On a grey March morning in 2008, a man named Hari Adhikari arrived in central New York with a refugee travel document and seventeen years of camp life behind him. He was the first Bhutanese Nepali to reach Syracuse. Within a decade there would be thousands, and the story of the Bhutanese in Syracuse, New York would be written across the porches and corner shops of a North Side that had already absorbed the Germans and the Italians before them.
The Place
Syracuse’s North Side is a big neighbourhood by city standards, close to four square miles spread over sixteen census tracts, tipping down from Schiller Park towards the flats where the Erie Canal once ran. It was settled largely by German-Americans in the nineteenth century, then became Little Italy, and the green-and-red banners still hang from the lampposts on North Salina Street beneath the tower of Assumption Church.
The housing stock is the reason so many newcomers land here. Wooden two-family doubles, built cheap for salt workers and factory hands, with front porches and rents low enough that a family arriving with nothing can make the first month.
Syracuse lost population for half a century. What refilled the North Side was not a returning middle class. It was refugees, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Somalia, Burma, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, and in numbers that surprised everybody, from the hills of southern Bhutan.
How It Became Bhutanese
The Law That Made Them Foreigners
The Bhutanese who came to Syracuse are Lhotshampa, which means “people of the southern border”. They are Nepali-speaking and mostly Hindu, and their families had farmed the southern districts of Bhutan, Samtse, Chirang and Sarpang, for generations, cutting terraces into land the northern Bhutanese did not farm.
In the 1980s the kingdom decided this was a problem. A Citizenship Act passed in 1985 reached back to a 1958 cut-off date and demanded documentary proof of residence before it. Paper was scarce in the southern hills, and families who had worked the same fields for a century found they could not prove it.
Alongside it came a policy called One Nation, One People. Driglam Namzha, the northern dress and etiquette code, became compulsory. Dzongkha became the national language and Nepali was discontinued in schools. What had been a country with two cultures was reorganised into one, and the Lhotshampa were on the wrong side of the reorganisation.
The Long Walk Out
Between 1990 and 1992 the exodus became a flood. Many say they were evicted at gunpoint and made to sign forms declaring they were leaving voluntarily. By 1996 more than a hundred thousand people had gone.
They crossed India and stopped in eastern Nepal, in camps that would define the next two decades: Beldangi I and II, Sanischare, Khudunabari, Timai, Goldhap. At the peak they held more than 107,000 people. Bamboo frames, thatch roofs, ration cards, and no citizenship anywhere on earth.
Nepal would not naturalise them. Bhutan would not take them back. Children were born in Beldangi who had never seen the country their grandparents were expelled from.
2008: The Door Opens
In 2007 the United States offered to take 60,000 of them, the largest single resettlement commitment of its kind at the time, and the UNHCR began planning the departure of most of the 108,000 people it had registered in the camps. The first Bhutanese refugees landed in the United States in March 2008.
Hari Adhikari was among the very first to reach Syracuse that month. He had been a camp leader in Nepal, one of the men who organised ration queues and school rotas, and he carried on doing it on the North Side instead. Out of that work came the Bhutanese Community in Syracuse, the nonprofit that still carries the community’s name.
Sumitra and Maniran Paudel arrived the same year and were among the first Bhutanese families to settle on the North Side proper. “When we came here the first time, we had a big dream,” Maniran said later. Syracuse in 2008 was not an obvious place to have one. The city was shrinking, the winters were long and the North Side had a reputation.
The Hard Years
The early arrivals were resettled into a neighbourhood with real problems, and the problems did not spare them. Families were robbed and assaulted. Nobody spoke Nepali at the housing office or the emergency room. Elders who had been respected farmers in Bhutan found themselves unable to read a bus timetable.
Mental health became the community’s quiet crisis, as it did in Bhutanese communities across the United States, and the Bhutanese Community in Syracuse has made it one of its central concerns rather than something to be kept in the family.
What the community had was numbers. Nearly 7,000 Bhutanese Nepali refugees were resettled in New York State across six years, and by far the largest share came to Syracuse. That concentration is what made everything afterwards possible.
Shops, Deeds and Passports
The turn came around 2012. Jai Subedi, a caseworker at InterFaith Works, opened the All Asian Store on Pond Street late that year. It was not the first Nepali business in Syracuse, but it was the one that proved a Bhutanese customer base existed, and by 2015 there were four Nepali groceries in the city and the first Nepali restaurant had opened.
Citizenship followed. Sumitra Paudel was sworn in around 2014, and by March 2015 roughly 150 Bhutanese in Syracuse had taken the oath. “After 37 years, I have a citizen in my hand now,” she said. “I’m so happy.” She had been stateless for most of her life.
Then came the deeds. Bhutanese families started buying the North Side doubles they had been renting, often living downstairs and letting the upstairs to a cousin or a newer arrival. It is the oldest immigrant strategy in America and it worked here exactly as it worked for the Germans in 1880. For the first time in decades, parts of the North Side gained population instead of losing it.
The Landmarks
All Asian Store, Pond Street. Jai Subedi opened it in late 2012 and it became the first and largest of the city’s Nepali groceries. The shelves carry sinki, the dried fermented radish no American supermarket stocks, plus garam masala, watana, gulab jamun, paan, and Nepali brands of soap, cosmetics and blankets. For years the stock came up from a Manhattan wholesaler, driven back weekly by Bharath Phuyel, who ran the till.
InterFaith Works Center for New Americans, 503 North Prospect Avenue. This is where almost every Bhutanese family in Syracuse first signed something. The agency resettles 500 to 600 refugees a year and serves around 1,200 more families still in their first five years here, with English classes, employment preparation and medical case management. Several of its Nepali-speaking caseworkers arrived as clients themselves.
North Side Learning Center, 501 Park Street. Founded in 2009 by members of the neighbourhood’s Muslim community who wanted English classes that fitted around shift work, it began above a shop at North McBride and Butternut streets and grew to around 150 families attending three nights a week. It now occupies a former Catholic school. Its longtime director Mark Cass died in August 2026, and Bhutanese families were among the hundreds who mourned him.
The Bhutanese Community in Syracuse. Registered as a Syracuse charity and grown out of Hari Adhikari’s camp-leader instincts, BCS has been led by figures including Krishna Baskota and Jai Subedi. Its work runs from citizenship preparation and interpretation to Dashain and Tihar gatherings and, unusually for a community organisation of its size, sustained attention to mental health.
Refugee and Immigrant Self-Empowerment, 302 Burt Street. Known universally as RISE and founded in 2004, it exists to move newcomers from case management to actual economic independence. For Bhutanese families that has meant job placement, driving lessons and the paperwork behind a first mortgage.
North Salina Street Historic District. The commercial spine of the North Side, still hung with Little Italy banners and still anchored by Assumption Church, but the shopfronts behind them tell a different story now. Nepali, Somali, Burmese and Congolese businesses share a street that the Italians of Syracuse built, and refugee resettlement offices sit at number 527.
341 Eggers Hall, Syracuse University. On 17 April 2018 the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs and the South Asia Center hosted Reflections on the 10th Anniversary of Resettlement, where members of the community told a university audience what the decade had cost and produced. Ten years to the month after Hari Adhikari landed.
Where They Came From
Almost every Bhutanese family in Syracuse can name two homelands and, until recently, belonged legally to neither. The first is southern Bhutan, the districts of Samtse, Chirang and Sarpang, cardamom and orange country in the foothills below the Himalaya. The family names, Adhikari, Subedi, Paudel, Baskota, Phuyel, point back to Nepali origins several generations before that.
The second is the camps. Beldangi, Sanischare, Khudunabari, Timai, Goldhap, in Nepal’s Jhapa and Morang districts. A whole generation of Syracuse’s Bhutanese were born there, went to school there and married there, and when they say where they are from, the honest answer is a bamboo hut with a UNHCR ration number.
The chain migration that followed was classic. One family lands, reports that Syracuse has cheap houses and an agency that answers the phone, and relatives resettled to Atlanta or Phoenix start driving north. Similar secondary migrations built the Bhutanese community in Akron, Ohio and the Nepali community in Columbus, and the three cities are connected by a constant traffic of weddings, funerals and grocery runs.
By 2015 around 100,000 Bhutanese refugees had been resettled worldwide and roughly 85 per cent of them had come to the United States. The camps consolidated and emptied, Goldhap and Timai folded into Beldangi II. What remains in Nepal is a few thousand people, mostly elderly, who chose to wait for a repatriation that never came.
Syracuse Today
The Bhutanese population of Syracuse is usually put at three to four thousand, one of the largest concentrations in the north-east and big enough to sustain its own shops, priests, weddings and politics. The North Side has Nepali spoken on the pavement and marigold garlands in October when Tihar comes round.
The generational split is now the defining fact. Parents who spent seventeen years in a camp work in warehouses, hospitals and hotels and speak careful, hard-won English. Their children went through Syracuse city schools and on to Onondaga Community College or Syracuse University, and are becoming the interpreters, nurses and caseworkers their parents needed twenty years ago. Some have never been to Asia at all.
None of it is finished. Poverty on the North Side is stubborn, the schools are stretched, and the resettlement pipeline that built this community has narrowed sharply since the peak years. Fewer new arrivals means a slow shift from a refugee community to simply an American one. That is the arc the Irish in Yonkers and the Ukrainians in Cohoes travelled a century earlier, and the arc that ends with people who describe themselves as being from Syracuse first. The difference is that these families arrived with nothing at all, not even a country, and bought the houses anyway.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Bhutanese people live in Syracuse, New York?
Estimates for the Bhutanese in Syracuse, New York range from about 3,000 to 4,000 people. Nearly 7,000 Bhutanese Nepali refugees were resettled across New York State over a six-year period, and Syracuse received the largest single share of them.
Why did Bhutanese refugees come to Syracuse?
Syracuse was an official resettlement site with established agencies, chiefly InterFaith Works’ Center for New Americans, and it had what refugee families needed: very cheap two-family houses on the North Side and entry-level jobs. Once the first families settled in 2008, relatives placed in other American cities began moving to join them.
Are Bhutanese refugees in Syracuse Nepali?
They are Lhotshampa, ethnic Nepalis whose families had lived in southern Bhutan for generations, Nepali-speaking and mostly Hindu, stripped of Bhutanese citizenship and expelled between 1990 and 1992. Many describe themselves as Bhutanese Nepali, which is why the community’s institutions carry both words.
When did the first Bhutanese refugees arrive in Syracuse?
March 2008. Hari Adhikari, a former camp leader in eastern Nepal, was the first Bhutanese Nepali to arrive in the city, in the same month the United States received its first Bhutanese arrivals nationally. He went on to help found the Bhutanese Community in Syracuse.
Where do the Bhutanese live in Syracuse?
Overwhelmingly on the North Side, the old German and Italian neighbourhood running north from downtown around North Salina Street and Butternut Street. It is where the resettlement agencies placed the first arrivals and where Bhutanese families have since bought a substantial number of the wooden two-family homes.
What Bhutanese businesses and organisations are there in Syracuse?
The best known is the All Asian Store on Pond Street, opened in late 2012 and the first of several Nepali groceries in the city, along with the Nepali restaurants that followed. The Bhutanese Community in Syracuse is the main community organisation, working alongside the North Side Learning Center on Park Street and RISE on Burt Street.
If your family’s story passed through Syracuse, or any of the places Bhutanese have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the cardamom terraces of Samtse and the bamboo huts of Beldangi, to a two-family house on the North Side, to wherever you are now.