Outcasts United: Chapter 3

Chapter 3 of Outcasts United explains many of the factors that brought so many refugees to the small town of Clarkston, Georgia. I will review some of the factors explained in the book and explain some new concepts as explained from a human geography perspective.

explains the change in Clarkston from a small town of 7,200 mostly white residents to a muli-ethnic community with over one-third of the population being foriegn born, represented by over 50 different nationalities. Specifically, the confluence of improvements in transportation and cheap housing are responsible for the changes. Transportation of all types has led to increasing urbanization of the United States. First, in the 1948 the Federal Aid Highway Act created the freeways such as I-15, I-80 and I-84 that run, in most cases,run border to border from north to south and east to west. This freeway system made it possible for Americans to live further away from where they worked but get to their jobs relatively quickly. This change is shown in the Disney movie Cars. The movie laments the demise of small towns in the U.S. that were connected by state roads. The most famous of these was Route 66. Route 66 was a lot like our own Highway 40 that runs through main street in Heber City and connects to I-80. Interstate highways bypassed these small towns, thereby taking much needed business away from small towns. As many small towns shrank in size, suburbs popped up all around big cities. The ability to drive 65 miles per hour (or faster) with no required stops allowed people to live fifty or sixty ( in my wife's case 70 miles) from where they work. Thus, places like Clarkston that are only 13 miles from Atlanta became destinations for people who worked in Atlanta but wanted to live in a smaller community. Ironically, it was the airplane and communications that had the biggest impact on Atlanta. In the 1970's Atlanta became an international airport. International airports are also important hubs for connecting to domestic flights (Salt Lake City is also an important hub. Althogh it is not mentioned in the book, in the 1980's Ted Turner established a communications/media company that includes CNN and TNT in Atlanta.

Both transportation and communications are basic industries. A basic industry is one that provides jobs for people who make something or provide a service for people who don't live in the area where they live. The more basic industries a place has, the more jobs are created. People move to these places for these jobs. All of these new people create a demand for more new services in these places. Services such as hospitals, schools, gas stations, restaurants etc. These jobs are called non-basic industries because they are dependent on some basic industry. Since Atlanta was adding basic industries, it also created a lot of jobs in non-basic industries. Thus, the population grew.

As more people moved to Atlanta, the population spread further and further out from Atlanta. Places that were formerly part of a county became incorporated as independent cities. You can see this around Salt Lake City. When we think of Salt Lake City, we usually think of the whole valley from the oil refineries in the north end of the valley, to the state prison at the south end of the valley and from Kennecott Copper in the west to the Wasatch Mountains on the east. Actually, Salt Lake City is much smaller than that. The valley just described includes places like Draper, Sandy, Murray, Holiday, West Jordan, West Valley, Magna, North Salt Lake and more. These were all once part of Salt Lake County. A place usually chooses to incorporate to keep their tax dollars close to home rather than being used in other parts of the county. Someday, maybe the resdients east of Heber City, the entire area east of Mill Road will want to incorporate as a separate city so that their tax dollars will work to create a separate police, fire, water and parks district that will serve just the people on the east half of the valley rather than go to residents of Wallsberg, Jordanelle, Daniel, Charleston and other parts of Wasatch County. Even though it is not an example of the incorporation of a city, Park City created a school district separate from the rest of Summit County so that their tax dollars would only go to Park City schools instead of students in Kamas, Oakley and Coalville. The process that I just described happened over and over again in the Altanta metropolitan area.

Clarkston was already incorporated as a city before all the growth started in Atlanta. Originally it was a place where middle class whites moved to get away from the hustle and bustle of Atlanta. When a beltway (a freeway that goes around the outside of the city) was added around Atlanta (simialr to I-215) this created more growth around the off-ramps of the belt-way. These new cities (called edge cities) were further out from Atlanta than Clarkston. As these suburbs appeared, white middle-class residents with cars moved further out from Atlanta, leaving vacancies in homes and apartment buildings that needed to be filled. The move of middle and upper middle-class whites is known as "white flight." Landlords who wanted to fill these vacancies dropped rents to make them more affordable but also cut the money they formerly spent on maintainence. This brought in low-income minorities to Clarkston. The reduction in maintainence led to the deterioration of the apartments. This is a simple explanation of urban decay (aka ghettoization).

At this point, there still weren't many refugees in Clarkston. While cheap rent was something that international organizations that found homes for refugees looked for places they could afford, they also needed to be able to get to work without a car. As mentioned in the book, refugees were given enough money to get started in a new place. After that, they were on their own. They almost never had enough money for a car. So, one of the factors that relief agencies looked for was easy access to cheap transportation into Atlanta's central business district where there were many jobs working as maids, cooks and janitors in hotels, restaurants and as workers in factories and agriculture. So, when MARTA made Clarkston the end of the rail line that connected the outlying area to Atlanta, this was the factor that made Clarekston an ideal location for a refugee. Clarkston, is obviously not the only place the refugees are sent. Clarkston was one of several places in the Atlanta area where some 19,000 refugees were sent. There were obviously many other places around the U.S. and the world where refugees migrate. You may be aware that just recently, dozens of refugees from Myanmar (aka Burma) recently arrived in Heber from a refugee camp in Thailand where they had been living for many years.

Needless to say, refugees in far-away places such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Liberia, Congo, Burundi, Sudan, Somalia or Ethiopia have no idea about the best places to make a new start in a new country. None of this would have been possible without the assistance of international organizations.  The increasing importance international organizations is covered in chapter 8 of our textbook. Any organization that works beyond the borders of any one country is called a supranational organization. The book talks a lot about how refugees begin the process of moving to a new country by applying for refugee status with the United Nations High Commisioner for Refugees. The United Nations is confederation of countries that seeks to solve many of the world's problems through the cooperation of its members. In the case of refugees, the United Nations will have representatives at refugee camps. People will apply for refugee status. The United Nations will verify that the person/family was indeed forced to leave their home and then work with member nations to get permission for them to enter their borders. The U.S. office of refugees is the organization that would approve the application and work with other organization to find a place for a refugee to live. The International Rescue Committee, World Relief and Lutheran Family Services are some of the non-profit organization mentioned in the book that help refugees get settled and offer support after they are established. Because of the many organizations involved in this process is the reason it could take so long from the time a family first arrived at a refugee camp until they actually made the move to a new country. People who work for these organizations are the ones that worked with the families described in this book. Without their help, all of the people in the book would either still be living in refugee camps or dead.  As the world becomes increasingly globalized, the need for international organizations to help coordinate the efforts of countries, corporations and other supranational organizations working in nearly every aspect of human life immaginable will surely increase.