article in 1849, describing a Chinese man who was “on display” in town.
Ithaca soon started to see more Chinese residents, according to Tompkins County Historical Center Archives. The first Chinese residents of Tompkins County were John and Mahjong Lee, who operated a laundromat on North Aurora Street in 1886, according to archival records. Two years later, another Chinese family arrived and operated another laundromat – on the same street. An Ithaca Journal writer, with overt racism, suggested that the stretch of Chinese laundromats on North Aurora Street be named “Washee Washee Lane.”
John and Mahjong Lee were in Ithaca less than a decade after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred further Chinese immigration to the United States in 1882. The racist and xenophobic legislation, driven by unfounded fears that Chinese immigrants were taking up too many jobs and depressing wages. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first time the nation barred entry of a specific group; the act wasn’t repealed until 1943.
Through the Cold War years and after the Vietnam conflict, Ithaca began to welcome refugees and migrants from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
In 1975, Vietnamese migrants, called “boat people” in local news articles, arrived in Ithaca during the biggest wave of migration the small college town had experienced in decades. It wasn’t the “migration” Ithaca was accustomed to: college students living in Ithaca for a short four years. This time it was people escaping the horrors of war and seeking a new life.
Dewitt Historical Society records show that as of 1983, there were roughly 100 Vietnamese migrants in Tompkins County. Many of those initial refugees had stayed in Ithaca temporarily; they moved to bigger cities and places with warmer weather, according to a 1983 Dewitt Historical Society newsletter.
One of the most significant migrations in Ithaca’s history started in 1991 when the U.S. government authorized the resettlement of 1,000 Tibetan refugees and listed Ithaca as one of 10 U.S. “cluster sites” for the Tibetans; the city was slated to take in 50 Tibetan refugees a year.
The following year, a group of Tibetan monks traveled from Dharamshala, India to Ithaca to establish a branch of the Namgyal Monastery, which became the North American seat for the Dalai Lama. The monastery is currently building a library to house the works of the current and previous Dalai Lamas.
Today the presence of a number of refugee communities can be felt in Ithaca. From the Tibetan Momo Bar on East State Street to the Cambodian food stand that’s become a mainstay at the Ithaca Farmers Market, migrant communities have become a part of the Ithaca fabric.
A welcoming tradition continues
Pedro Molina, an editorial cartoonist from Nicaragua, set out for Ithaca in December 2018, after Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s government began to actively hunt down and arrest independent journalists.
Nicaraguan journalist and refugee Pedro X. Molina dedicated this illustration to the power of the press, when it operates free of government repression.
“It became impossible to keep doing (journalism) from inside the country,” Molina said.
In 2018, amid mass protests against Ortega’s administration and social security reforms, the Nicaraguan government started raiding media offices to stymie coverage of the opposition. Journalists were arrested for “inciting hate.”
Nicaraguan authorities raided the office of Confidencial, the publication where Molina works. He said they seized computers and other office equipment. While Confidencial staffers continued working with donated computers and other equipment, Nicaraguan authorities returned and confiscated the equipment again.
Then, the authorities ransacked the office of a television news channel. While no one was present in the Confidencial office when authorities stole its equipment, there were two journalists working in the news channel’s office when police barged into the office. Those two journalists were subsequently arrested and charged with terrorism.
So Molina and about 100 other Nicaraguan journalists fled Nicaragua, scattering themselves across the globe. Molina said he initially planned to go to Mexico, but once he received an invitation from the group, Ithaca City of Asylum (ICOA), he knew he couldn’t say no. (the organization works to take in writers and artists from countries where their works are censored and where their lives are endangered.)
“In a matter of two or three days, I changed my destination,” Molina said.
It wasn’t the first time Molina had lived in exile. He said that when he was 10 years old, he and his family fled Nicaragua’s civil war.
Since 2001, ICOA has hosted poets, writers and journalists from China, Pakistan, Iran and Swaziland, providing them financial assistance and two-year residencies in Ithaca. The organization also subsidizes legal costs. At the end of the two-year residency ends the organization tries to help refugees stay in the United States or find a home in a new country.
Molina said ICOA was the only organization willing to resettle his wife and two young children as well. He received offers from other international assistance programs, but none of them could accommodate his family. ICOA helped Molina’s children get settled into local schools and arranged English lessons for his wife.
Molina, who still works, remotely, for Confidencial, said he’s fortunate to have the opportunity to continue his work as a cartoonist, even if it’s in his Ithaca apartment.
“I went to visit some colleagues who also left Nicaragua and are living in Miami,” Molina said. “I went to visit some of them down there. And some of them are painting houses or doing other kinds of jobs to sustain themselves. And, when I went there to talk to them, and see how they were doing, it was like, ‘Oh my God, I can't even complain.’”
Assisted assimilation
The quite literally named Ithaca Welcomes Refugees (IWR) was founded in 2015 in response to the Syrian refugee crisis. More recently, the organization had been assisting with efforts to help Afghan refugees resettle in Ithaca after the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan. Since its founding, IWR has also worked to resettle refugees from Myanmar, Colombia, Nicaragua.
A rally in New York City in support of refugee resettlement in the United States. Photo by Christopher Penler via Shutterstock
Unlike ICOA, IWR doesn’t have a well-established relationship with Cornell or Ithaca College. Rather than helping refugees obtain teaching jobs at the two universities, IWR offers assistance with housing and childcare at the Global Roots Play School.
When refugees first arrive in Ithaca, they’ve typically come through a refugee resettlement agency that offers assistance for 90 days. Afterward, IWR typically helps with longer-term assimilation, said Executive Director Casey Verderosa.
More recently, many other organizations have gone “dormant,” as have larger refugee resettlement agencies designated by the federal government, according to Verderosa.
The main refugee resettlement agency in Ithaca was Catholic Charities of Tompkins, but that organization shuttered refugee resettlement operations after former President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January 2017 temporarily halting refugee admissions. The Trump administration proceeded to slash the number of refugee admissions to a historic low of 15,000 per year. President Joe Biden authorized a quota of 62,500 last year, after facing backlash for having maintained the Trump quota.
Another lull in refugee resettlement was caused by COVID-19.
The resettlement pause adds to the uncertainty about the future that grips Molina, the Nicaraguan cartoonist. He’s considering a long stay in Ithaca because the community has been so welcoming. But staying in Ithaca could potentially — and permanently — require Molina to give up his job at Confidencial and look for full-time employment in the area.
“It's a very welcoming place for me and my family,” Molina said. “So, we are very pleased to be here. But for how long? Are we going to be able to be here? That I don't know for sure.”
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Meghna Maharishi is an investigative intern at CNBC.