City Of Refugees

There is an old city where a quarter of the population is made up of refugees from more than 30 countries. That city is ideal for refugee resettlement. It is Utica in New York. Some call it the last refuge

- Chinki Sinha

IT has been nine years since we last spoke. “So much changed since you last visited us. I brought my parents here in Utica from Myanmar,” San Win tells me over the phone from a small city in Upstate New York where we first met in 2007 when she and her younger brother arrived as refugees from the camps in Thailand. That year, hundreds of refugees from Myanmar were being resettled in Utica, a small city with a little over 65,000 people with a quarter of those being refugees from many countries, including Vietnam, Bosnia, Cambodia, Somalia, Afghanistan and Myanmar.

Back then, San Win was a young woman in her twenties. She had left her village in Kayin State in Myanmar’s southern region in 1999 not knowing she’d not return until 2019 only to bring her parents to Utica.

That evening in 1999, she recalls, the military came and destroyed her village, burnt everything and she, along with many others, fled to the border that Myanmar shares with Thailand. Her parents had gone to another village and she wouldn’t see them until 2019. For a long time, she didn’t know if they had survived.

San Win is from the ethnic Karen minority and she crossed into Thailand a few years later and lived in refugee camps before she was chosen for third country resettlement in the United States.

“We walked for three days to reach the camps in Thailand,” she says.

She sends me photos of her village. Bluest skies and foamy clouds hang over greyish mountains, a river carrying a few boats, a woman in a village market cooking.

“I want to go back again. I can’t live there anymore. Utica is my address now,” she says. “It is still dangerous there.”