Partnership offers outreach help to Bosnians in St. Louis

ST. LOUIS -- Bosnians immigrants, who comprise about 10 percent of the city's population, should benefit from an unfolding outreach program designed to hasten their grasp of English and ease their way into U.S. citizenship, officials announced Thursday.

Using a $40,000 donation from Verizon Wireless, the effort unveiled by Secretary of State Matt Blunt includes distributing informational documents -- initially, a Missouri voters' guide -- printed in Bosnian, accompanied by the English translation.

The outreach effort also will support English-speaking volunteers to conversationally practice English with Bosnian adults at the immigrants' homes and workplaces, supplementing their formal schooling on the language and broadening their support network, Blunt said.

Blunt, who hopes to have the bilingual literature distributed well before the November election, said the success of the literacy-building would determine whether similar programs are rolled out elsewhere in the state.

"I think we're going to have a great reception to this," Blunt said, announcing the partnership at a St. Louis Public Library branch on the city's south side.

Aid with citizenship

Mark Crumpton, president of Verizon Wireless' Kansas-Missouri region, said the push to help Bosnians better understand U.S. citizenship requirements also seeks to fill "the vital mission to help Bosnian immigrants to help themselves."

Though the flood of refugees has slowed to a trickle, St. Louis has experienced a Bosnia boom, with 30,000 to 35,000 people from Bosnia-Herzegovina now living within St. Louis' city limits. In no other major U.S. city do Bosnians account for such a large share of the population.

Immigrants have little say about where they end up and their new hometowns are chosen by the U.S. State Department because of those cities' effective resettlement agencies, which welcome refugees and help find housing, clothing and other necessities. The presence of cheap housing and plentiful jobs in a city also plays a role.

Bosnians later can choose to move to other cities to join family who settled elsewhere. After five years in the United States, the former refugees are eligible to apply for U.S. citizenship.

Though fewer Bosnians are arriving here now, most find adjustment easier than their predecessors. Plenty of fellow Bosnians offer advice, augmenting agencies that have welcomed the influx for nearly a decade.

Still, adjusting is difficult and most Bosnians arrive with few personal belongings and little grasp of English. Recent arrivals face the same obstacles: learning enough English to get a job, or trying to learn English while juggling demands of work and family life. Often, parents rely on their children to translate and many find it hard to learn because they spend so much time talking Bosnian with friends and family.

To Bosnian immigrant Ahmed Jakupovic, 26, the new outreach should "help us in our future life in the United States."

"It'll help us feel more welcome in this country," said Jakupovic, the local Bosnian Chamber of Commerce president who arrived in the United States nearly six years ago.