Immigrants don't pay taxes. They also refuse, or are too lazy to speak English, and they take jobs away from Americans.

These are just a few of the myths Phoukham Vongkhamdy faced when coming to this country from Laos. Some 20 years later, the myths remain, the state outreach coordinator/Asian American employment program manager for the USDA -- Minnesota Natural Resources Conservation Services told about 175 people who attended the fourth annual Regional Cultural Diversity Conference held recently in Worthington.

"We are not the same, but we have some things in common -- food, family, education, music, religion and language," Vongkhamdy said. "All cultures have these things."

The key is to recognize and understand the differences between cultures, to connect through the similarities, to reach helping hands into immigrant communities rather than waiting for them to reach out, and to give them and their descendants time to adjust, according to Vongkhamdy and other conference speakers.

However, some traditions die hard, he said. Even after 20 years, he sometimes forgets to look people in the eye when speaking to them. Avoiding eye contact shows respect in his culture, but Americans take this as a sign of inattention, he said.

"I pay attention to you even though I don't look at your eyes," he said.

And no matter how long he lives here or how hard he tries, he will never speak perfect English, he said. Yet Vongkhamdy is optimistic.

"The new generation will change lots of things," he said.

Naly Yang, executive director of the Women's Association of Hmong and Lao, Inc., is less certain. Although some youngsters struggle to gain the independence enjoyed by American teenagers, she believes it will take many more generations before major changes take place within the Hmong community, whose members come from the mountain regions of Laos

"You can look at the different immigrants that have come before the Hmong and look at the struggle they had, and the acculturation process is pretty much the same. The only painful part about it is that it is our acculturation process," Yang said. "I do hope that things change and that I get to be a part of what enables us to change. But I also know that it's difficult because you're trying to change people's mindsets."

Mainstream America knows what it reads in newspapers about the Hmong culture, but much remains unknown. The cultural gap is wider than differences in language and gestures, she said.

For instance, among Hmong clans it still is somewhat common to have traditional rather than legal marriages. Brides are as young as 14 years old, and arranged marriages still happen, Yang said. Divorce is rare, regardless of the circumstances, and men have more power and rights than women do.

"Single women with children have no place in our community, basically. We also believe in having many children," Yang said. "It's hard to change that mentality. The reality is we end up doing what we see every day. So, if we see that teenage marriages are OK, we'll be doing that. If we see polygamy, which is such an awkward issue in our community, then we'll do that, too. You have men my age who are marrying first and second wives."

Yang is among a small, but slowly growing number of Hmong women who hold professional jobs and who marry later in life. Yang remained single until she was 27.

"There are male supporters out there, but when a man supports a woman, he is seen as less than a man," Yang said. "As Hmong women become more professional, as we start looking for careers, things are changing in that the men in our lives understand that we are not going to be home. But it's a small segment of the population that's attained enough education for this."

Yang deals in her work with young girls who often seem to want to buck some of these traditions. Too often, though, she later learns one of them is married and pregnant, she said.

"I feel like standing in front of a brick wall and just pounding my head against it," Yang said.

Money that goes to small cultural diversity organizations in individual communities to help immigrant populations deal with these and other problems often would do more good at larger agencies that have better capacity to serve these people, Yang said.

"Here in Minnesota we are still struggling so hard with just the definition of cultural competency and who is culturally competent and the whole diversity card in terms of funding," Yang said.

Hiring minority staff who speak good English might help agency coworkers, but these might not be the people with the most knowledge of and influence within a minority population, Yang said.

"Just because you have one minority person on staff doesn't mean that you're culturally competent," Yang said.

Paul Pierson, a co-op development specialist with the USDA believes conferences like the one in Worthington help break down some of the barriers that exist between cultures by heightening awareness.

"If nothing else, a lot of the agencies have a chance to talk about common concerns and issues," Pierson said.

These conferences also help community members understand immigrants' problems better, Connie Knorr, education coordinator for the Southwest Minnesota Private Industry Council said.

"We in agencies need to be better educated about the people that we work with, but the guy in the coffee shop has to be educated also," Knorr said.