When refugees immigrate to Tennessee, most of the time they settle in Davidson County. This year, nearly half of the 230 refugees who’ve immigrated to Tennessee live in Metro Nashville. The city is already well-known as home to one of the largest Kurdish populations in the country, but city officials estimate that as many as 86 countries are represented here.
Dinah Gregory with Metro Social Services says one reason Nashville is so popular goes back to the early1990s. That’s when federal officials named the city as one of four preferred sites to resettle refugees.
“What we tended to hear was that we had a relatively low unemployment rate, we had a fairly mild climate and we had a friendly environment.”
A person is considered a refugee when they can’t or won’t return to their home country out of a well-founded fear of persecution.
For the last three years, most of the refugees entering Tennessee have been from Somalia, where some 3-million Somalis have fled because of political instability and near constant warfare.
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