Abdinoor Jama and Aden Aden have been business partners for years: first mending clothes in a Kenyan refugee camp after fleeing their native Somalia during a civil war.

Today, they run a store and tailor shop on the West Side of Buffalo.

Jubba Food Store and Tailor occupies a building on a stretch of Forest Avenue near Grant Street without many other businesses.

"I need to make it a big business for my future," Jama said. "First you start a small business, and then you grow up and grow up."

Jama and Aden are part of the next generation of entrepreneurs in Buffalo. The city is being hit by a new wave of immigrants -- including refugees from Africa, Asia and Latin America -- forming new ethnic enclaves across the city.

Also on the West Side, an abandoned building is being renovated so it can host up to 34 immigrant vendors in a bazaar on West Ferry.

The group is diverse: a Burmese jewelry maker, a Peruvian dessert chef, a Sudanese restaurateur, a Palestinian merchant selling furniture and blankets, a Liberian family selling African clothing and fabric.

Gone from Buffalo are most of the factories and shipping industries that employed the newly arriving Germans, Poles, Irish, Italians and others at the turn of the 20th century.

Today's immigrants and refugees are increasingly striking out on their own and starting businesses.

According to the Small Business Administration, 28.7 percent of all new businesses in New York State are started by newcomers -- 12 percentage points higher than the national average. Newcomers in general are 30 percent more likely to open businesses than natural-born citizens.

"I think it's going to be increasingly common that immigrants and refugees start businesses," said Eva Hassett, executive director of the International Institute. Her office assists immigrants and refugees in Buffalo.

"Immigration itself is an entrepreneurial act," the authors of Immigrant Inc quote Edward Roberts, founder of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, as saying.

An economic force

The immigrants arriving in Buffalo now are a couple of decades behind those in many cities, but the newcomers may help kick-start the local economy.

"I think the key question is: What is the new economy and how do we get there?" said Robert T. Herman, co-author of "Immigrant, Inc." "You run into immigration as part of the solution."

The Cleveland-based lawyer wrote that an influx of immigrants in the 1990s helped revitalize cities like New York, Toronto and Columbus, Ohio, largely passing over Rust Belt cities like Buffalo and Cleveland.

But some data shows that the flow of newcomers has changed, at least for refugees. The number of refugees coming to Erie County has surged over the past decade. Since October 2003, the county has received more refugees than any other county in the state -- 5,643. New York City received 4,661 during the same time period.

"In some way, immigrants and refugees are the only people coming to Buffalo," Hassett said. "It's part of our economic development."

Coming here in 1985 from Ethiopia, Getenet Bezunehyhe was a bellwether for African immigrants who would flock to places like New York in the following years. When he applied for resettlement to the United States, he intended to do the same.

"I thought Buffalo was a suburb of New York City," he said. "I didn't know it was a very snowy place."

Few immigrants have had to endure what Bezunehyhe went through to get to this country: four years in jail for demonstrating against Ethiopia's former communist regime and three more as a refugee in Sudan.

After arriving, he found work at the former Tunmore Nissan Group as a "lot boy" while taking night courses at Buffalo State College. He worked his way up from the lowest paid person at the dealership to car detailer and eventually to supervisor in four years.

Then, at the suggestion of some friends, he decided to start his own car detailing shop in 1989 in the Tunmore dealership. It's a path common for immigrant entrepreneurs: work for several years, learn English and build up enough credit and savings to go into business.

Since starting his Clean Machines Auto Detail 21 years ago, Getty, as he is known around the shop, has purchased his own building in Kenmore, which he recently had renovated for $200,000. With the addition of a 3,000-square-foot garage, he plans to hire four or five more detailers and begin hand-washing 150 to 300 cars a week.

"He lives, breathes, eats, and sleeps his business," manager Nick Crocco said. "He's really dedicated to the craft."

New arrivals come here with no credit history and usually are unable to secure a business loan. Even for those who had businesses in their homeland, the idea of a credit score is foreign. Most work for several years to accumulate capital and prove to banks that they are loan-worthy.

"Immigrants, and particularly refugees, rarely have good enough credit or enough credit to warrant regular bank loans," said Bonnie Smith, economic development director at the Westminster Economic Development Initiative. Her organization assists new businesses on the West Side, many of them started by refugees.

Tackling the credit issue

She described how one of her clients had good credit, but the bank would not grant him a loan because he had been in the country for only four years. In cases like these, the Westminster initiative backs the loans 100 percent.

"We basically co-sign the loan," she said.

Terry Michalski had to tackle the issue of credit on her own when she came here two decades ago. In the Philippines, she ran a small convenience store before meeting her future husband, a Peace Corps volunteer from West Seneca. She knew she wanted to start a business when she moved to America.

"Coming here in 1990, I had no idea what to do. I asked my [now] ex-husband, what am I going to do when I get there? Am I going to sell apples, door to door?" Michalski said.

When she arrived in the United States, she worked for a Filipino beautician who, Michalski said, took advantage of her. Eventually she found a job at a pizzeria and went to cosmetology school. When she secured a $5,000 loan and had saved another $2,000, Michalski finally had enough seed money to start her day spa, which she named Totally For You.

"One of the largest challenges is understanding the way to go into business here versus the culture of their home country," Smith said.

Navigating the city bureaucracy was a challenge for Jama and Aden.

Although the pair had a loan from the Westminster initiative and were being mentored by Smith, they had to figure out the city's licensing process -- a complicated enterprise made more so when English is a second language. Many types of businesses -- from food vendors and sidewalk cafes to scrap yards and nightclubs -- need Common Council approval. The Police Department also needed to approve the business, because it would be selling food.

"I would like it to be more predictable, that people can walk in and know exactly what it is they need to do," Niagara District Councilman David A. Rivera said.

His office helped Jama and Aden's application through the legislative process, but it still took six months for approval. Initially, City Hall lost their application, delaying it for about three months. Then it was held up again when the Police Department faxed it to the wrong office.

For those first three months, the partners were paying rent on their building, before their landlord decided to waive the payments until they opened.

"(Everybody) who try to open store, it's very difficult," Jama said.

The Westminster initiative has guided seven businesses like Jama's and Aden's store in the past three years, and six are still operating. The outreach program's latest effort, in collaboration with several other entities, including Journey's End Refugee Service and Councilman Rivera's office, is the West Side Bazaar scheduled to open this fall on West Ferry Street.

Helping Everyone Achieve Livelihood, one of the collaborators, is renovating an abandoned building on West Ferry between Grant and Herkimer so it can host up to 34 immigrant vendors. The bazaar will handle advertising, offer business workshops and connect sellers to city departments.

"So many of these people with entrepreneurial skills go on welfare," said Hodan Isse, board president of Helping Everyone and an economics professor at the University at Buffalo. "We are trying to find a model that will work for refugees."

Making a contribution

Fifteen to 20 immigrants have committed to setting up shop so far.

Alice Benishyaka, a Rwandan woman, will sell handcrafted jewelry, dishes, table cloths, paintings and carvings imported from Rwanda and the Ivory Coast.

"We come here with another culture and other things," Benishyaka said. "It helps to heal our wounds, because we still have a broken heart."

She fled Rwanda in 1994, during the civil war, and lived as a refugee for nine years before coming here.

"Some people have an idea about an immigrant. I want to show another image. We have a lot of things to show the world," she said. "It's a good contribution to America."

dgrandoni@buffnews.com null