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Refuge War has always meant refugees. In Biblical times, the enslaved Israelites fled Egypt seeking safety. Millennia later, seeking religious freedom, the Puritans settled in what became the United States; in the 18th century the nobility fled France during the French Revolution; and political exiles left central and southern Europe during the upheavals of the mid-19th century. Over 700,000 Mexicans left home because of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 and after World War I, people were displaced en masse from Asia Minor, the Russian Empire, and the Balkans. Huge numbers of the Germans from Russia emigrated to North Dakota during this period. In the 1930s, many fled from China because of the Japanese invasion and from Spain because of the Fascist victory. During World War II, an estimated 7 million Jews and others threatened by the Nazis fled their homelands. In the 1970's, at the height of the Vietnam War, approximately 1,200 Southwest Asians including Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians and Thai's came to North Dakota as a small portion of the 500,000 who immigrated to escape the communist take-over. In the 1990's Kurd, Sudanese, Serbian, Bosnians and others from war-torn area of the Eastern Europe have sought refuge and a new life on the prairie. The immigrants included farmers, fishermen, professionals, and businessmen. Some are young. Many are older. They all seek a more peaceful, safe way of life. In North Dakota, immigrants seeking refuge and safety are profiled in the New Pioneers program including: Abdullah and Berivan Ali fled Kurdistan in Iraq when mounting oppression and brutality put their young family at risk. They left their country because of the mounting physical danger but they chose to emigrate to North Dakota because of the larger group of refuges already in the area.   Tiffany Nguyan fled Vietnam in a small boat with her siblings, and survived nine months in an Indonesian fishing camp before immigrating, parentless, to Minnesota. All these refugee immigrant, past and present, were forced to leave their homeland in order to survive. According to Barry Nelson, Lutheran Social Services, many of these immigrants say "It wasn't for me so much. I'm going to continually mourn what I've lost. I'm going to miss what was so familiar. It's going to be difficult for me here. But my children, my children will know safety and security, and they will know America as their home. It is for the children that we did what we did."

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