English Key to Jobs for Somalis, City Says

To the south, in big-city Portland, officials say the jobless rate among Somali immigrants is less than 10 percent. In Lewiston, "it's easily over 50 percent," Nadeau said. He said the city does not have an exact figure because it has trouble tracking the demographics of the Somali population.

The solution, city officials think, is to compress the traditional arc of an immigrant family's assimilation -- from low-skill jobs to English fluency and the service economy -- into a single generation.

To that end, Somalis who apply for "General Assistance" -- a few hundred dollars a month in local funds for housing, food and other expenses -- are usually required to take English classes.

"If they don't do it, they're not eligible," said Sue Charron, who administers the program. She noted, however, that exceptions are made for those who cannot attend classes because of disabilities or having to care for young children. She said only a few Somalis have been taken off for noncompliance.

Other welfare programs around the country require participants to work, perform community service or attend employment-related training. But immigration experts say it is rare for any jurisdiction to have an across-the-board English requirement, and they question how much good such a program would do.

"For most people, solitary English language acquisition is not the way to get them into work quickly," said Jonathan Blazer, a lawyer at the National Immigration Law Center. He said it is more common to require vocational training, instead, or to teach job skills and English together.

Many Somalis interviewed in Lewiston recently said they welcome the English requirement. But others questioned whether it works as intended. Ismail Ahmed, 33, said many students went just because they had to, and learned little.

"They are just coming to pass time," said Ahmed, who is an indicator of Lewiston's difficult job environment. He said he received a master's degree in leadership studies from the University of Southern Maine -- and then had to move to Baltimore early this year because he still could not find a job he wanted in Lewiston.

The difficulties of the path that Lewiston has chosen for itself are nowhere more evident than in the English classes themselves. One recent morning at the town's bunkerlike Adult Learning Center, teacher Kate Brennan was going through the basics of English sentence construction. She asked Weheliye Ali, 21, to make a sentence out of "I" and "grow" in the past tense.

"I grew up," Ali said after a pause.

"Where did you grow up?" Brennan asked, looking for a slightly more complex sentence.

"I grew up in Somalia," replied Ali, who said later that he wanted to learn English because he had found it hard to understand his boss at a local hotel.

At times, Brennan's students seemed to be firmly on the track that Lewiston officials have in mind for them, talking about plans to work as a nurse, become a shop owner or even earn a doctorate. Asked to form a sentence using the word "GED," meaning the high-school equivalency General Educational Development test, one student came out with "The GED is on the way to higher education."

But then came the next vocabulary word, "scared," and another sign of the huge adjustment that Lewiston is hoping these students can make in one lifetime.

When Brennan asked the class, "What makes you feel scared?" one student responded, "When I see the lion."

Brennan looked puzzled. Then, from across the room, another Somali student spoke up.

"In Maine," she told her classmate, "is not lion."