The Refugee City Inside the Pioneer City
Near Salt Lake City, Utah
The founding story of Salt Lake City is itself a story about refugees. The Latter-day Saints who crossed the plains in eighteen forty-seven were fleeing religious persecution in Missouri and Illinois, where state governors had issued extermination orders and mobs had burned towns. They were looking for a place far enough outside the United States that no government could reach them, and they found it in what was then Mexican territory.
Today, Salt Lake City receives people under similar pressures from the other side of the world. The International Rescue Committee office in Salt Lake City has resettled more than thirteen thousand refugees since opening in nineteen ninety-four. Top countries of origin have included Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Burma, Bhutan, Syria, Venezuela, and Afghanistan. The Somali community, which grew after the nineteen ninety-one civil war, has established a visible presence in the Salt Lake Valley. Arrivals from Burma and Bhutan followed in large numbers in the two thousands and two thousand tens.
The institutional support structure is unusual. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, through its humanitarian arm, is one of the largest sponsors of refugee families in the United States. This creates a specific kind of Salt Lake City texture: a conservative religious institution whose political alignment on immigration at the federal level is complicated, and whose on-the-ground humanitarian practice involves welcoming thousands of people from Muslim-majority countries, from war zones, from places of statelessness and displacement.
The pioneers who built this city called it a refuge. The city that exists now is still that, for more kinds of people than the original founders imagined.
