Print — bhutanese-american-secondary-migration — BhutanWiki

Bhutanese-American secondary migration is the documented post-resettlement internal migration of Lhotshampa refugees within the United States after their initial placement under the US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP). Between 2008 and 2016 the programme resettled more than 92,000 Bhutanese refugees from camps in eastern Nepal, dispersing them across roughly 130 cities in at least 41 states. Within a few years many families moved again — sometimes within the same state, more often across state lines — to consolidate around a smaller set of community hubs. The pattern has reshaped the geography of the Bhutanese-American population so thoroughly that cumulative arrival counts published by the US State Department's Worldwide Refugee Admissions Processing System (WRAPS) now diverge sharply from current resident populations measured by the American Community Survey (ACS) in many cities.

The phenomenon is not unique to Bhutanese refugees. The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) has recognised secondary migration as a normal feature of the US refugee programme since at least the 1990s, and commissioned a dedicated study of it in 2009. What makes the Bhutanese case distinctive is the scale and the speed of the consolidation, and the way a handful of destination cities — above all Columbus, Ohio — came to hold a disproportionate share of the entire resettled population within roughly a decade.

Definition and terminology

Secondary migration refers to any move a refugee makes, after initial USRAP placement, from the city or state of original resettlement to another location within the United States. It is distinct from primary placement, which is determined before arrival by the nine national resettlement agencies, ORR allocation formulas and available local capacity. It is also distinct from tertiary migration, a later move within the new state or metro area, though in practice the three stages blur together in individual family histories.

Under US law, refugees admitted through USRAP hold lawful permanent resident eligibility and are free to move anywhere in the country immediately upon arrival. Federal cash and medical assistance, English-language classes and employment support follow a formal placement agreement between ORR and a local voluntary agency, but nothing in that agreement binds the refugee to stay. A family that arrives in Houston on a Tuesday can legally relocate to Columbus the following week, and some did.

Why initial placements dispersed so widely

USRAP placement decisions are made before a refugee boards a flight. The nine national resettlement agencies — including the International Rescue Committee, Church World Service, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (now Global Refuge), the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, World Relief and others — negotiate annual allocations with ORR and with their own local affiliates. Local capacity depends on affordable housing, case-worker availability, existing language resources and state-level co-operation. Refugees themselves submit limited preferences, and family reunification provisions give priority to placement near US-resident relatives.

For the first Bhutanese cohorts arriving in 2008 and 2009, the reunification anchor was thin. Almost no Bhutanese refugees had been resettled in the United States before that point, so there were few US-resident relatives to pull new arrivals toward any particular city. As a result, the initial caseload scattered. According to data compiled by the Minnesota Department of Health and the International Organization for Migration, by 2011 Bhutanese refugees had been resettled to 41 states, with Pennsylvania, Texas, New York and Georgia each receiving at least seven per cent of the total. Smaller cohorts went to Vermont, New Hampshire, Idaho, Arizona, Maine, Montana and many other states where Bhutanese had no prior community presence.

In this dispersal phase, cities such as Utica (New York), Burlington (Vermont), Concord (New Hampshire), Manchester (New Hampshire), Boise (Idaho), Erie (Pennsylvania), Houston (Texas), Phoenix (Arizona) and Salt Lake City received hundreds or low thousands of Bhutanese arrivals. None of these cities had pre-existing Nepali-speaking infrastructure: no Hindu temples serving the Bhutanese Hindu majority, no Nepali groceries, no community-based organisations and, often, no interpreters familiar with the dialect.

Push and pull factors

Reporting in the regional and national press, together with academic research, has identified a consistent set of factors driving Bhutanese refugees to leave initial placements and converge on a shorter list of destinations.

Push factors

Isolation and absence of community infrastructure. Families resettled in cities with only a handful of other Bhutanese households found themselves without the religious, cultural and linguistic supports common in the camps. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 2013 MMWR study of suicide among Bhutanese refugees in the United States, which examined 16 deaths between February 2009 and February 2012, identified post-migration social isolation and family conflict as significant risk factors, alongside pre-existing trauma and difficulty finding work.
Climate. Refugees from subtropical camps in Jhapa and Morang districts of eastern Nepal often struggled with winters in Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Utica and Burlington. Heating costs, limited cold-weather clothing and reduced outdoor mobility compounded isolation.
Cost of living. Placements in high-cost metros such as Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, greater New York and Seattle gave refugees access to well-funded voluntary agencies but left little room between wages and rent. For workers taking entry-level jobs in retail, warehousing and hospitality, housing absorbed most of the pay cheque.
Healthcare access. Texas refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, and Refugee Medical Assistance under federal law lapses after eight months. Reporting by UT Austin's Reporting Texas documented that Bhutanese refugees and their advocates cited the resulting gap in affordable healthcare as a principal reason for leaving Houston, particularly for older arrivals dealing with trauma-related mental health conditions. Ohio and Pennsylvania, which did expand Medicaid (in 2014 and 2015 respectively), became more attractive by comparison.
Limited job ladders. Advocates interviewed by Reporting Texas and by Pittsburgh-based reporters described first-generation refugees stuck in entry-level positions with no realistic pathway to advancement, particularly where English-language classes were limited or inconveniently scheduled around shift work.

Pull factors

Established community hubs. Wherever a Bhutanese community reached a critical mass of perhaps 1,000 residents, the resulting ecosystem of temples, grocers, restaurants and mutual-aid organisations attracted further arrivals. Columbus's Bhutanese Community of Central Ohio (BCCO), Harrisburg's Bhutanese Community in Harrisburg (BCH), Pittsburgh's Bhutanese Community Association of Pittsburgh and Akron's cluster of community organisations all played this role.
Hindu religious infrastructure. The majority of Lhotshampa refugees are Hindu, and access to a functioning temple was an important draw. In central Ohio, Pennsylvania and Georgia, temples established by earlier South Asian immigrant communities were supplemented by specifically Bhutanese-Nepali temples built after 2012.
Affordable housing in sectoral labour markets. Columbus, the Harrisburg–Lancaster corridor, Pittsburgh, Clarkston (Georgia), Akron and Louisville offered comparatively low rents alongside employment in healthcare support, warehousing, hospitality, light manufacturing and meat processing — sectors that could absorb workers with limited English and varied levels of prior schooling.
Schools and children's futures. Parents interviewed by regional reporters cited the preservation of Nepali language and cultural identity as reasons for moving closer to larger Bhutanese communities, where children could attend cultural programmes and learn alongside other Lhotshampa peers.

Documented case studies

The clearest English-language documentation of Bhutanese secondary migration comes from a 2019 Reporting Texas investigation by journalists at the University of Texas at Austin's School of Journalism. The piece followed three named Bhutanese families who left Houston after several years of initial settlement.

Parshu Chamlagai, who fled Bhutan as an eight-year-old in 1992 and resettled in Houston through USRAP in 2009, moved to Pittsburgh in 2019 after a decade in Texas. He told Reporting Texas that the trigger was a lack of affordable healthcare for older Bhutanese refugees carrying trauma from the expulsion and the camps.

Geeta Sharma, who arrived in Houston in 2012, worked at Walmart for four years before moving to Cleveland, Ohio, where she became a legal assistant. She told the same publication: "We were looking for community and we didn't want to be left behind — everyone started moving."

Kishor Dhaurali, who arrived in Houston in 2009, left for Columbus after two years. He framed the move in generational terms, telling Reporting Texas that it was about younger family members preserving their culture and language.

Yehuda Sharim, a filmmaker and researcher then at Rice University's Kinder Institute for Urban Research and later at the University of California, Merced, produced a 2018 report cited by Reporting Texas finding that Houston offered less long-term health, education and economic support than other US cities receiving comparable refugee caseloads. Sharim told the publication that Houston was itself diverse and welcoming but was "located within a state with a governor and some politicians who are not" — a reference to the decision by Governor Greg Abbott to withdraw Texas from formal co-operation with the federal refugee programme in 2016.

Similar trajectories, with less systematic media coverage, have been documented out of Erie (Pennsylvania), where state officials told reporters that Pittsburgh was the largest secondary-migration destination for refugees leaving Erie; out of Vermont, where news coverage and academic research have described onward movement to central Ohio; and out of smaller New York State placements such as Syracuse and Utica.

Destination hubs

Columbus, Ohio

Columbus is the dominant destination for Bhutanese secondary migration in the United States. Community leaders and local researchers estimate that between 25,000 and 30,000 Bhutanese-Nepali refugees live in central Ohio, making the metro home to the largest concentration of Bhutanese people anywhere outside Bhutan itself. The Bhutanese Community of Central Ohio, founded in 2008, has played a central organising role. The suburb of Reynoldsburg, east of Columbus, became the first US municipality to elect a Bhutanese American to public office when Bhuwan Pyakurel won a ward 3 council seat in November 2019; he was elected President of the Reynoldsburg City Council in 2025.

The Columbus concentration grew through a mixture of direct USRAP placement and secondary migration. Case-worker reports and press coverage cited arrivals from Texas, Vermont, New Hampshire, upstate New York, Arizona, Idaho, Pennsylvania and the Dakotas among the secondary migrants joining the existing community.

Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania received one of the largest Bhutanese primary-placement allocations of any US state. The Harrisburg–Lancaster corridor emerged as a major hub built around the Bhutanese Community in Harrisburg (BCH), founded in 2009, and around the Hindu temple infrastructure of the Susquehanna Valley. Pittsburgh developed a separate hub anchored by the Bhutanese Community Association of Pittsburgh and by the Children of Shangri-Lost oral-history project. Pennsylvania state refugee coordinators have described Pittsburgh as the principal secondary-migration destination within the state, drawing families onward from initial Erie placements in particular.

Akron and Cleveland, Ohio

Akron's North Hill neighbourhood, once a declining area of the city, became a major Bhutanese-Nepali hub after 2008. Press accounts and the Case Western Reserve University Encyclopedia of Cleveland History describe Akron as hosting the second-largest Nepali-Bhutanese cluster in the country after Columbus, with an estimated 5,000 or more residents by the late 2010s. North Hill developed a dense cluster of Bhutanese-owned grocery shops, restaurants and small businesses, and the Himalayan Music Academy was founded there in 2016. Cleveland's west side hosts a smaller related community. Like Columbus, both cities grew through a combination of direct USRAP placements and secondary migrants arriving from Texas, Georgia, Arizona and other initial-placement states.

Clarkston, Georgia

Clarkston, a small city east of Atlanta long used by voluntary agencies as a concentrated resettlement site, absorbed a significant share of the early Bhutanese caseload and has often been described in press coverage as home to one of the largest Bhutanese-Nepali communities in the United States after Columbus and the Pennsylvania corridor. The community is embedded in Clarkston's wider multi-ethnic refugee economy, with Bhutanese groceries, restaurants and places of worship operating alongside Ethiopian, Eritrean, Burmese, Congolese and Somali institutions.

Other destination clusters

Secondary migration has also produced measurable clusters in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex (a net destination within Texas for families leaving Houston), Louisville (Kentucky), Syracuse (New York), the Twin Cities (Minnesota), Phoenix (Arizona) and a handful of others.

Quantifying the divergence

The gap between the cumulative WRAPS arrival count in a given city and the current resident population measured by ACS is the clearest statistical signature of secondary migration. The US State Department publishes WRAPS data by initial placement; the Census Bureau publishes estimated "Bhutanese alone" and "Bhutanese in combination" populations from rolling ACS five-year samples.

Pew Research Center's Bhutanese-American fact sheet, drawn from 2019–2023 ACS data, estimated the nationwide Bhutanese-alone population at around 14,000 (rising to roughly 20,000 when mixed-heritage respondents are included). Ohio alone accounted for an estimated 4,000 Bhutanese-alone residents, or about one-quarter of the national count on that narrow measure. Pennsylvania stood at roughly 3,000, New York and Virginia at about 1,000 each, and Texas at roughly 800. These figures are widely understood to undercount the true community — the ACS struggles to reach small, non-English-speaking populations, and the Nepali-language response category is ambiguous between Bhutanese refugees and broader Nepali-origin immigrants — but the relative orderings hold.

Community organisations produce much larger internal estimates: BCCO has cited figures of 27,000 to 30,000 for central Ohio alone, and advocacy groups have cited totals exceeding 90,000 nationally. The gap between ACS and community counts reflects undercount on one side and possibly generous counting on the other, but both sources point to the same directional finding: Ohio holds a far larger share of the resident Bhutanese population than its original WRAPS allocation suggests, and Texas, Vermont, New Hampshire and Utica hold far smaller shares.

Policy implications

Secondary migration complicates the ORR funding model. Federal refugee assistance is allocated to states and local voluntary agencies on the basis of initial placement, with some secondary-migrant adjustments through discretionary grants. Destination states that absorb large secondary flows — particularly Ohio — have argued that their community organisations carry service burdens disproportionate to the federal funding received. Initial-placement states whose refugees move away, conversely, are left maintaining infrastructure sized for populations that no longer reside there.

The pattern also shapes political representation, civic participation and language-access requirements. Reynoldsburg's election of Bhuwan Pyakurel in 2019 and Suraj Budathoki's swearing-in to the New Hampshire General Court in December 2024 were possible only because the communities behind them had reached a sufficient size and density to sustain political organising — an outcome of consolidation, not dispersal.

During the 2025 immigration enforcement escalation under the second Trump administration, the geography created by secondary migration became operationally significant. Bhutanese Americans detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement were concentrated in the hub cities where the community had become visible — Harrisburg, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Dallas–Fort Worth and Akron — rather than in the dispersed placements of the previous decade.

Academic and institutional documentation

Academic attention to Bhutanese secondary migration remains limited relative to the scale of the phenomenon. Susan Banki of the University of Sydney has examined Bhutanese diasporic identity and homeland politics in ways that touch on community formation across resettlement sites. The Migration Policy Institute has published on broader refugee integration outcomes, including Bhutanese-specific data. Public-health researchers at the CDC, the Minnesota Department of Health and several academic medical centres have produced studies of Bhutanese refugee mental health, maternal health and ageing outcomes that incidentally document concentration patterns. Community-led documentation projects, including Children of Shangri-Lost in Pittsburgh and the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) project Echoes of Home on placemaking in the Midwest, have preserved the first-person accounts of families who moved more than once during their first decade in the United States.

Bhutanese-American Secondary Migration