7 years of welcoming

NPR’s All Things Considered invited listeners to “see what happened” when “a city near Springfield, Ohio welcomed immigrants.” Those of us in Ohio were not surprised. That city was Dayton, Ohio, the first certified Welcoming City in the United States. The NPR story features immigrant entrepreneurs and other business, community, and government leaders. Read excerpts below.

Beth Casella's family has been making things out of metal in Dayton, Ohio, for more than half a century.

FC Industries — the company started by her grandfather, Frank — has grown into an $85 million local manufacturing business, churning out everything from high-tech centrifuges to La-Z-Boy recliner frames.

"We're growing," Casella says. "We keep breaking records, month after month.”

Finding workers to sustain that growth has not been easy, especially since the pandemic, in a city where the unemployment rate is just 5%. Casella has relied in part on immigrants, who now make up about 10% of FC Industries' 300-plus-person workforce.

"We've always prided ourselves on being very diverse," Casella says. "Three of my grandparents were immigrants."

The company has partnered with a local refugee resettlement agency to help recruit workers. Bilingual employees are paid extra to act as translators, and the company is setting up an English class. It's not altruism, Casella says. Just good business.

"We want good workers," she says. "We want people who can grow here and grow us to the next level. And we’re open to looking wherever that could be.”

….

Some of the new arrivals have started their own businesses, like Moh Fardeen Ahmadi, who moved to Dayton from Afghanistan, where he'd worked as a translator for the U.S. military.

When he arrived a decade ago, Ahmadi spent a year working at Payless Shoes, then got a job as a truck driver. Eventually, he started his own trucking company with Afghan, Arab, Latino and U.S.-born employees.

….

Anita Nzigiye grew up in Rwanda and followed her sister to Dayton. After working for a time as a home health aide, she opened a market with her family, selling east African groceries to the growing community of African transplants.

“It’s basically food from home," Nzigiye says of popular items such as smoked fish from Tanzania and specialty flours made from cassava and yams.

Nzigiye used to rarely see African immigrants in Dayton but says more are arriving every week, building a customer base for her store and a built-in welcoming committee for new arrivals.

“The housing is affordable," Nzigiye says. "Even if their English may not be their first language, they can still find a job.”

Listen to the complete NPR story here.