As Erie's population continues to sink, the only significantly growing population in the city is coming in from the rest of the world.
Erie's refugee population has surpassed 10,000, with the number of refugees enrolled as students in the Erie School District nearly doubling over the past decade.
The city is one of the largest resettlement destinations for refugees in Pennsylvania, as low cost of living matched with affordable housing have made Erie a popular relocation spot.
"Without refugees, the city's overall population would be drastically lower," said Ed Grode, a Fairview Township resident and board member for the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. "Without them, Erie would be at risk of losing state and federal money."
Erie's population, on the decline for several decades, slid to 99,452 in 2014, its lowest total in nearly a century, according to new estimates released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau.
The last time Erie's population was below 100,000 was in 1920, when it was 93,372.
Population numbers have financial and political implications for any city, and they help determine how much federal and state funding is allocated to local governments for public programs and community projects.
Grode said the refugee population in Erie remains strong and continues to thrive.
"They save their money; they pool their resources. They work hard, sometimes two or three jobs," Grode said. "They tend to buy houses in the inner city that others would stick their noses up at. But they see a vision, a house in bad repair, and they fix them up, right in the very parts of Erie we want to be more stable."
The USCRI resettled 3,350 refugees in Erie between October 2004 and September 2014. The International Institute of Erie, 517 E. 26th St., is a USCRI field office.
That figure could be more than 4,000 when including other resettlement agencies that sponsor some refugees, Grode said.
On average, between 350 and 475 new refugees have annually resettled in the city over the past decade, officials said.
"It's a vibrant refugee community in Erie. They buy homes, own businesses. They work hard and make a huge difference in that city," Eskinder Negash, senior vice president for global engagement for the USCRI, said during a telephone interview from his office in Arlington, Va.
Negash said a portion of Erie's refugees have resettled here from Ohio, New York and elsewhere in America.
"They talk on the phone to each other in other states. They say they like Erie, even though it may be a little too cold at times, and other refugees from around the country move there," Negash said. "Many of the refugees don't leave Erie. They make it their home, and they work hard to make sure it prospers. This is their city, and not a transitional place for them."
More than 5,000 Bhutanese call Erie home, the largest immigrant community in the city. The next three largest refugee communities in Erie are Bosnians, Africans and Iraqis, social-service officials estimated.
Erie has a long history of immigrants and refugees relocating here.
In 1910, a quarter of the 66,000 people who lived in Erie at that time were foreign-born, according to the Historical Society of Erie County, with immigrant populations from Germany, Poland, Ireland, Italy and Russia.
In the 1980s and '90s, Erie saw a surge of refugees relocate to the city from Bosnia and Kosovo, among other countries.
There are currently about 900 refugees enrolled as students in the Erie School District. In 2003, that figure was about 480.
Students in the district, not all of whom are refugees, speak 46 different languages and represent 50 countries, said Matthew Cummings, the district's director of communications.
Of those native languages, the most-spoken one is Nepali, by 418 students, followed by Spanish (215), Arabic (138), Somali (115) and Swahili (46).
"They create such a rich learning environment in our schools," Cummings said of the refugees. "There's no other place in Erie where one can be exposed to such a rich and diverse amount of cultures."
Despite the city's overall population being on a decades-long slide, Grode said he expects Erie's refugee population to continue to grow in the future.
"It absolutely will. Erie is a wonderful place for refugees," Grode said. "I'm always pleasantly surprised at how welcoming people here are to refugees, because it's not like that everywhere."
