By Shawn Vestal
Veronique Changa Changa recalls the night that she and her family began the long, long journey from the Congo to Spokane.
The 22-year-old burn scars on her leg remain to remind her.
Continue reading “American lives taking shape: For refugees from the Congo, life in Spokane is one of hope, heartache”
A mother and daughter are excited for a fresh start after receiving the keys to their new Habitat for Humanity home on Sunday.
Alphosine and her daughter Esther are originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo, but they were living in a refugee camp in Uganda before coming to America.
Continue reading “Congolese refugees become newest Habitat homeowners in Lexington”
By Kirk Siegler
It’s the first day of school in Missoula, Mont., and Elongo Gabriel, a Congolese refugee, is dropping off his young son and two daughters.
A proud father, he has a wide grin. “For me it’s like a dream to get a chance for my kids to study here,” he says.
Continue reading “Popular Refugee Resettlement Programs Closing Under Trump Administration”
By Bill Decker
When I read or hear stories about the current immigration crisis on the U.S. southern border, the word “cacophony” frequently comes to mind: an “unpleasant mixture of loud sounds,” as one dictionary defines it.
The same dictionary then provides a list of synonyms: bedlam, clash, commotion, salvo, thunder, and uproar.
Continue reading “Taxi rides provide illumination about crisis of immigration”
Kenyan-born Dr. Godriver Odhiambo, a professor, at Le Moyne was among immigrants sworn in as American at the grounds of the New York Fair.
To honor New Americans day, nearly 100 immigrants were sworn in on Friday during a naturalization ceremony at Daniella’s, formerly the Empire Room. This is the fifth year the State Fair has held the ceremony and each one carries a lasting impact.
Continue reading “Kenyan-born professor among new Americans as New York State Fair holds naturalization ceremony”
Calling Aklilu Burayu a parking ramp attendant doesn’t come close to describing the roles he’s played in the Twin Cities economy.
In the 13 years since coming to Minnesota from Ethiopia, he’s been a painter and sander at a Blaine wood factory, an assembly line worker in Arden Hills and worked a succession of office jobs through a staffing agency. These days when he’s not at the ramp, he picks up shifts at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport as a chef.
Continue reading “East Africans Clock in With Hope, Hard Work on Minnesota’s Thankless Jobs”
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.
Continue reading “Maine finds homes for several hundred African asylum seekers”
If you are living in the United States and wish to learn Kinyarwanda – Rwanda’s vernacular, your destination has been unveiled.
Indiana University (IU) in the United States will start offering a course in Kinyarwanda, making it the 8th African language the university is teaching under its African Studies Program.
Continue reading “Indiana University starts course to teach Rwandan national language, Kinyarwanda”
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.
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.
Continue reading “What Is The History Behind Minnesota’s Somali-American Community?”
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.
Continue reading “American firm hoists Nigerian flag to honour employee”
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)
Continue reading “‘I do everything all Americans do.’ Home but for how long? ICE releases Mauritanian man after 11 months”
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
Continue reading “Trump’s Incendiary Rhetoric Is Only Accelerating Immigration”
Hilary Kimuyu
In 2003 a go-getting Kenyan nurse called Janet Kisaka Rangi found out that an application process she had begun with some agents in Nairobi had borne fruit. She had an opportunity to move to the United States.
She quit her nursing job at Aga Khan University hospital after working for a year. She packed her belongings, left her husband behind and flew off to America, all this while expecting her first child.
Continue reading “Kenyan author and blogger, Janet Rangi, writes book on how immigrants can secure success in America”
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.
Continue reading “‘We Are Americans’: Somali Refugee Family Reflects On Making A Life In The U.S.”
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.
Continue reading “Lazy people don’t immigrate; hopeful hard workers do”
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.
Continue reading “America’s Asylum System Is Profoundly Broken”
By Katrina Pross
The newest firefighters in St. Paul and Minneapolis graduated Friday, including two men who will be the first Somali-American firefighters in St. Paul and possibly the state and nation.
Continue reading “In a first, 2 Somali-Americans joining ranks of St. Paul firefighters”
By Rob Wolfe
They may be separated by language – Portuguese for Angolans, English for Rwandans, French for the Congolese – but all of Greater Portland’s African immigrant communities do share one means of communication: soccer. Or, as they are more likely to call it, football.
To welcome newly arrived asylum seekers, the Congolese Community of Maine teamed up with players from several other African countries for an afternoon of soccer in Portland’s East Bayside neighborhood.
Continue reading “Soccer matches welcome asylum seekers in Portland”
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
Continue reading “When 100 Congolese Asylum Seekers Showed Up, This Shelter Made Room”
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.
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.
Continue reading “From Somalia to Kenya, From Michigan to Missouri: Abdi Tarey Finds His Place as a New American”
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”
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.
Continue reading “Refugees and the spirit of America –”
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.
Continue reading “Congolese asylum-seekers given taste of home”
Almost 30,000 Nigerians stayed beyond the period lawfully allowed by their visas in the US last year.
By Samson Toromade
A total of 29,723 Nigerian immigrants who travelled to the United States of America in 2018 overstayed their visas according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Continue reading “29,723 Nigerians overstayed in US in 2018”
Immigrants who arrive in the United States on a diversity visa, randomly selected from among their county’s applicants, often come to the country the promise of a job and without being assigned a place to live, as refugees often are. With all of the U.S. to choose from, many recent immigrants from the Democratic Republic of Congo have chosen to make their home in Kirksville, Missouri.
Truman State University education students had a chance to hear the perspectives of students who are travelled a particularly long distance to Kirksville in an event at Violette Hall.
Continue reading “Congolese KHS students share immigrant experiences at Truman”
Buloze Rusesera fluffed pillows in Room 322 at the Courtyard by Marriott hotel attached to the Grappone Conference Center.
She sported a purple ski hat promoting “Colorado,” though she’s never been there. She only came to New Hampshire in November after fleeing the Democratic Republic of Congo and spending time teaching at a refugee camp in Burundi.
Rusesera, 21, is one of six Congolese refugees participating in a hospitality training program to help them learn English, American customs and job skills.
Continue reading “Congolese refugees learn job skills, New Hampshire customs in internship program”
Benjamin Muriithi and Maureen Wairimu Waithaka moved from Kenya to Rwanda to Namibia and finally to Nova Scotia, where they’d like to stay. At first they thought the immigration process would mean transferring their lives. They’ve since learned it’s more than that: it’s starting from scratch.
Here’s their story and videos created for CBC, which includes spoken word from Maureen. In the videos, Benjamin and Maureen are speaking the creolized version of Swahili called Sheng’. Benjamin says “Sheng’ freely mixes Swahili, English and our native languages.”
Continue reading “This Kenyan couple wants to stay in Canada, permanently”
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