So why are there so few Chechens in America? Mainly, because we don't resettle Chechen refugees here.
...And frankly, says Kathleen Newland, director of refugee programs at the Migration Policy Institute, the Chechen population was never of "special concern" to the United States, and the hope was that the region's displaced citizens would return home when its wars ended.
...This asylum process is how the suspects' father, Anzor Tsarnaev, a Chechen man who was living in Dagestan in southern Russia, ended up in Boston: He and his then-8-year-old son Dzhokhar, the surviving suspect, arrived in the U.S. legally in 2002 on a tourist visa, and then petitioned to stay as asylum seekers.