BY GEORGE HOPKINS
The vacant shop’s windows blare a message to the old town square in tiny Cuba, Illinois —“Lost Dreams! Broken Heart! Must Sell!”
Like many once-thriving downstate market towns, this Fulton County hamlet is a pretty place, with its spruced-up commercial center and a park in the middle of its vacant storefronts. But “For Sale” signs dot the lawns of mostly well-kept houses — the small kind many of us grew up in, cheap by 21st century standards.
There are schools, a library, a fire district, a couple of convenience stores, a bar, a diner, even a car wash. Anything more requires a 10-mile drive on the eponymous “Cuba-Canton Blacktop” to Canton. Which pre-supposes a car–hence the vacant storefronts. What can save these fading small towns, still so comfortable, safe, and livable? So empty!
How about the desperate refugees suffering in European camps and the Middle East?  Properly vetted, these people have already proven their energy, ambition and willingness to take risks. They might be the salvation of places such as Cuba. Many are highly educated, heirs to a commercial tradition thousands of years old, dating back to antiquity.
What might such people make of a vacant storefront? They could repopulate and revive small towns of downstate Illinois, bringing new ingenuity and innovation.
The United States has pledged to take only 10,000 from Syria after they are vetted, a process that takes months and depends on the refugees bringing with them the paperwork on their lives, such as birth certificates. Only 1,200 from Syria have managed to reach the United States so far, according to The Progressive magazine.
Canada’s record is better — they’ve pledged to bring in 50,000 Syrian refugees by the end of this year.
There are precedents from the past. After the Vietnam War ended, the United States took in 131,000 Vietnamese, even though many lacked documentation.
Even farther back, Peoria welcomed Hungarian refugees in 1956, when the United States took in 40,000 fleeing Communism. http://www.unhcr.org/453c7adb2.html
Former Peoria Journal Star reporter Theo Jean Kenyon vividly recalls covering the arrival of a planeload of these refugees late at night. Journal Star publisher Henry Slane had arranged the trip and organized it so that every family on the plane had a Peoria family willing to take them in for a while and help them get settled. They soon became productive citizens.
“I am ready to integrate in the U.S. and start a new life,” a Syrian refugee recently told the Associated Press in an airport before the family boarded a flight to Kansas City from Jordan. He and his family had been in a refugee camp for three years.
A recent episode of the CBS show “60 Minutes” described how a generation ago Middle Eastern refugees saved a depopulated, crumbling Italian hill town whose young people had abandoned it for life in the cities. They revitalized the place with work and service.   Today these former refugees are fully “Italianized.” It’s an old story—a very “American” one.
Ask any current or former Congressman named LaHood how Lebanese migrants to Peoria worked out.
Refugees from many nations have settled in Utica, N.Y., where the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees, a nonprofit group, has settled refugees for years, according to The New York Times.
They have “transformed this once-fading industrial town,” the Times reported, and now make up perhaps one-fourth of Utica’s population of 62,000.
“The immigrants have been an economic engine for the city, starting small businesses, buying and renovating down-at-the-heels houses and injecting a sense of vitality to forlorn city streets,” the Times said.
“We’re like every other upstate city,” the county executive said. “Our infrastructure is old. Our housing stock is old. But the refugees have renovated and revitalized whole neighborhoods.”
Peoria and the small towns in central Illinois could use a jolt of life, from those fleeing death. It only takes determined U.S. citizens, ready to help their fellow human beings.