Reborn Maine milling city offers lessons amid refugee crisis

Fifteen years later, the Somali newcomers are solid members of the community, as evidenced by its proliferation of shops, restaurants and mosques — and a championship-winning high school soccer team featuring players from Somalia and other African countries.

Since February 2001, more than 5,000 Africans have come to Lewiston, a city of 36,500 on the Androscoggin River, in a prime example of what scholars call "rapid ethnic diversification."

The first Somalis found Lewiston after a refugee resettlement program was established in Portland, Maine's largest city.

Because of a housing shortage in Portland, they looked 30 miles to the north, where aging apartments that once housed Lewiston's mill workers provided plenty of low-cost homes.

The success flies in the face of a wave of anti-immigration sentiment nationwide that's fueled by concerns over recruitment by Muslim extremists, something that could cause problems for Syrian refugees, said Westy Egmont, director of the Immigrant Integration Lab at the Boston College School of Social Work.

Immigration opponents include Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who wants to ban Muslims, and several governors who have rejected the president's call to accept Syrian refugees.

In Lewiston, white residents now see the black newcomers want the same things they do — a safe place to raise a family, good schools, freedom and jobs, said Abdi Said, a refugee who was originally put in San Jose, California, before he moved to Lewiston.

Longtime residents have largely accepted the immigrants, said Jimmy Simones, whose grandfather was a Greek immigrant who opened Simones' Hot Dog Stand, an eatery that's now a regular stop for politicians and city leaders.