Meeting the Needs of African Migrants in NYC

Brian: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Here's something about our recent asylum seekers that you might not know. While the vast majority of the recent arrivals, somewhere around 85% according to The New Yorker, are from Latin American countries, a growing number are coming from African nations, flying to Central America and then traveling through the southern border into the United States. This is in part due to the crackdown on migration in Europe.

On December 20th, the European Union signed a pact to facilitate the deportation of asylum seekers and limit migration to the EU bloc. Many far right politicians in various countries there are also running and winning on the promise to curb migration. Here, in the US, the number of African asylum seekers apprehended at the southern border jumped from around 13,000 in 2022 to over 58,000 last year according to The New York Times. The majority of those migrants were from Mauritania, Senegal, Angola, and Guinea.

Joining me now to discuss these trends and the special needs of African migrants and how his organization is responding to meet them is Amaha Kassa, founder and executive director of African Communities Together, which is national group supporting African immigrants with a headquarters in Harlem. They're also in DC and Philadelphia. Amaha, thanks so much for coming on with us. Welcome to WNYC.

Amaha: Good morning, Brian. Very glad to be with you.

Brian: Before we dig into some of this recent news and invite callers in, can you first tell us a bit more about your organization, African Communities Together, and what you do?

Amaha: Sure. Our organization, we just celebrated our 10th anniversary. As you said, we are a national organization of by and for immigrants from Africa and their families. We do a lot of different things, including a lot of direct service provision. Most of that is immigration legal, but we help people with a whole range of urgent needs. We also are a membership-based organization, we run leadership programs, and we're an advocate as well in the courts, in state, and federal government. We advocate on policy issues that affect our communities.

Brian: Last summer, as many of our listeners know, Texas Governor Greg Abbott started sending busloads of migrants to New York City. Can you tell us a bit about what your organization saw at the beginning of that, and how it's been changing over the months?

Amaha: Absolutely. Over the months that secondary migration from border states, particularly Texas, has been coming to New York. We have just been steadily overwhelmed, to be frank, by the number of community members seeking assistance. We are currently getting over 250 primarily African-- we serve lots of different countries of origin. We get people, of course, also coming in from Central America or the Middle East or other countries, but the vast majority of people who find us and who need assistance from our team are West African migrants.

We're seeing people coming from Guinea, Mauritania has been a big-- there's been a big influx of folks coming from Mauritania, Burkina Faso, other parts of West Africa. We've always-- historically, most people who were coming to us were long-term New Yorkers and had been living in New York for some time and heard about us through word of mouth. Like a lot of other immigrant serving organizations, we have had to shift drastically to meet the needs of these newest New Yorkers.

Brian: Now, let me invite listeners who may be among those new arrivals from Africa or may know anybody who is to call in or even anyone else from, especially those four countries who've been getting named as the senders of most of the recent African migrants coming through the southern border after they get to this hemisphere. Listeners, if you are from or connected to Mauritania, Senegal, Angola, or Guinea, you're going to get first priority on the phones now.

Help us report the story of why people are making that incredibly perilous and difficult journey going from any of those countries, first, to Central America and then making that perilous trip that so many Central Americans make somehow walking or however, they go up to the United States and coming in and then 58,000 in the last year into New York City after that, 212-433-WNYC. We invite your stories, we invite stories of people you know, we invite your questions, we invite your take on what's going on in the home countries to drive so many people to take these risks. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

Call or text for Amaha Kassa, founder and executive director of African Communities Together. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Amaha, if that number in The New York Times is right, 58,000 new such arrivals in 2023, that's more than 1,000 people a week. Is that what you're seeing at African Communities Together?

Amaha: Well, we're seeing that number, us and the other organizations. There's a lot of other organizations that are really valiantly trying to respond to the needs of these new African arrivals. We're one of the largest, but there's other, a group called Africana that's been doing incredible work on the front lines, meeting the buses, African Services Committee, other groups that have been first responders, but a lot of the those folks have come to us.

And it really has been an order of magnitude more than anything we've seen in the previous eight or nine years, including even during COVID when we had a lot of people who were in need of emergency services because businesses were closed, public accommodations were closed. We were, at one level, trying to do rapid response during COVID, and have had to level up again to meet the current influx of folks. Often with just a delayed and really insufficient level of response from certainly from the federal government, but really there's been gaps at the state and local level as well.

Brian: I wonder if you could help give our listeners a short course on what's going on in some of these countries, driving so many people to take this desperate act. Mauritania, Northwest Africa, Senegal is right there, Guinea is right nearby, Angola is further south, but most New Yorkers without connections to the region hardly hear anything about Mauritania. What the heck is happening in Mauritania that they're driving so many people to do this?

Amaha: Well, there's a poem that people may have encountered by Warsan Shire that says, "No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark." I think that's really true. A lot of African migration-- people are migrating because they don't have great options to remain. In some cases, we're talking about countries that have experienced political violence, war, conflict, interethnic violence, those forces that are driving people. A lot of times with Mauritania, in particular, it's because people are members of a group that is discriminated against or persecuted in their country of origin.

You're seeing people who are considered to be Black Mauritanians and who often experience racism up to and including forced labor and slavery. There's well-documented human rights reports on this in Mauritania, which is why we've been urging the federal government to extend Temporary Protected Status, humanitarian protection to Mauritania, but so far, that's not something that the federal government has done.

Brian: That's like more ethnically Arabic people persecuting more ethnically Black African. Am I putting that right?

Amaha: Effectively, yes. Sometimes the categories don't always map on to how we in the US understand ethnicity, but yes, certainly people who we would identify as Black are on the receiving end of that persecution, yes.

Brian: Let's take a call from a listener who wants to say something about Guinea. Namina in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Namina.

Namina: Hi, good morning, Brian. Happy New Year to you and your staff, and your wonderful guest. Thank you, sir, for this topic, it's so needed to talk about. I'm originally from Freetown, Sierra Leone, West Africa, and my mother is and my father. My father is Guinean. You just said something about, they will kill them because of their religion or just because they're Black. The last President that was in Guinea, that's what he was doing. He just killed. If you're dark and you're Muslim, he just killed, you can read it.

People were just running away; children, mothers were killed, and people were just running away, and they're following their rainbow where they could go. Nobody wants to leave their homeland, but just like you said, they killed them for no reason. They are running away to save their life, and they just go. They just follow their rainbow, wherever they go. If even they deport them, they will still come back. They are running away for their life. You don't know what to do. Remember when the blood diamond happened in Sierra Leone? That's what most of our family, everybody just running away.

They are just killing them. If you're a different tribe, they kill you. If you're Black Muslim, they just killed you, your own. That's what's going on. I thank you so much for this topic. I wish the news was there. I was telling the young lady to answer the phone, and I said, when you go into the villages, you see it, not in the city, but when you go into the village, you see the atrocities, but the news is not there. The media is not there. I'm so grateful and thankful that your guest is having this conversation. Thank you.

Brian: Thank you, Namina. Thank you for amplifying it.

Amaha: Yes, thank you, Namina. It's very well said.

Brian: I actually want to take another caller with ties to Guinea, who I think is going to say they're working with some recent asylum seekers. Mamadou in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hello, Mamadou.

Mamadou: Hi, Brian. How are you?

Brian: Doing okay. Thank you very much. Tell us your story.

Mamadou: Thank you. I'm sorry. I'm from Guinea, and I've been working with some of the asylum seekers from Guinea, especially in my community. When I realized they were coming like six, seven months ago, and we did not have any organizations or group to help them out or to advise them on anything, I came up with an idea of creating a WhatsApp group chat. With two of my friends, we called it [unintelligible 00:13:13]. Help me, I help you.

Basically, what we done in that group is like to share information to advise them what they should be aware of and help them out with getting New York City IDs or sharing information, where they should go for ESL classes. We helped them a lot. We've had now an office where we are taking some of them to help them with Medicaid, or New York City ID applications, but we still need more resources. I just to emphasize, helping out these immigrants is highly recommended by everyone. There is much more we can do individually or within your group.

Brian: Mamadou, thank you very much. I'll follow up on that with you in a minute, Amaha, about things that are needed. I want to go next to Emily in Manhattan, who I think says she's a doctor in an emergency room in the Bronx, seeing more people from West Africa. Emily, you're on WNYC, thank you for calling in.

Emily: Yes, hi. Yes, like you said, I'm a doctor in the South Bronx, and I work in the emergency department. We've also had quite an increase of people from West Africa coming into the department over the last year or so, which presents a new widespread variety of challenges because all of these people are coming up, as you said through South America. In addition to that, it's a whole underreported thing as you've been saying because we hear a lot about migrants from South America and we see a lot of those migrants as well, but we do see a big proportion of West Africans come in.

Especially as an emergency provider, it's a very interesting thing to happen because we get all these people who speak all these different varieties of languages. Just in terms of how we treat these people, we have a hard time communicating with them sometimes because there's all these people coming in from tribal languages that we can't even communicate with them anymore. We've seen this just in the emergency department on the ground, and it is something that is happening, and it's under-reported.

Brian: I'm glad you're helping us amplify it. I'm curious if besides communicating with whoever's coming in to treat their ER medical needs, if you're hearing any stories of why they fled their countries.

Emily: Not so much. A lot of it is, as you were saying, like religious persecution or ethnic persecution that has caused them and a lot of them have come up through South America, as you see. We see this really interesting demographic, where these people come in, and sometimes they speak a bit of Spanish. Sometimes they speak a little French, but I find it very interesting because they are coming up through South America, as you said. Along with that, the hospital, which I worked at, interestingly, is the largest.

We treat the most malaria out of any hospital in the United States because people do come in, and then they seek medical attention, and it's not like they're getting malaria here in the US, but they're coming here with malaria. It is a sad thing to see, and you know they've been under-treated or not treated at all because they've been trying to migrate up from South America or just from other West African countries.

Brian: Emily, thank you so much for your work and for your call. Interesting that she talks about language, Amaha, and the previous caller, Mamadou from Guinea, was describing one of the services they're trying to provide is English as a Second Language classes.

Amaha: Language, it's impossible to overstate how important that need is. Africa is the most linguistically diverse place in the world. There are literally hundreds and thousands of African languages. For the most part, up until recently, even basic access to French and Arabic was often missing in public services and publicly funded services. Language services would provide the Spanish and maybe a couple of Asian languages and call it a day. As the doctor was saying, that's really insufficient. There's good news and bad news.

I think that we've started to meet the demand for language services. We actually helped launch a language services worker cooperative called AfriLingual, which is a worker-owned agency providing language services. That's terrific news. Unfortunately, we had the City Council allocated $5 million to expand language services and the Adams administration cut that funding in the most recent city budget. Unfortunately, during a time when we need to be growing language services, we're seeing some moves backwards.

Brian: That's a paradox, right? The city says it has to cut services because it's spending so much money on migrants, but some of those cuts are to organizations like yours that serve the migrants.

Amaha: Exactly, and help them move into self-sufficiency. Ultimately, these are cost savings that we can realize by getting people legal status, getting people help with their employment applications, helping them move into stable housing, all of that.

Brian: Here's a caller from another of the four countries that a lot of people are coming from now. Elijah in Manhattan, who told our screener he's Senegalese. Elijah, you're on WNYC, thank you so much for calling in.

Elijah: Thank you, Brian, and thank you for your guest. I just wanted to ask one question, how we can help other Senegalese who've been there for a while? I'm seeing my brothers and sisters struggling on the street, they don't have no place to stay, they stay in this mosque, 200 of them. For sure, they don't have no place to take shower. They are here for four months, five months, nothing, nothing. They picking a battle on the street. What advice would you give us guys that we can have access to it to help them because it's so sad. It's so sad.

They're here already. It's going to take them time to integrate, so we need advice what we can do, where we can get access to help them because I know is overwhelming. Suddenly, tell them come, and they're new in this country, struggle to communicate. It's overwhelming to our community too. I'm sitting here and helpless. We don't know what to do.

Brian: Helpless, but also I hear your beautiful heart and trying to help people. Amaha, any advice for Elijah as he's asking for, or advice to the listeners, as a whole, on how they can help if they want to help because I'm sure a lot of people are wondering that.

Amaha: Yes. I think what Elijah said and what Mamadou said earlier is so true. A lot of the people who are getting help right now, it's not even agencies like ours, or the city, or these things, a lot of the help is coming from these frontline mosques, churches where right now they're putting people up on floors. We've tried to support some of those folks who are housing people informally. The community really has been heroic in its response to arriving community members, particularly where we already have a lot of people in New York, like the Senegalese committee, the Guinean community.

I think we need to demand action from the city. The city also needs to demand more leadership from the state and federal government. If this were taking place at the southern border, I think we would be seeing billions of dollars from FEMA to provide short-term housing, and because it's happening in New York, I think the federal government has been able to wash its hands of the situation. We haven't filed the lawsuit against the federal government the way that I think you might see a more hostile mayor or governor do.

I think we need that, and I think we need both short-term solutions, like vouchers to get people into housing. I think we need long-term solutions like your last segment was talking about the structural crisis of affordable housing. We need to be converting hotels and office space into affordable housing. Private charity can help. We've been able to get people into some short-term transitional housing, thanks to a grant from Airbnb, but those things are just a drop in the bucket compared to the scale of the need.

People need housing until they can get on their feet, the work authorizations are taking too long. If people have that, they can become self-sufficient like tens of millions of immigrant New Yorkers have before them.

Brian: Before you go, can you just give us a little bit more of a political geography lesson, these four countries who are the big four African countries from where so many of the migrants to New York are coming, and it still blows my mind to think that they're flying to Central America and making that treacherous journey up through Mexico and all of that, and crossing the border and then winding up in New York and 58,000 people have done that in the last year, according to The New York Times from these four countries?

For people who don't know the map, one more time, just going from south to north this time, they're all on the West Coast of Africa, Angola, then up through Guinea, Senegal, and Mauritania, the most north of the four, but there are other countries in Africa, where they're also a desperate situation; Sudan is in the news, Congo is in the news, others. Is it a matter of geography that even though they're an ocean away, these countries are the closest to the Americas because they're on the West Coast of Africa? Is that why it's these countries, and it's not Sudan, which is in crisis, or elsewhere?

Amaha: Yes. I would say, I know that Angola has been a big sending country. In terms of our communities, we're actually seeing more also from Burkina Faso. There's a big Burkinabe community.

Brian: Also, in West Africa, they're not on the water, right?

Amaha: Exactly. I think that it's complicated. In migration, you talk about push factors and pull factors. When there are short-term crises, sometimes it's actually places where you have folks-- sometimes the most vulnerable people don't make the crossing. It takes a lot of initiative and maybe a little bit of money to buy a plane ticket to make these crossings. Sometimes it's a combination of desperation and an ability to move. Sometimes it's network effects where people you know are leaving, and you start to look around prospects and possibilities.

Brian: Because there are immigrant communities from those places here. That's a great point.

Amaha: Exactly.

Brian: As is the point you were just making before that which we actually did part of a segment on just recently how it is not the poorest people who are the immigrants from anywhere to anywhere generally because it takes some resources to migrate at all, but there we leave it with Amaha Kassa, founder and executive director of African Communities Together.

Now, listeners, you know something that many of you may not have known about our recent asylum seekers, that 58,000 of them in 2023, according to STATS published in The New York Times came not from Latin America or the Caribbean, but from Africa. Thank you so much for joining us. Good luck with everything that you're doing.

Amaha: Thanks for having me, Brian. Thank you.