Skip ads and navigation
Advertising
Our network sites seattlepi.comHelp

Steady stream of immigrants underscores July Fourth

Tuesday, July 4, 2000

By DAVID FISHER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

EVERETT -- Victor Litovchenko spent two years in a Siberian labor camp for refusing, on religious grounds, to fight a Soviet war in Afghanistan.

Today, he works from his Everett home to help hundreds of other Ukrainian Pentecostals each year get to a country where such persecution can't happen to them.

  Photo
  Tatyana Kozodoy, 19, of Everett, who emigrated from Ukraine in 1992, ties stars to a trolley in Everett that will be in a Fourth of July parade at 10 this morning. The city of Everett will welcome 50 to 60 of the area's newest citizens in a ceremony today with certificates and American flags.
Renee C. Byer/P-I
"Freedom is the most important part in our people's lives," Litovchenko said yesterday. "I'm sorry about my children. They will never know what we went through in the Ukraine, and sometimes I get upset because they don't know what it is. . . . Freedom."

Litovchenko is one of thousands of Ukrainian refugees who have funneled into Snohomish County in the past decade. They have joined a refugee stream that enters Washington at a rate of 3,500 to 4,000 a year.

Those newcomers provide an eager work force into an economy that is booming, said Thuy Vu, director of the state Office of Refugee and Immigrant Assistance. They bring an ever-changing mix of cultures into the region's ethnic mix and, for many, they give new meaning to Independence Day.

The city of Everett will take time during its official Fourth of July celebration this afternoon to welcome 50 to 60 of the area's newest citizens with certificates and American flags. It's the first time the city has done that, but after a decade that has seen a steady flow of Southeast Asians, Iraqis and Ukrainians meld into Snohomish County's suburban cities despite language barriers and economic deprivation, such a ceremony seems fitting, Everett spokesman Dale Preboski said.

"Typically, people who resettle from their own countries are strong people," Preboski said. "They truly are pioneer stock."

The Everett ceremony also recognizes a growing trend among refugee and immigrant communities: Many are moving directly to the suburbs or to smaller cities, bypassing inner cities that have become too expensive and too crowded.

Vu said that in Washington, a suburban mix of jobs, cheap housing and community support has brought Ukrainians to Moses Lake and the Tri-Cities; Ukrainians and Eritreans to Spokane; Vietnamese, Bosnians and Russians to Vancouver; Vietnamese and Ukrainians to Bellingham; and a mix of Iraqis, Africans and peoples from the old Soviet republics to Everett. In addition, a broad mix of populations has managed to find housing in Seattle.

The newcomers have come in successive waves as the world's trouble spots have heated and cooled. The 1980s saw a steady stream of Cambodians and Vietnamese. Persecuted religious groups began flowing in after the collapse of the old Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Last year brought a wave of Bosnians. This year, the bulk of refugees are African.

The numbers are not insignificant. By Vu's estimate, Washington has absorbed more than 120,000 political and religious refugees since 1975, and numbers for total foreign immigration are larger still. The state absorbed 146,830 foreign immigrants between 1990 and 1999, according to U.S. Census estimates, ranking it seventh in the nation behind California, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois and New Jersey.

King County annually absorbs more immigrants, by far, than any other county in the state, Census figures show. But many of the newcomers are coming to less expensive areas of the county such as Kent and Federal Way, Vu said. And migration to King County accounts for only 46 percent of the state's total during the past 10 years.

Photo

In part, suburban migration is a growing fact of life because the state's suburban regions have the full mix of characteristics that immigrants need, Vu said: jobs, cheap housing and community support.

In Everett, the non-profit Refugee and Immigrant Forum works with a variety of refugee leaders to find a host of services ranging from translation to jobs and subsidized housing, Assistant Director Rita Meehan said. Its reach extends into Skagit and Whatcom counties, along with its Snohomish County base.

The key, Meehan said, is that Snohomish County has services to coordinate. Schools are equipped to provide English as a Second Language classes. Community colleges provide English classes and job training classes. There is a waiting list for subsidized housing, but it exists, and jobs are plentiful.

"Everybody's kind of used to it," Meehan said. "We are ready for it."

Washington state's immigration numbers have grown every year through the 1990s, rising from 9,120 in 1990 to 21,360 in 1999, according to Census Bureau estimates.

Refugee communities, in particular, grow in predictable patterns, Meehan said. Most are "seeded" when volunteer organizations, usually affiliated with a church, sponsor a few families into an area. The community grows as families bring relatives to join them. An area eventually becomes a preferred area of settlement because an immigrant community already exists, complete with family networking and attendant social services.

In Everett, for example, a volunteer group associated with the St. Mary Magdalen Parish Church sponsored the first few Southeast Asian families to locate in the area in the late 1970s, Meehan said. It has expanded through the years to help successive waves from other parts of the world.

In the suburbs, unlike the cities, immigrant groups often leave a light impression on the landscape. There is no Ukrainian district in downtown Everett and, except for pockets of subsidized housing, no areas of town have a recognizably Ukrainian flavor to them. Just as with native-born Americans, suburban living tends to disperse communities.

Litovchenko, who makes a living as a refugee case worker, said he doesn't know how many Ukrainians will be willing to march in the city's Independence Day parade today, or show up for a government-sanctioned ceremony. Despite the city's friendly intentions, there are too many memories of being forced to march in Communist parades -- something that was anathema to a Ukrainian Pentecostal community that refrains from swearing allegiance to any government and from fighting in any war.

Conditioned by decades of persecution in their homeland -- where they were routinely denied higher education, banned from high-ranking jobs in government and industry, and sometimes arrested for meeting in illegal church groups -- Ukrainian immigrants typically are quick to help one another and adept at community building, Litovchenko said. Although dispersed in neighborhoods, they remain stitched together through their churches.

Opportunities that would never have existed in the Ukraine, where Pentecostals are still spurned by a largely Russian Orthodox Church society and a still Communist-influenced government, are plentiful in the United States, he said. Some, like himself, have built their own homes through self-help housing projects.

But opportunity is slow in coming for many. Although many in the Ukrainian community are highly skilled in such physical trades as auto mechanics, carpentry and electrical work, they work for low wages in unskilled jobs because their English is poor, Litovchenko said.

That makes it tough to support a typically large family.

And the dark side of society that freedom can engender -- crime, fraud, "general irresponsibility" -- also troubles many in the religiously conservative community, Litovchenko said.

Yet, they come.

A coal miner by trade, Litovchenko said he helped lead strikes in the Siberian coal mines after his release from the labor camp, trying to bring some measure of constitutional freedom to the old Soviet Union. He finally found what he was looking for half a world away.

"People who grow up just with freedom, they never can understand what does it mean, freedom for people, because they never experienced difficulties, persecution," he said.

"When you are under persecution, you will understand what it means."

P-I reporter David Fisher can be reached at 425-252-2215 or davidfisher@seattle-pi.com

OUR AFFILIATES
NWsource KOMO
Pacific Publishing

Seattle Post-Intelligencer
101 Elliott Ave. W.
Seattle, WA 98119
(206) 448-8000

Home Delivery: (206) 464-2121 or (800) 542-0820
seattlepi.com serves about 1.7 million unique visitors
and 30 million page views each month.

Send comments to newmedia@seattlepi.com
Send investigative tips to iteam@seattlepi.com
©1996-2008 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Terms of Use/Privacy Policy

Hearst Newspapers