A story in today's New York Times by Oliver Bullough seems to confirms the idea that there are relatively few Chechens in the US:
There are thousands of Chechen refugees in Austria, and thousands more in Poland, France, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Dubai and elsewhere (as well as scattered communities in the United States). Wherever they are, they stand out, a nation apart.
The word most linked to “Chechen” is “terrorist,” because of the attacks against the audience at Moscow’s Dubrovka Theater in 2002, against children in Beslan, North Ossetia, in 2004, and now the marathon in Boston. But terrorists were only ever a tiny fraction of the population. A more accurate word to link to “Chechen” would be “refugee.” Perhaps 20 percent, perhaps more, of all Chechens have left Chechnya in the last 20 years.A story in USA Today suggested that the number of Chechens in the may be very small, indeed.
There are probably fewer than about 200 Chechen immigrants in the United States, and most of them are settled in the Boston area, as many U.S. cities have refused to accept asylum applicants from the war-torn area of southern Russia, says Glen Howard, president of the Jamestown Foundation.
About 70% of the Chechen immigrants are women, Howard says. Very few men are granted asylum because of U.S. anti-terrorism policies and because Russia often protests when ethnic Chechens try to settle in the U.S., he said. The U.S. admitted only 197 refugees from all of Russia in 2012.
Overall, the Chechen population in Russia is not large, but there is considerable variability in estimates of its size. Information from the Russian Embassy in the UK suggests that in 2002, there were 1.3 Chechens in Russia, whereas a source purporting to have data from the 2010 census suggests that there may be nearly 8 million Chechens in Russia. We do know that most Chechens are Muslim, but we don't yet know whether religion played any role in the Boston bombings.
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