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Aug. 8 (UPI) -- Nadin Yousef sits in the second booth from the door, her hands working the tassels hanging from a tiny wall at her workstation. In between knitting, she adjusts the wires of her earphone so they don't get tangled with her threads. She sells home decor items like dream catchers and wall hangings at West Side Bazaar, a 3,200-square-foot enclosed market in Buffalo, N.Y. She creates them using macrame, a technique of knotting threads to create patterns and designs.
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"In Iraq, everybody did macrame, so I never thought of starting this business back home. When I came here, I saw that I could use macrame to make money," she said.
The bazaar -- a space that provides facilities for new businesses that serve the community -- is 6 years old. It helps anyone wanting to start a business, but most of its vendors are refugees and immigrants living in the local area.
Next to Yousef is a tiny office space with a curtain, where Khaing Naing, originally from Myanmar, helps people file income tax returns.
"Most of my clients are refugees and immigrants -- especially people who just moved to the city," he said. "It's not limited to just refugees. I help anyone who needs a commercial tax preparer."
"Grant Street is where most of the self-employed refugees start their businesses," said William Sekacy, supervisor of the Immigration and Refugee Assistance Program at the Catholic Charities of Buffalo, one of the oldest resettlement organizations in Buffalo.
Every stall bears both a name and its owner's country of origin. There are three kinds: retail, food retail and commissary kitchen.
On one side of the bazaar, the misty steam of bamboo caskets lined with Chinese pork buns and Burmese noodle soups mixes with the waft of Pakistan's spicy halal meat. There are hearty Ethiopian curries, laid out attractively on injera, a speciality bread from Ethiopia. On the other are retail booths with embroidered cloths and bright, colorful accessories from Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Sudan.
In the past decade, Buffalo has resettled about 10,000 refugees, a sizable portion of those from Myanmar, Somalia and Bhutan. Last year, Buffalo resettled nearly 2,000 refugees of the 5,800 resettled in New York state. A study by the New American Society released in February 2017 reveals that nearly 23 percent of metro Buffalo's foreign-born population - 15,530 people - were refugees in 2014. That's a large number for a medium-size city of around 250,000 people.
Michelle Holler, manager of the bazaar, said the market has done two things for the neighborhood: It has created new demand for products and services previously unavailable, and generated employment in specific refugee communities that are represented in the market.
"The bazaar is reflective of the refugees placed in Buffalo. Ten out of 20 stalls are owned by Burmese refugees and immigrants," said Holler. "The local residents keep the business alive here," she said, noting that the bazaar's food business made $19,840 in revenue from January to June this year, while the retail businesses made $4,330. The bazaar is at a 100 percent occupancy rate.
The economic impact of refugees
It's hard to track economic integration of refugees in the United States. Most studies measuring the impact of the immigrant population on local economies in the United States do not distinguish between refugees, immigrants and asylum seekers.
"We don't track refugees once they're resettled in the country. There is data collected for the initial months of resettlement, but there is no centralized system to keep track of how refugees are doing after 90 days' resettlement," said David Kallick, director of the Fiscal Policy Institute's Immigration Research Initiative.
Kallick said that collecting such numbers would provide important insights in a city like Buffalo, where the local population has been on the decline. But this is being balanced by arriving refugees, some of whom have bought homes, send their children to local schools and work in local businesses.
Meanwhile, the bazaar was recently nominated by Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown for the 2017 Wells Fargo and USCM Community WINS Grant Program worth $300,000.
The nomination is good news for refugee businessmen and women, especially at a time when funds are being diverted away from refugee resettlement following President Donald Trump's executive order.
Kallick emphasizes that refugees are having a significant impact on an area like Buffalo where the population is dwindling. "Refugees stay, while others leave the city," he says.
This article originally appeared on Refugees Deeply, and you can find the original here. For important news about the global migration crisis, you can sign up to the Refugees Deeply email list.
