Missouri's immigrant population rose 87 percent in the 1990s

When Denis Zijadic moved to Kansas City from Bosnia in 1999, he chose to live near the Don Bosco Community Center and the help it provides refugees.

And when he bought a duplex last year, he chose Gladstone, where he found a home that was affordable and close to North Kansas City's burgeoning Bosnian population.

"You want to be close to people in your community," said Zijadic, who at 27 is married and has a 3-year-old son. "If you need help, it's easier to ask people from your country."

The Zijadic family and about 79,000 other foreign-born people moved to Missouri in the 1990s, according to census data released Wednesday.

In large part, the new immigrants flocked to the Kansas City and St. Louis metropolitan areas and to southwest Missouri, where there are jobs in the food processing industry.

The influx led to an 87 percent increase in Missouri's immigrant population, bringing it to 151,195 foreign-born residents. That increase, however, still was less than Kansas' 121 percent spike.

In Kansas, immigrants now represent 5 percent of the population. In Missouri, they make up 2.7 percent.

In the Kansas City area, Jackson, Platte, Clay and Cass counties all experienced greater percentage increases in immigrants than the overall state increase.

Missouri's immigrants are much more diverse than Kansas' largely Hispanic immigrant population.

In Kansas City, that diversity is due in part to the Don Bosco Community Center, which resettles refugees from around the world. The center helped 5,155 refugees from 1990 to 2000, said Mary Brown, director of the Nationalities Service Center for Don Bosco.

North Kansas City became home to many refugees, contributing to an increase of 822 immigrants -- up from zero counted in 1990 -- in the city of 4,714 residents.

Foreign-born residents now make up 17.4 percent of that city's population -- the highest proportion among cities with more than 1,500 residents in the state.

More of those immigrants were European (285) than Asian (271), Latin American (212) or African (54).

In the 1990s, the city became a hub for Bosnian refugees. One reason is that it has a lot of rental property and is conveniently located in the metropolitan area, said Pam Windsor, city administrator for North Kansas City.

"I love the fact that when I go different places I can see people from all sorts of cultures," Windsor said.

Jobeth Bradbury, director of the North Kansas City Public Library, interacts with immigrants of European, Middle Eastern, Hispanic and Asian backgrounds.

Bradbury said they come to the library to search for jobs, learn English and read their hometown newspapers on the Internet.

"It's quite wonderful," Bradbury said. "You can come in our library any time of the day and visit with people from all over the world -- in North Kansas City, a town of 4,700 people."

To reach Grace Hobson, call (816) 234-7744 or send e-mail to ghobson@kcstar.com.

To reach Gregory S. Reeves, database editor, call (816) 234-4366 or send e-mail to greeves@kcstar.com.

Maybe most of them are good people, but there have been a least a few violent fights between them in Missouri. What is interesting is that the fight described below is between supporters of Alija Izetbegovic and those of Fikret Abdic. It makes you wonder how much ethnic cleansing was done by the Bosnian Muslims against each other. Most sheeple have no clue that such fighting went on, yet the rift between the groups shows up years later and 1,000s of miles away.

Lingering tension blamed for skirmish among Bosnian immigrants in St. Louis

ST. LOUIS (AP) -- Leftover hard feelings from the Bosnian war were blamed for an assault in a St. Louis bar frequented by Bosnian immigrants.
About 1 a.m. Sunday, Damir Didovic and his brother Mirsad began closing their bar, Sweet P's, in the Bevo neighborhood of south St. Louis.a little early. At that time, about six men brandishing baseball bats arrived at the front door, according to Shirley Rukcic, a patron and friend of the owners. Police corroborated her account.
"One guy came in on his own, screaming at one of these guys at the bar, 'Come here, come here,"' said Rukcic, 30, who had stopped in at the bar moments before the attack. "When I turned around to look at the door, these guys were coming in with sticks, cans of pepper spray.
"They were just ransacking everything," she said. "They were just beating everybody with bats. Glass was everywhere."
Damir Didovic was beaten and taken to Barnes-Jewish Hospital to be treated for two broken ribs and a collapsed lung, Rukcic said. A hospital spokesman would not confirm that Didovic, 36, had been admitted. Others, including a man whose arm had been broken, refused medical treatment because they didn't have health insurance, Rukcic said.
Sunday afternoon, Rukcic and about 20 men huddled inside the bar, darkened by the boards that had been nailed over its shattered windows. Damir Didovic's crumpled, blood-stained shirt and jeans lay on a table. Shattered glass and broken pool cues littered the floor.
The attack was unusually severe, the patrons said, but it was just the latest in a series of brawls that have managed to further drive a wedge in the region's Bosnian community, which numbers from 20,000 to 30,000.
The conflict has its roots in their war-torn homeland. Sweet P's patrons, who call themselves "West Bosnians," long ago allied themselves with Finkret Abdic, a Bosnian Muslim businessman who established an "autonomous" region in northwest Bosnia with an eye toward toppling the government in Sarajevo.
Abdic, whose partisans affectionately dubbed him "babo," or "daddy," managed to recruit Serbs and Croats to his cause -- a move that made him a traitor in the minds of Sarajevo Muslims. It is likely that the "East Bosnians" that Rukcic blamed for Sunday's attack shared that view, she said.
About 50 to 75 Bosnians gathered later Sunday afternoon at the St. Louis Police Department's South Patrol station to complain about the lack of police response to violence in the Bosnian community.
They told Lt. Col. Steve Pollihan that troublemakers who have been responsible for scattered acts of violence in recent months continue to walk the streets. In particular, they wanted to know why police did not immediately arrest a man suspected of leading the assault at Sweet P's.
"We explained that we just can't lock people up and keep them locked up," said an officer who asked to remain anonymous. "They don't understand our system, so we tried to educate them to the process."
Bar patrons at Sweet P's said they had hoped to leave the east-west rivalry behind when they fled Bosnia.
"This is like Bosnia again, like the war and everything," said Zlatko Husidic, 31, a truck driver and former soldier. "That was a problem over there at that time, not here in U.S."
About 3 a.m. Sunday, another brawl among Bosnians erupted at Cafi Harry's. Police arrested two men in that fight.
Other people who were injured and other assailants were gone by the time police arrived.

I hope Clinton stuck Missouri with the right kind of Bosnians and not the Jihad kind.

So, the answer seems to be, if you read my post #6, that Clinton stuck Missouri with a mix of good and bad.

Notice that the troublemakers the ones coming in the bar with bats and beating people and wrecking the place are the pro-Alija ones. And it was Alija Izetbegovic, the one with fundamentalist Islamic views, whom U.S. government and policy supported over the more moderate Fikret Abdic. They supported the criminal elements within Izetbegovic’s regime such as Muhamad Sacirbegovic

Spar, that last link is to a really good article written earlier this year. Here’s one section of it:

His father continued as Izetbegovic's "Ambassador-at-Large" for a few more years, but he too felt the calling for other causes. Nezhib became first a board member, and now the most active spokesman for the American Muslim Council. In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, he met with Attorney General John Ashcroft together with other Muslim leaders to express his support for the War on Terror and protest hate crimes against Muslims.
The question is: did he also beg for clemency for his son?
Because Muhamad Sacirbegovic, son of Nezhib and former government minister, ambassador and Washington media darling, is now an international fugitive from justice.

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