Somali Communities

[Chimera]

Man in Malaysia how's your spying on the Japanese Somalis going so far?

 

let me know bro..

[N.O.R.F]

Originally posted by RendezVous:

Second degree adverts..

 

Why don't you pay for proper advertising materials..employ Northerner and me to do some proper research for you..

 

Northerner: Our Territory

Saxib, i have managed to successfully dodge most Somalis so far. Apart from a few times while watching the footy.

 

But there is no 'community' here

[Chimera]

African immigrants set pace to get off welfare

 

Immigrants from Somalia and other African nations are making strong strides in Minnesota toward weaning themselves off welfare,helping to lend some urgency to statewide efforts to make sure that other racial and ethnic groups perform as well.

 

Research by state officials shows that, although African immigrants received more welfare assistance than U.S.-born blacks at the beginning of this decade, they now receive less.

 

"The truth is a little bit counter to expectations," said Chuck Johnson, assistant commissioner for children and family services in the Minnesota Department of Human Services. "We've always been concerned about immigrant communities, but we really found out when digging into it that the much bigger problems are in the African-American and the American Indian communities."

 

The state is asking counties to figure out why Somalis and other recent African immigrants are moving off welfare rolls faster -- which might lend clues to why other groups aren't.

 

Suburban counties in particular are seeing increasing numbers of immigrants and minorities.

 

"We're a rich suburban county with one of the lowest poverty rates in the country," Ruth Krueger, director of employment and economic assistance for Dakota County, told board members recently during a briefing. "We have not paid a lot of attention to minorities because the numbers have been so small."

 

On the state's so-called "self-support index" -- based either on working at least 30 hours a week or departing from welfare altogether --Somalis in Dakota County are earning a rating of 80 percent vs. 72 percent for whites, she said.

 

Statewide, the figures are 78 percent for whites, 75 percent for Somalis, 76 percent for other African immigrants and 58 percent for U.S.-born blacks and American Indians. Hispanics -- most native-born -- and Asians, including Hmong, have rates in the same range as whites and African immigrants.

 

Over time, each immigrant group relies less on welfare as members learn English and how to navigate U.S. culture, and as government agencies find solutions to their needs, Johnson said.

 

Welfare reform, with its five-year limit on benefits, has heightened the urgency for figuring out why some groups do better than others, he said. "We used to just send the check; now we need to figure out what's going on."

 

And the shift of minorities to the suburbs adds another challenge.

 

"Counties like Dakota, Washington, Anoka are realizing they're at the point where their caseload is really shifting, with a much bigger presence of racial and ethnic minorities, and they need to figure out how to work with those populations," Johnson said.

 

Dakota County has met with clients of different ethnic and racial groups to ask what it could be doing better, including what sort of rapport they feel with the county's caseworkers.

 

"Their experience with that is uneven," Krueger said. Most report some discrimination in hiring, she said. Still, she added, the issues minorities face -- such as transportation and training -- are similar enough to those of whites that the county's main focus "is on poverty, not race."

 

http://www.startribune.com/462/story/899338.html

 

dead link but the info will be usefull for me in the future

 

*archiving it*

[RedSea]

Now the bad side of all this, I am in Minnesota. Both of those advertised malls offer nothing really, well if you are guy they don't. But they do sell alot of goods that will be useful to ladies.

 

I also don't like when people (guys) go there just to check out girls or sit around all day without doing anything, some of them just drink tea in mid day, who drinks tea on mid day?

 

but they buy nothing or go there for the purpose of what the mall was built for. They play dominos there as well, and can you believe it, they play shax, you can always see Sangub's voice from some maqaaxi on the corner. Funny.

 

There are some good restaurants in Karamel and 24th mall though.

 

Over all, I like Minnesota, becasue of its large somali community, we have alot of things to offer to everyone. The only complaints I have about Minnesota is well for being "Minnesnowta". Ibtisam, I know you like snow, this is the perfect place for you.

 

^^^nacalaa shaydaan kuyaal, in aan af ingriis wax ku qoro sowtaan mabnuucay?

[Chimera]

United Kingdom

 

 

Somali is now the majority home language for children in many London schools, and young Somalis, Eritreans and Ethiopians are beginning to come through as university students, following young South Asians along trails that they seem to have blazed a decade or so ago. These new multicultural realities are not only making themselves felt at primary or secondary school level, therefore, they now affect life and work also in universities, where a new generation of the descendants of immigrants are coming up as top students, asking many questions that we never heard before. -Immigration and Multiculturalism, Werner F Menski, social scientist

 

 

Children as young as five should learn Polish, Afghan and even Somali under plans to shake up language learning. Children of five 'should be taught Somali in schools' By Laura Clark

 

The Changing Face of Ethnic Minority Entrepreneurship in Britain

 

 

new minority groups, emerging despite apparently strong immigration controls, are beginning to replace earlier communities in some places. For example in Southall, the heart of London’s Indian Sikh community, both Somali and Afghan enterprises have appeared. The Afghans occupy a number of large shops sub-divided into low-grade micro malls, mainly selling cheap clothing and household goods. The Somali businesses are on the southern fringe of the Southall shopping district; restaurants and cafés are the most prominent types of activities. In the 1980s, the premises currently occupied by Afghans and Somalis mainly accommodated Indian retailers

 

Horseed UK Champions

[Chimera]

Finland

 

Somali street patrol in Helsinki aims to narrow ethnic generation gap

 

Channel Patrol guides the youth home from the railway station before nightfall-By Otto Talvio

 

"The amateurs are on the move", a policeman guarding the railway station area declares. A group of people who seem to have enjoyed their pre-Christmas spirit emerge from the surrounding restaurants, queuing for taxis. A group of a dozen orange-coated Somali men patrol the station area every Friday and Saturday night, a stone's throw away from the taxi queue. They keep an eye on Somali youths and try to prevent fights, if necessary. They are volunteers, working for an organisation called Kanava Nuoriso ("Channel Youth").

 

An older man gets out of a car and approaches the group, carrying ten more orange vests for reinforcements. The men put on the vests over their own coats, and the official-looking group grows. The spokesperson of the patrol is Mohmad Musse, 28, who has lived in Finland for 12 years. Musse, who is fluent in Finnish, is also a project worker for the city's Youth Department.

 

The first round of the Channel Patrol begins at the corner of the Sokos department store at 10.30 P.M.. The orange-clad men walk unhurriedly across the station into the Kaisaniemi park, where young people often congregate. Right now, however, there is not a soul in the park. The patrol stays in the empty park for a while, shivering. A police car passes. The most dangerous place in the city centre does not seem that dangerous tonight.

 

A few weeks ago, however, there was a hostile situation, says Musse. Some immigrant boys had a row at the station, but the patrol had managed to intervene. Later, the fight had begun anew on the road to the park. One of the youths present had called the patrol, and they calmed down the situation together with the police.

 

The patrol moves on to Esplanadi. Apart from Kluuvi, the city centre is quiet, at least in terms of people the patrol is interested in. On Mannerheimintie the patrol runs into a group of Somali youths, who are going to have coffee in a hamburger restaurant. Like most Somalis, they are also familiar to the patrolmen.In a close-knit community, almost everyone knows each other. This is what the operation of the Channel Patrol is based on. The youths, dressed athletically, appear shy of the camera, but seem to get along well with the older men. They are peaceful, as are all the other Somali youths the group meets.It seems like the presence of the patrol on the streets upholds the social system of the immigrant community more than anything else. This may also be behind the fact that there no Somali girls to be seen."We have no trouble with the girls," says Musse over some coffee."We do not run into girls often this late. It would be shameful for them to run into us in the street. They do not want to lose face in front of their community."

 

Having finished their hamburgers, the patrol returns to the corner of Sokos, which has become a hang-out for young people, thanks to the warmth of the indoor area. A few familiar faces are present. Abdi, who is slightly under twenty, says he is on his way from football practice to meet some friends in town. The anorak-clad teenager smiles shyly and seems somewhat reserved. At first he did not even want to tell us his name. Later someone explains with a sly smile that Abdi is a very common name."I am probably going home soon, since there is nothing to do over here," he tells us. He mostly spends time at home and has never encountered trouble in town. "And I do not want to," he adds, just to make sure.

 

Not everyone is having such a peaceful evening. A slightly older man, Ali Abukar, appears. He seems to be somewhat intoxicated. He believes that the biggest problem in the centre of Helsinki is the racism of the police.Ali Abukar digs out his cell phone and shows us his list of recent calls to support his argument. There was some sort of trouble in his apartment building in Sörnäinen, and he called the police.Nobody came, but an hour and a half later someone called back. He attributes the delay to racism.

 

Friday has turned to Saturday.The next operation for the party is to encourage all of the rest of the Somali teenagers at the station to go home. Some get a ride from the Channel workers, some are escorted to buses and trains. Nobody objects.

 

 

Big Brother is watching you...

[Chimera]

Lewiston,Maine, Revived by Somali immigrants

 

By Jesse Ellison - Published Jan 17, 2009 - NEWSWEEK

 

Barely a decade ago, Lewiston, Maine, was dying. The once bustling mill town's population had been shrinking since the 1970s; most jobs had vanished long before, and residents (those who hadn't already fled) called the decaying center of town "the combat zone." That was before a family of Somali refugees discovered Lewiston in 2001 and began spreading the word to immigrant friends and relatives that housing was cheap and it looked like a good place to build new lives and raise children in peace. Since then, the place has been transformed. Per capita income has soared, and crime rates have dropped. In 2004, Inc. magazine named Lewiston one of the best places to do business in America, and in 2007, it was named an "All-America City" by the National Civic League, the first time any town in Maine had received that honor in roughly 40 years. "No one could have dreamed this," says Chip Morrison, the local Chamber of Commerce president. "Not even me, and I'm an optimist."

 

Immigrants from Somalia may sound like improbable rescuers for a place like Lewiston. Maine is one of the whitest states in the country, second only to Vermont, and its old families have a reputation for distinct chilliness toward "outsiders." And many of the immigrants spoke no English at all when they arrived. But even beyond the obvious racial, cultural and religious differences between the Muslim newcomers and the locals, the town's image had become so negative that it was hard to imagine people choosing to move there. "Nothing could have rightfully prepared them," says Paul Badeau of the Lewiston-Auburn Economic Growth Council. "And nothing could have rightfully prepared us, either." It wasn't easy at first. Townspeople feared for the few jobs that remained in the area, and they warned that the strangers would overload local social services. In 2002, the then Mayor Laurier Raymond wrote an open letter to the Somali community begging them to stop encouraging friends and family to follow them to Maine.

 

But the Somalis kept coming, followed by Sudanese, Congolese and other Africans. By some estimates, 4,000 new immigrants have moved to Lewiston since 2001, and dozens are still arriving every month. Eight years ago, the town's adult-education center had only 76 students learning English as a second language. Now some 950 pass through every year. "This is just the teeniest little part of what has happened to the city," says the center's coordinator, Anne Kemper. "Everybody has had to scramble." Today, Somali women and children in donated winter parkas carefully navigate the snowbanks in the town's formerly crime-ridden low-income residential area.

 

The center of town still has pawnbrokers and bars, but now there are also shops with names like Mogadishu and Baracka, with signs advertising halal foods and selling headscarves and prepaid African phone cards. "Generally, refugees or migrants that come into a town give a new injection of energy," says Karen Jacobsen, director of the Forced Migration Program at Tufts University's Feinstein International Famine Center. "Somalis particularly. They have a very good network [with strong] trading links, and new economic activities they bring with them." Retailers sell clothes and spices imported from Africa; other entrepreneurs have launched restaurants and small businesses providing translation services, in-home care for the elderly and other social services. There's even a business consultant. "Increasingly, there's an acceptance that immigration is associated with good economic growth," says urban-studies specialist Richard Florida, director of the University of Toronto's Martin Prosperity Institute. "How is Maine going to grow? It's a big state with a sparse population. One of the ways to grow quickly is import people."

 

Commerce isn't all the Somalis are reshaping. Maine has America's highest median age and the lowest percentage of residents under 18. Throughout the 1990s, the state's population of 20- to 30-year-olds fell an average of 3,000 a year. Demographers predict that by 2030, the state will have only two workers for each retiree. "In many small Maine towns they're looking at having to close schools for lack of schoolchildren," says State Economist Catherine Reilly. "It will snowball. Right now we're seeing the difficulty of keeping some schools open; in 10 or 15 years that's going to be the difficulty of businesses finding workers." The same ominous trend is seen in other states with similarly homogenous demographics and low numbers of foreign-born residents—states like Montana, North Dakota and West Virginia. Reilly adds: "If you told a demographer just our racial composition, they would be able to guess that we're an old state with a low birthrate."

 

Lewiston's sudden jolt is reflected even in enrollment at local universities. Although University of Maine enrollment has dropped systemwide since 2002, the student population at its Lewiston campus jumped 16 percent between 2002 and 2007. And Andover College, which opened a campus in Lewiston in 2004, had to start expanding almost immediately to accommodate a boom in applications. Enrollment doubled in two years. The reason? "Young people didn't want to go to a place that's all white," says Morrison. Practically everyone in Lewiston credits the Somalis' discovery of their town with much of its newfound success. "It's been an absolute blessing in many ways," says Badeau. "Just to have an infusion of diversity, an infusion of culture and of youth. Cultural diversity was the missing piece." The question is whether the rest of Maine—and other states like it—can find their own missing pieces.

 

http://www.newsweek.com/id/180035?from=rss

[Sir-Qalbi-Adeyg]

^ Are you actually in Japan? I did not know their were somali's in japan.

[Chimera]

Nope! but there are Somalis living there(and China,S-Korea etc).

 

btw Lol@man_in_malaysia never reporting back on the Somali community there..(are you still with us?)

[Sir-Qalbi-Adeyg]

China, yes, I've heard of somali's go there, some for studies others living there for years and doing business.

 

But the Japanese are very xenophobic people they don't let foreigners in even though the japanese population has been decreasing over the years.

[Chimera]

Well they are a very homogeneous people and value that, also the fact that the majority of the population consists of the Yamato ethnic group is also a good reason why they might be xenophobic to foreigners, but there are currently two million Koreans and one million Chinese living there, and not to forget the hundreds of thousands of Brazilian workers.

[Sir-Qalbi-Adeyg]

The weirdest place I've heard somali's living in was Nunavut, Canada. Somali's are everywhere, the gypsies of africa.

[Chimera]

Maybe someone here on SOL can volunteer and represent us in Alaska?

[rudy-Diiriye]

go nomads. most hard working people in the world.

now if we can only get rid of warlords, we could reach the moon.

[Chimera]

Balancing out this negative 09 Nov day.