For many years, Greensboro, Guilford County and the Piedmont have welcomed refugees. Almost all local efforts have concentrated on the struggle to deliver services to individuals and families through a patchwork of organizations, with far less attention paid to building ethnic communities. Refugee status is transitory; refugees and their families eventually move into the mainstream regardless of local officials’ interest. Working with arriving individuals and their families is a profoundly personal and intimate experience that many caring residents in the region have responded to. Refugees’ entitlements are limited by dollars and upwards of five years, which also defines the service and attention span of most agencies. But building ethnic communities with the ability to take care of its members, preserve values and determine their own future is more complex, long term and by nature, political. Ultimately, the task of organizing individuals into a community is beyond the abilities of private agencies or volunteer sponsors.
The region's leadership must support ethnic community-building if it also wants to attract and build a creative class, a focus of almost all regional workforce and economic development projects. But few have a vision that connects the elite top of the social pyramid with the bottom. Montagnards in the area, unlike Hispanics, do not suffer from public questions about their legal status. Montagnard Dega Association is among the few and oldest of such organizations yet it is in regular danger of collapse.
There are lessons to be learned from its troubled history and the experience of Montagnards in the Piedmont, but almost no one in a position of responsibility is keen to step forward. Besides the Hispanic population, undoubtedly the largest group of new North Carolinians, it seems other groups recently resettled in the area may share the Montagnards’ fate to be benignly neglected by a regional culture more used to its old Southern past than a 21st Century America that will neither black or white but tan, diverse, and multicultural.
