At a high-traffic intersection on the south side of St. Louis, in a former bank building complete with a glassy atrium, it’s time for sewing class — held in Dari, the Afghan variant of Persian.
The walls are hung with photos of Afghanistan, from which most of the students have recently arrived. Before class starts, a handful of women in sneakers and head scarves first go to another room for prayer, while their younger children scamper around a well-equipped play room. They return to dated sewing machines, learning how to run tiny businesses from their homes as they acclimate to their new country.
The two-year-old Afghan Community Center has been an anchor for Halima Osmani, 20, who arrived from Afghanistan last summer with her parents and seven siblings. She now runs her own tailoring business, selling to local women through an Instagram account, while she works on getting her G.E.D. Eventually, she wants to become a physician assistant, and St. Louis seems like a good place to fulfill her dreams.
“Our first choice was Virginia, but we ended up here and liked it,” Ms. Osmani said through a translator; she is still learning English. “The first thing we noticed here was that it wasn’t crowded.”
Not being crowded — that’s both a problem and an opportunity for the grand but diminished city, which has been losing population for decades. The city’s politicians, business community, religious institutions and philanthropists have embraced a push to reverse that trend through immigration. In addition to refugees like Ms. Osmani, they’re trying to attract people from Central and South America, as well as international students and highly skilled professionals on employment visas.
Early evidence is promising. In 2023, the region added 30,000 foreign-born residents, amounting to a 23.2 percent increase in the immigrant population, according to census data. (The New York City area added 88,000, only a 1.5 percent increase.) That was almost enough to offset the loss of 34,000 native-born residents.
“We have no choice but to grow, and the way in which we’re going to do that is through migration to St. Louis,” said Dustin Allison, the interim chief executive of Greater St. Louis Inc., the city’s main business group. “I’m really coldblooded about this. I need bodies, because I need talent in order to attract and retain companies here.”
“You’re seeing shortages in almost every work force, from police officers to teachers to manufacturing,” said Brad Christ, a Republican state representative from a suburban district southwest of the city. “So I’m very pro legal immigration, and there’s really good ways to do it effectively, and I think we’ve done it effectively in St. Louis.”
The approach has worked for other metropolitan areas losing population, like Detroit and Philadelphia, which got started around the same time as St. Louis’s programs. As birthrates decline, immigration is forecast to be the nation’s only source of population growth, and cities with rapidly aging demographics are fighting for their piece of the inflow.
“Given that these places are losing domestic migrants, they’re going to be much more dependent on immigration for their population growth than they have in the past,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution who has written about the recent surge of arrivals. Domestic migrants are those coming from other places within the country — or leaving, as the case may be.
Now, the Trump administration is upending that strategy — by taking away refugee resettlement funding, revoking the temporary legal status of other recent immigrants, and potentially constricting employment-based visas. Missouri’s Republican governor, Mike Kehoe, has signaled that those without legal status should be worried, directing state law enforcement to pursue illegal migrants and to collect the immigration status of those charged with crimes.
For elected officials in St. Louis (all of whom, in the city itself, are Democrats), antipathy to immigrants on the state and national level creates a stiff headwind to measures that would make this blue city in a red state welcoming to new residents. Politicians from the county, which surrounds but doesn’t include the city, are on the same page.
“We want people who can come here and work and bring their skills,” said Sam Page, the St. Louis County executive and also a Democrat. “The president’s policies are creating an unwelcoming environment.”
A Shrinking City
By the early 2010s, St. Louis was in an advanced stage of urban exodus.
The city proper, which ballooned with the growth of automakers and breweries through World War II, had lost more than half its population since the 1950s; it stood at 319,000 in 2010, and has shrunk to 282,000. Both white and Black residents left for better schools, safer streets, and more job opportunities; new highways that were bulldozed through urban neighborhoods hastened their flight. And although many went to the close-in towns, the surrounding county’s population has stagnated in recent years too, lingering around 987,000.
Shrinkage can be self-reinforcing. It leads to school closings and layoffs among city personnel as the tax base contracts. Increasingly vacant neighborhoods foster crime that in turn repels newcomers. Employers can’t find the workers they need, so they move headquarters elsewhere.
In a 2012 study, city leaders identified the source of the problem: It wasn’t that St. Louis was aging faster than other places, or losing more jobs.
“We were not getting our fair share of immigrants,” said David Kemper, who headed Commerce Bank and is now its executive chairman, as well as a board member of Greater St. Louis. “We were just kind of off the beaten path.”
St. Louis did have one positive reference point: the wave of Bosnian refugees who had settled there in the 1990s, which eventually grew to about 70,000 people. They remade a neighborhood in South St. Louis called Bevo Mill, starting new businesses and rehabilitating homes, before spreading to surrounding areas.
So Mr. Kemper and other business leaders set about making St. Louis more hospitable to international transplants. They began an organization called Mosaic, which helps companies recruit more foreign talent and organizes gatherings for those who make the city their home.
Lusnail Haberberger is the kind of newcomer local leaders hope to see more of. She moved from Venezuela to Texas for college and to St. Louis in 2015 with her husband, whose family is from the city. A couple of years later, she started a utility engineering firm. It now employs more than 100 people, many of whom she brought in on visas, since she says it’s difficult to persuade prospects from other U.S. cities to move to St. Louis.
“My secret sauce, and how I was able to grow so fast and recruit, has been through immigration,” said Ms. Haberberger, who proudly displays the flags of the 23 nations where her employees hail from in the office foyer.
The St. Louis effort slowly started building, with a collection of about 800 Syrian refugees arriving in the mid-2000s. But the International Institute, the city’s main refugee resettlement organization, atrophied after the first Trump administration slowed refugee admissions to a trickle. When U.S. forces withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021, a class action lawyer in St. Louis named Jerry Schlichter saw an opportunity for the city — not just to serve as a first port of call for those fleeing the chaos, but also to become the preferred destination for the Afghan diaspora in the United States.
“It’s secondary migration, that was the key then and it’s the key now,” said Mr. Schlichter.
Working through the International Institute, Mr. Schlichter funded the Afghan Support Program: a suite of services including housing assistance, grants for new businesses, the community center, a newsletter and a full-time coordinator who traveled the country spreading the word of the growing community in St. Louis.
The main selling point for St. Louis is affordability. Rent costs far less than in coastal markets and the median selling price for a home is $214,000, according to Redfin, compared with $418,000 nationally. Large parts of the city are underoccupied. The unemployment rate for the metropolitan area is 3.2 percent, well below the national average. For Afghan families, which tend to have several children and wives who don’t work outside the home — at least at first — it’s easier to support a household on one income.
Over the last few years, the International Institute would resettle 750 Afghans, with another 750 arriving on their own. Most have established themselves; some have even bought homes. Initially, many find work in fields like construction and light manufacturing, since their educational credentials from Afghanistan tend not to transfer to America. (Many Afghan refugees came to the country after assisting the U.S. military.) Others skip that step.
Mohammed Raza Hassani had been a mechanic in Afghanistan and knew he wanted to start an auto repair business when he arrived in 2021. He won a $15,000 start-up grant from Mr. Schlichter’s program, which bought him some better tools. Now he’s doing so well that he wants to move to a bigger shop and has hired several refugees as employees. He likes the way word travels quickly in St. Louis, bringing him plenty of customers, and the affordability.
“Small city, cheap city,” Mr. Hassani said, sitting in the one-room office at the front of his lot.
After migrants began arriving across the southern border and through airports in 2022, Mr. Schlichter decided to extend the recruitment effort. He hired the former head of the local Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Karlos Ramirez, to spread the word that St. Louis wanted new Latino residents too.
Mr. Ramirez went on the road, making presentations at job fairs and holiday markets in places like El Centro, Calif., which has one of the country’s highest unemployment rates. He brought people in as quickly as he could secure housing for them and has so far relocated 550 immigrants, focusing on those who already had work permits and would quickly be able to support themselves.
Many city residents were happy to see the newcomers. Leah Sweetman, who sits on the board of the neighborhood association in Tower Grove South, adjacent to the International Institute, said she appreciated the vibrancy they brought to the sidewalks. “We have the footprint of a much larger population from decades ago,” she said. “I’m sure some school buildings would make adjustments, or some blocks might get more crowded, but by and large, there are many neighborhoods that do have space.”
Local resistance had flared up and then faded: A resolution by the council of a neighboring county that would have opposed bringing in migrants was voted down after the International Institute clarified it was only looking for people in the country legally.
One local Republican’s outlook helps explain the region’s attitude toward immigration. Dennis Hancock, a Republican council member for St. Louis County, voiced some caution about making sure that new residents didn’t become a burden on the strained budget, and pointed out that the city’s emptiest neighborhoods were not always close to its largest job centers. But as for immigrants, he said, “the more the merrier.”
“Everyone came from somewhere else,” Mr. Hancock said. “We were able to assimilate all those groups and create what’s been a nice mix of cultures here in St. Louis.”
Now, that sense of cohesion is in jeopardy.
‘We Knew It Would Not Be Good’
Over 100 years in operation, the International Institute has become an anchor of the city’s south side. It has resettled many of its refugee clients in the surrounding neighborhoods; shops and restaurants with cuisine including Japanese and Ethiopian line South Grand Boulevard all the way to the Afghan Community Center. It’s housed in an old Catholic school with high vaulted ceilings and thriving potted plants. People come in and out all day, taking classes, meeting with caseworkers, applying for benefits.
When Mr. Trump won the November election, the International Institute rushed to accommodate a surge of people before he took office.
“We knew it would not be good, from everything we saw on the campaign trail,” said Blake Hamilton, the institute’s interim director. “But we really couldn’t have predicted what occurred since Inauguration Day.”
In late January, refugee flights were halted, and most of the institute’s federal funds — which account for 80 percent of its budget — were frozen. The organization furloughed 91 people, or 60 percent of its staff. It had to raise private funds to dispense the cash grants that are typically afforded to refugee families, who often fled with next to nothing, to help them get settled. Assistance in finding jobs, preparing for citizenship tests, enrolling children in school and connecting with medical providers was severely curtailed.
And without money to lease apartments, the institute had to keep new arrivals in hotels, isolated on highway interchanges. In early February, about 150 people were in that situation, costing $15,000 a week.
A volunteer group, Welcome Neighbor, threw itself into the gap. On a recent Friday, Welcome Neighbor’s director, Jessica Bueler, and a part-time staff member, Mawda Altayan — a refugee from Syria — walked the halls of an Extended Stay America, checking on families whose progress toward self-sufficiency had been halted by the freeze.
One had been there for nearly three months with six children under the age of 13, including one with cerebral palsy and another with frequent convulsions.
Another family had arrived a few weeks earlier from a refugee camp in Ethiopia, with five children and a nephew. They had only a couple of sweatshirts for the bracing cold, no soap to clean the pile of pots in the corner of the kitchen, and no medicine for skin rashes that had developed.
Tut Chagor, who had fled the war in South Sudan and worked as a translator and teacher for the United Nations, pleaded for more help, since he had not heard from the International Institute.
“If you have communication with the office, tell them to visit us,” Mr. Chagor, 45, told the Welcome Neighbor staff, who came bearing diapers and grocery store gift cards. He wants a chance to earn his way forward.
“Whatever is assigned to me, I will do,” he said.
A Feeling of Insecurity
Other refugees were luckier to have arrived earlier, to have found homes and jobs. But those who arrived as parolees or with temporary protected status still cannot build new lives, as Mr. Trump moves to end their protections.
Iris Segura and her husband arrived in early January from a shelter in New York City, where they heard about the program in St. Louis. They had a business in Venezuela selling cleaning products, but ran into trouble with the government of President Nicolás Maduro for supporting his political opposition, Ms. Segura said. Under extortion threats, the couple fled with their two young daughters. They have settled into a suburban apartment complex just north of the city and have been applying for work with staffing companies.
But these days, they again don’t feel safe. They absorb animosity toward Venezuelans circulating on Instagram, Ms. Segura said, which reflects the White House’s portrayal of migrants as criminals and gang members. She worries about her next asylum case hearing in March, and whether it will be judged more harshly by the current administration.
“We are feeling like we are in jail,” Ms. Segura said. If given the chance, she said, she would love to start another business in St. Louis. Until then, her husband is driving for Uber to keep the family afloat. The institute’s Latino Outreach Initiative, meanwhile, has shifted to recruit those already in the United States, rather than people arriving over the border.
The new winds in Washington are making even foreigners with legal permanent residence nervous.
Susan Gobbo came to the United States from Brazil 20 years ago, when her husband was transferred for his job at the international pet food maker Nestlé Purina; they moved to St. Louis in 2008. She had to give up her medical career, and quickly tired of domesticity. So she started a program for the hundreds of other highly educated foreign-born professionals who had accompanied their spouses to postings at St. Louis companies, in hopes of persuading more people to put down roots in the area. Many have found jobs of their own.
Since the inauguration, that mission has gotten more difficult. The other day, Ms. Gobbo said, a friend was speaking on the phone in Portuguese in a Walmart when a man in uniform stopped her and asked for her immigration documents. A woman walking by started screaming at the man to deport Ms. Gobbo’s friend, who left the interaction shaken to her core.
“I have been working for 10 years to make people feel welcome,” Ms. Gobbo said. “Suddenly, someone like that ruins everything.”
That kind of interaction worries St. Louis civic leaders, who have invested substantial time and political capital into growing through immigration.
In 2023, the city established an Office of New Americans to convene discussions with the city’s international population, headed by Gilberto Pinela. Unlike Democratic, immigrant-rich places like California and New York, the office couldn’t take steps like licensing undocumented immigrants to drive, or allowing them to vote in local elections, without facing “immediate” backlash from the state government, Mr. Pinela said.
Instead, the office has focused on uncontroversial priorities, like making city services available in multiple languages and staging cultural events. The hope is to keep St. Louis on the map as a destination for people coming to the United States — because not enough people born there are staying.
“We are experiencing the early stages of a winter demographic. It’s not only affecting the city and the region, but soon it will affect the entire state,” said Mr. Pinela, sitting in the mayor’s office at City Hall, in a part of downtown that feels deserted on a weekday afternoon. “The same politicians that are trying to isolate the state are going to be suffering the consequences of this later on.”
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