Tag: African immigrants

Immigration

Maine finds homes for several hundred African asylum seekers

By David Sharp

Most African asylum-seekers who made the perilous journey through Central America to the southern US border and flooded shelters in Maine’s largest city have new homes.

Thursday marked the closing of an emergency shelter set up in a basketball arena in Portland after several hundred African immigrants arrived from Texas. All told, the city has found homes for more than 200 people since the first families arrived in June.

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Communities

This is Where African Immigrants live in New York

By John Campbell

The New York Times estimates that those born in Africa are about 4 percent of New York City’s immigrant population.

Africans, like any other group, live all over the city. However, Andy Kiersz has published two fascinating maps on Business Insider that shows where in New York people speak specific foreign (not English) languages at home. Not surprisingly, Spanish is dominant in most neighborhoods in all five boroughs.

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Communities

Eritrean, Saheed Saleh, killed in Dayton shooting

A Dayton man, Saheed Saleh, killed in the Sunday shooting at the Oregon District was an Eritrea native.Yahya Khamis, president of the Dayton Sudanese community, who spoke on behalf of Saleh’s family, said several members from across the state came to Dayton to pay their respects.

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Education

Coming To America: The Best Student Podcasts About Immigration from NPR

By JACQUELINE NKHONJERA

When Fahmo Abdi and her family immigrated to the United States from Kenya, they lost contact with all of their loved ones. While living in a refugee camp, Abdi’s mother decided to move her family to the United States in search of a better life. “She knew she had to work hard to provide for us and [for] her family back home,” Abdi recalls.

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Religion

Big Tent hosts African leaders’ pre-conference gathering

Leaders from 11 African countries now serving the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in 22 states and 20 presbyteries across the United States gathered for the African Leaders Pre-Conference, sponsored by the Racial Equity & Women’s Intercultural Ministries at Big Tent 2019.

Those attending the African pre-conference at Big Tent in Baltimore joined in a Spirit-filled worship service Tuesday.

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Immigration

3 ways South Africans are moving to the United States

More South Africans are emigrating to the United  States (US) in search of a better lifestyle and job opportunities.

According to data provided by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, between 2015 and 2017 around 10,200 South Africans obtained permanent resident status.

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Communities

What Is The History Behind Minnesota’s Somali-American Community?

By Heather Brown

Recent political attacks have shined a spotlight on Minnesota’s immigrant communities. Minnesota has the country’s largest Somali-American population – 69,000 people. That’s about 40% of everyone reporting Somali ancestry in the United States and more than four times the Somali-American population of the next largest state, Ohio.

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Achievements

American firm hoists Nigerian flag to honour employee

An American multinational company, Stericycle Inc., recently hoisted the Nigerian flag in honour of a hardworking new employee, Mrs Omolanke Shelle.

Thirty-eight-year-old Shelle, an indigene of Ekiti Stateworks at the company’s facility in Aurora, Illinois, where the Green-White-Green national flag was raised in April.

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Opinion

Immigration And The African Diaspora

Dr. Halifu Osumare

With the Trump administration’s hardline and heartless immigration policies — starting with the 2017 rescinding of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) for young immigrants already in the U.S. and continuing with the 2018 family separation policy under his so-called “zero-tolerance” approach at the U.S.-Mexico border — the focus has been on brown people escaping poverty, gang violence, and state terror in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador. But there are also tens of thousands of African, Caribbean, and African diasporans entering the country by plane that are also trapped in the morass of Trumpian hardline immigration policies.

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Immigration

‘I do everything all Americans do.’ Home but for how long? ICE releases Mauritanian man after 11 months

Amadou Sow, 49, a Mauritanian national, stands in the doorway of his apartment in Lockland, where his family has lived for 13 years. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested him Aug. 22 but inexplicably released him July 12 after almost 11 months in detention. (Photo: Albert Cesare / The Enquirer)

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Immigration

Why No One Is Discussing the Rise in Africans Migrants Piled at U.S.-Mexico Border

By David Love

The subject of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border conjures images of people from Latin America, particularly Central America, who are fleeing poverty and violence. However, the dynamics of migration into the U.S. are changing. Increasingly, many migrants crossing the border are from nations in Africa and the Caribbean, particularly Haiti, making asylum seekers and the border a Black issue as well.

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Opinion

Trump’s Incendiary Rhetoric Is Only Accelerating Immigration

  The Crisis at the Border Is of Washington’s Own Making

By Randy Capps

President Donald Trump’s stance on immigration could hardly be less welcoming. During the 2016 presidential campaign, he pledged to build a wall across the entire southern border, deport all undocumented immigrants, and restrict legal immigration—including instituting a “complete and total shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States. He has yet to deliver on the most draconian of these promises, but there’s no denying that his administration has made border security and immigration enforcement top priority

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Immigration

U.S. dream pulls African migrants in record numbers across Latin America

Marilyne Tatang, 23, crossed nine borders in two months to reach Mexico from the West African nation of Cameroon, fleeing political violence after police torched her house, she said.

She plans to soon take a bus north for four days and then cross a tenth border, into the United States. She is not alone – a record number of fellow Africans are flying to South America and then traversing thousands of miles of highway and a treacherous tropical rainforest to reach the United States.

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Uncategorized

Candace Owens sparks twitter storm following remarks about Nigerian-Americans

by  Nurudeen Lawal –

American conservative commentator and political activist Candace Owens is known for her pro-Trump activism and her criticism of the Democratic Party. In a tweet that is trending on Twitter, Owens claimed that Nigerian-Americans are the most successful ethnic group in the United States; more successful than blacks of over-privileged America.

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She also asserted that the success achieved by Nigerians is because they are not exposed to the “Democrat parasite of victimhood!”

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Communities

‘We Are Americans’: Somali Refugee Family Reflects On Making A Life In The U.S.

By Josh Axelrod, Von Diaz, and Camila Kerwin

Facing persecution, violence, lack of health care and myriad other barriers to safety, millions of refugees leave home each year seeking a better life in a different country. As of 2017, more than 2 million Somalis have been displaced, in one of the world’s worst refugee crises, according to the United Nations refugee agency.

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Opinion

Lazy people don’t immigrate; hopeful hard workers do


By Amgad Naguib

Earlier this year I was at my local gas station at 6 a.m. stocking up on caffeine for the daily commute. I joked with the young Ethiopian attendant about how haggard he looked and how happy he must be to get some rest after a graveyard shift.

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Book review, Communities

Somali and American: Portrait of a Minnesota Community

By Aida Alami

Refugees often say that war feels like a wave of violence washing over them, leaving behind death and destruction. The feeling was no different for Katra Ali Hethar, who fled war-torn Somalia in 1991 with her nine small children.

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Opinion

America’s Asylum System Is Profoundly Broken

Until the United States establishes and articulates clear rules, the crisis at the border will continue.

By David Frum

A 25-year-old man from El Salvador tried to swim with his daughter across the Rio Grande to Brownsville, Texas. Father and daughter were caught in the current, and drowned. Their bodies washed ashore on the Mexican side of the river, in an image that has seized the attention of the world.

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Communities

‘Because I love Somalia and because I love America’: Minnesota celebrates Somali Independence Day and Week

By Jim Walsh

Cheers erupted and hundreds of Somali flags cut through the humid Minnesota night, waving wildly as Walz read from his proclamation celebrating Somalia Independence Day and Week. Observed annually in Somalia on July 1, the date celebrates the unification of the Trust Territory of Somalia (the former Italian Somalia) and the State of Somalia (the former British Somaliland) on July 1, 1960, which formed the Somali Republic. 

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Immigration

When 100 Congolese Asylum Seekers Showed Up, This Shelter Made Room

A shelter in Buffalo, New York, operated by health center, Jericho Road, has been providing recent arrivals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo medical aid, legal services, and educational opportunities.

By Talya Meyers

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Uncategorized

From Nigeria To Springfield, Missouri: Tayo Bakare Blooms Where Planted

By Michele Skalicky

Temitayo “Tayo” Bakare is 35-years-old with a family and a job as clinical director of pharmacy at CoxHealth in Springfield.  But her life began thousands of miles away in Africa.  She learned to be on her own at a time when many children in the United States are just beginning to test the waters of independence with their parents close by. She grew up in Nigeria and remembers a fun childhood there.

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Uncategorized

From Somalia to Kenya, From Michigan to Missouri: Abdi Tarey Finds His Place as a New American

By Jessica Balise

In 1991, civil war broke out in Somalia. It’s a relatively young country, with only 59 years of independence since British rule. At the time, Abdi Tarey was five years old. His father was in the military and things became very dangerous for his family.

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Immigration

Maine Needed New, Young Residents. African Migrants Began Arriving by the Dozens

By Kate Taylor

Through the winter, the families streamed into Portland, bringing stories of violence and persecution in their home countries in central Africa. Portland’s shelter for homeless families soon filled to capacity, so the city put mats on the floor of a Salvation Army gym for 80 more people. Then that, too, wasn’t enough. This month, 250 migrants from Africa arrived in this northeastern city of roughly 67,000 residents in the span of just a week, overflowing the overflow space and forcing Portland to hastily convert a basketball arena into an emergency shelter. Continue reading “Maine Needed New, Young Residents. African Migrants Began Arriving by the Dozens” →

Immigration

He traveled from Africa to Houston via Central America on plane, boat, bus and foot. There is no happy ending

By Rob Curran and Andrew Nelson

The last time we saw Eritrean asylum seeker Kidane Okubay, we were in a little port town on the border of Colombia and Panama and he was heading off into the night on a motorboat with 10 of his compatriots. We received emails from him on the road to the U.S., but they abruptly stopped in late August. What happened to him?

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Opinion

Refugees and the spirit of America –

By Omar Kallon

Growing up as the son of a Sierra Leonean refugee in Egypt during the 1990s wasn’t easy. My father couldn’t return to his homeland because of a brutal civil war, and although my mother was an Egyptian citizen, Egypt’s patrilineal citizenship laws meant my father and my sister and I were never considered Egyptian.

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Communities

Renga for the West: The US Through the Eyes of Congolese Refugees

Experience day jobs, road trips and high school pep-rallies in the US through the eyes of Montana’s newest residents.

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Immigration

Here’s a look at the process of seeking asylum and why it’s different this time

By Nick Schroeder

PORTLAND (BDN) — As of Friday afternoon, a total of 177 migrants have arrived in Portland. Thursday night, 157 stayed at the Portland Expo, and 20 more arrived on buses from San Antonio Friday morning. Since arriving on Sunday, 41 have also left, according to the city of Portland, possibly headed for Canada.

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Uncategorized

Congolese asylum-seekers given taste of home

By Jessie Degollado – Reporter, Misael Gomez – Photojournalist

SAN ANTONIO – Congolese asylum seekers at both of the city’s Migrant Resource Centers are being treated to home-cooked meals provided by the local Congolese, including Dr. Patience Miller, an OB-GYN, and her husband, Bosco Miller, an adjunct professor of religion at the University of the Incarnate Word.

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Opinion

Why Should Immigrants ‘Respect Our Borders’? The West Never Respected Theirs

Immigration quotas should be based on how much the host country has ruined other countries.

By Suketu Mehta

There is a lot of debate these days about whether the United States owes its African-American citizens reparations for slavery. It does. But there is a far bigger bill that the United States and Europe have run up: what they owe to other countries for their colonial adventures, for the wars they imposed on them, for the inequality they have built into the world order, for the excess carbon they have dumped into the atmosphere.

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Immigration

VIDEO: Border Patrol detains 116 African migrants crossing US-Mexico border

U.S. Border Patrol agents in Texas intercepted 116 African migrants who crossed the Rio Grande and entered the U.S. The group consisted of migrants from Angola, Cameroon and Congo.

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