This post was originally published on Politico.

When Bosnian refugees started arriving in Utica, New York, in the mid-1990s, it was a down-on-its-heels Rust Belt city that had seen its population crater by roughly a third from a mid-century peak of just over 100,000 residents.

“I thought I came to another war zone when I came here,” said Hanka Grabovica, who arrived in the Mohawk Valley city in 2001 when she was 16 years old, citing the prevalence of boarded-up buildings and garbage on the streets. “Utica was pretty bad back then.”

Grabovica, now president of the Bosnian American Community Association, was part of a wave of

Author: By Paul Demko