The Red-State City That’s Doing Immigration Right

Some of these young women—part of a corps of thousands of young Mormons on assignment around the world, including the church’s own headquarters—sport U.S. flags, but on a recent weekday evening most did not, instead wearing flags from Malaysia, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and South Korea, among others. As these international arrivals converge on Salt Lake, thousands of homegrown Mormons fan out across the globe to the church’s 450-odd missions abroad, getting an early-life crash course in internationalism. (Sometimes they get a very intimate look; as one chatty Uber driver explained to me, “They go off and they get married.”)

The awareness that its founders were refugees permeates the church and the broader culture, though nowadays the refugees look different. Beus, the resettlement executive, said that, in recent years, large numbers from Latin America had arrived in Salt Lake, many with some connection to the place. The group does a lot of family reunification, he explained, and works with many Congolese, Sudanese, and Afghan arrivals. The U.N. estimates that there are 65,000 refugees in the state, mostly around Salt Lake. These numbers don’t quite stack up to states like Texas or California, which received 20,000-plus in the last few years alone, but on a per-capita basis, Utah sits well above them.

That number is stagnating, though, as the Trump administration has put the nation’s entire refugee infrastructure on ice; since Trump took office, he has reserved the resettlement program almost exclusively for small numbers of white South Africans, forcing resettlement organizations to focus on supporting refugees who have already arrived. In keeping with the state’s frontier ethos, the emphasis is on self-sufficiency. In West Valley, the IRC has leased land for one of various community farms and gardens where refugees can grow produce, some of which is sold at farmers markets the organization facilitates.