Most immigrants only know what it’s like to be a newcomer to a country once. But for Sayu Bhojwani has done it twice.
Immigrant leadership advocate Bhojwani was born in India in 1967, then moved to Belize with her parents when she was four-years-old. She spent the remainder of her childhood in the Central American country, learning the Catholic traditions and the Spanish language, which most of the population speaks despite English being the official language of the country, along with her own family’s heritage.
Then in 1984, she went to college at the University of Miami and moved to New York City after she graduated where she was struck by the vibrant mix of different ethnicities living side-by-side.
Working with Asian immigrants and Asian-American communities through the Asia Society, she soon noticed that there were few elected representatives of this community. So in 1996, she created the nonprofit South Asian Youth Action! (SAYA!), which helps young Asian-Americans feel more at home in their country — connecting kids from immigrant families to tutoring, mentoring, internships and jobs. In other words, the sorts of opportunities American kids from non-immigrant families can take for granted.
“I’m restless,” Bhojwani tells NBC News. “For better or worse I get bored with what I’m doing and I start thinking about what problem I can solve.”
Bhojwani went on to tackle many other problems. In the wake of the September 11 attacks and the persecution many immigrants experienced as a result, Bhojwani was named the first New York City Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs. In that role, she pressed for policy changes, such as ensuring that immigrants could maintain their confidentiality when reporting crimes or receiving healthcare. “Really what we did,” she says, “was serve as a pain in the ass, to getting these things through city bureaucracy.”
Then Bhojwani decided she wanted to look beyond New York City and get Americans all over the country to view immigrants in a more positive light and treat them with respect. To do this, she founded the New American Leaders Project (NALP) in 2010, through which she works to foster leaders in immigrant communities and supports representatives of these communities running for public office.
Bhojwani is an inveterate helper and problem solver. “I feel like if I see something, I have to do something about it,” she tells NBC. “As I get older, I am working on this — if I see something, I should point it out to someone else.”
Still, it’s clear the 47-year-old Bhojwani plans to keep solving problems for immigrants for years to come.
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Tag: immigration
Why Immigrants Are Necessary in Order for the American Dream to Exist
Like many other veterans, Minnesota’s Mike Dukart credits his time in the military with giving him the ability to persevere as a businessman.
Dukart is a Marine Corps veteran who became an entrepreneur, founding Illusion Systems, a company that sells hunting call devices, including the “Extinguisher Deer Call” and the “Goose Flute Calling System,” racking up millions of dollars in sales each year.
“If it wasn’t for the training I received in the Marine Corps I wouldn’t have made it through the difficult times,” Dukart tells Daddyhood.Net. “When it comes to tough situations, the word ‘can’t’ isn’t in a Marine’s vocabulary.”
Many members of Dukart’s family have served in the Armed Forces, developing that toughness he credits with his success, and he’s especially thankful his relatives that emigrated from Germany to North Dakota in the early 1900s. “It was really amazing to listen to how they would flip the wagons over [to] survive the winter. If you think about what they endured. It’s pretty amazing, the culture they created and what’s been achieved in west and southwest North Dakota today.”
Dukart believes that new immigrants — regardless of where they come from — can make a similar contribution to America through their hard work and service, which is why he made the film “Serving America: Putting the American Dream to Work.”
“So many people forget that they too are products of immigrants,” Dukart says. “I hope this film awakens Americans to reconnect and understand what immigrants bring to the table and their contributions.”
In the film Dukart explores how immigration previously benefitted America. “It’ll touch on our military — how we as patriots have stood up to protect this country,” he says. “These hot button issues aren’t leading to the left or to the right. It’s about dealing with issues and problem solving.”
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This Immigrant Turned Fast-Food Franchise Owner Has Been Serving Free Thanksgiving Dinner for 23 Years
On the Thursday before Thanksgiving, the line out of a McDonald’s in Denver extended out the door.
The people weren’t clamoring for Big Macs, however. They were there to partake in a complimentary Thanksgiving feast that the owners of the franchise, Geta and Janice Asfaw, have been serving to the poor of their neighborhood for 23 years.
Originally, the Asfaws cooked up a meal consisting of turkey, mashed potatoes and stuffing for the area’s senior citizens, but lately, they’ve become even more generous. The event now includes a presentation of scholarships to high school students and a bike giveaway for elementary schoolers.
Last year, the Asfaws distributed 250 bicycles to low-income children nominated by their teachers for academic achievement or persistence in the face of obstacles. (Through the years, the Asfaws have united with other Denver restaurant franchise owners and nonprofits to distribute 1,700 children’s bikes.) Last year, Geta told Austin Briggs of the Denver Post, “We want them to hear that it doesn’t matter where they are today, it’s where you are 20 years from now that matters.”
Geta knows a few things about how to bring about personal transformation through hard work. He left Ethiopa to attend college in America in 1972, and after a coup in 1974 made it impossible to return home, he stayed in the U.S., earned his college degree and eventually became a citizen. In 1991, he bought his first McDonald’s franchise and now owns eight of them.
Last week, Geta told the Denver Post, “We’ve always felt that as local businessmen we should give back to the community — not just take the money. That’s what we said at the start. If we’re going to (be here), we’re going to do that. Even when we didn’t have much, we always felt it was our responsibility.”
So if you ever find yourself in Denver with a hankering for French fries, we can’t think of nicer people to get your craving satisfied by.
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The Yelp-Like Website Helping Migrant Workers Avoid Bad Bosses
We’ve all seen groups of day laborers congregating on a street corner, hoping to be hired for a job. These workers, as well as those in this country on temporary work visas, are taking a big risk: They have to trust that the people who hire them will pay them as promised.
A new social media site, Contratados.org (the name roughly translates as “hired hands”), aims to offer some insurance against dishonest employers to day laborers.
On the website, workers can look for a job, write and read reviews of companies, bosses or recruiters, learn about their rights and read about news developments of relevance to them. For those who don’t have Internet access, there’s even the ability to leave a review via the telephone.
These Yelp-like reviews can help workers avoid bad work situations and find fair ones. For instance, one man who regularly employs undocumented workers recently received two one-star ratings. One reviewer says that this man had him working without a salary for two months, and in exchange for his work, promised a tourist visa. Instead, he gave him a fake visa, which resulted in deportation. On the other hand, another reviewer employed by a seafood market in Louisiana praised his bosses in a five-star review. “It’s a good company and a pure good thing,” the anonymous reviewer writes.
The reviews can be anonymous (which could, of course, result in the posting of falsehoods and exaggerations), but as with Yelp, the more reviews that accumulate, the more the consensus can be trusted.
Michelle Chen of The Nation spoke to Alissa Ecarce of Contratados, who says, “The beauty of the Contratados.org employer review feature is that it does not rely on any legal mechanism — the point is for workers to share information with one another so that they can make more informed employment decisions. Both guest workers and undocumented workers work within a system where they are at a power disadvantage due to their status, and we hope that Contratados.org will be a tool that all workers can use to increase their power in the labor market.”
This website, which offers a contemporary solution to an age-old problem, could prevent a lot of low-income workers from experiencing needless misery.
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For Immigrants Waiting on Paper Bureaucracy, This Online System Could Be the Answer
One of the problems stemming from the recent surge of child refugees into the U.S. from Central America? Each applicant could wait years before their immigration cases are processed, thanks to our backlogged system (the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service, or USCIS, receives millions of paper applications each year).
The people behind a San Francisco-based company, FileRight, think they have the solution: an online system for filing immigrant claims, which will allow individuals to fill out their own forms without hiring expensive lawyers — similar to the way that the software TurboTax enables citizens to complete their own taxes online. These forms can then be digitally processed, potentially speeding up the process.
Now, FileRight just has to convince the government to allow online applications.
According to Megan R. Wilson of The Hill, FileRight hired lobbyists in January and has been meeting with Obama administration officials.
Cesare Alessandrini, founder and chief executive of FileRight, is the son of Italian immigrants who got the idea for the program when he was trying to help his soon-to-be Argentinian wife apply for citizenship. “I had two options: I could have hired a lawyer for $5,000 — which I didn’t have — or I could do it myself,” he tells Wilson. “How hard could it be?”
Alessandrini found the application process confusing and complicated — even for a native English speaker. So he began designing FileRight, a system that could help some applicants avoid denials for small errors such as spelling mistakes or writing on the wrong line, which are routine with the current, paper-based system.
FileRight isn’t the first company to attempt to digitize the immigration process. As we reported in February, Clearpath Inc. is also developing software to streamline the visa application process.
Regardless of which company’s software proves the most effective, it seems likely that digitizing the process will certainly help relieve some of the immigration backlog.
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This Nonprofit Says ‘Welcome Home’ to Low-Income and Immigrant Families
Hailing from Haiti, Ermance Cyriaque has been in the United States for two decades, and her hard work as a shelf stocker at Walmart paid off as she recently moved into a house of her own in New London, Conn.
Hope Inc. (Housing Opportunities for People), a nonprofit that provides affordable housing for working-class people in Connecticut’s southern Middlesex County, purchased and renovated the home, then sold it to Cyriaque at a below-market price. The Hope Inc. program is geared toward low-income people that are well-equipped to stay in their homes, and Cyriaque was chosen because of her excellent credit.
New London’s neighborhood stabilization program contributed $34,000 so that HOPE could purchase the home. The organization has renovated 13 homes on the street where Cyriaque will live, and the houses will remain permanently affordable — even if their original owners sell them.
Cyriaque has been living with her daughter Annesylly and her nine-month-old grandson Zorienn Canuto in a three-bedroom apartment, struggling to make ends meet in a community where prices were outgrowing her retail wages. To qualify for the program, she had to earn no more than half the median annual income in the area for a family of two: $33,850. Annesylly, who also qualifies for the program, will rent the apartment attached to her mother’s house.
When the family saw their new home for the first time, the Ninigret Quilters Guild presented Cyriaque with a hand-pieced quilt to make it cozy. (The Rhode Island quilters frequently donate their handiwork to needy families in the area.) According to Lee Howard of The Day, Kate Lamoureux, one of the quilters, tells Zorienn, “I hope it becomes your favorite blankie.”
Meanwhile, Ermance Cyriaque had a gift of her own to give. She gave Marilyn Graham, the Executive Director of HOPE, a painting with the words Do What You Love. “You went over and beyond to take care of us and help us out,” Annesylly says of Graham.
Of Howard, Graham says, “Theirs is a nice American dream story.”
And it comes wrapped in a warm, new quilt.
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For More Than 100 Years, This House Has Been Welcoming New Americans
Neighborhood House in west St. Paul, Minn. has come a long way since Russian immigrants in the area built a simple wooden structure in 1897. First opened to give newcomers the support and information they needed to make their way in this country, Neighborhood House now has a bigger and fancier home and the immigrants it serves come from different countries than they did 117 years ago. But the nonprofit’s mission remains the same.
Neighborhood House supports immigrants of every kind — from struggling newcomers who rely on its food pantry, family crisis center and refugee resettlement services, to people striving to become educated and advance their careers. It also offers a free preschool for the children of immigrants and an after-school program for teens that teaches them about health, education and careers and encourages them to engage in community service. But that’s not all. The center also provides health programs, gang-prevention activities, English language classes and GED prep courses.
Over the years, people from about 40 countries have benefitted from Neighborhood House’s services.
Nancy Brady, president of Neighborhood House, tells Angela Davis of CBS Minnesota, “Our mission at Neighborhood House is to help people gain the knowledge, the skills and the confidence that they need to overcome whatever the challenges are that they’re facing in their life — and move forward.”
The nonprofit’s three-year-old college access program is already changing lives — providing scholarships to adults of all ages who want to attend college. “Year one, nine people went to college,” Brady says. “Last year, 61 of our participants went to college. That’s how we measure success.”
Neighborhood House is funded through donations from its community, and for more than 100 years, residents in St. Paul have considered it a worthy investment. “We want to help people dream,” Brady says, “and then work to make their dreams come true, and to help all people see a positive future.”
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How Digging in the Dirt Improves the Health of Immigrants in America
As anyone who’s traveled to a foreign country can attest, food can vary greatly from land to land.
So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that when some immigrants move to America, their health declines because they don’t have access to the fresh produce that enriched their diets in their native country.
In rural western Colorado, a unique program is solving this problem by helping immigrants learn English while they grow healthy food for their families — and it’s giving the farmer who hosts them some new notions about what crops to grow, too.
In the town of Delta, immigrants from countries including Mexico and Myanmar who sign up for ESL classes learn about a program at the Thistle Whistle Farm, located near Hotchkiss, Colo., about 45 minutes away. The immigrants help out at the farm and in doing so, get tips on how to cultivate and grow their own food. Plus, they can practice their English writing skills while taking notes on gardening techniques.
Their ESL and farming teacher, Chrys Bailey, tells Laura Palmisano of KVNF, “A lot of what has brought them to the program is that they are noticing that their families and themselves are beginning to suffer from health issues that they had not suffered from before and they are making the connection that some of their food choices are not serving them.”
Some students bring their children to Thistle Whistle to help out, filling idle summer hours with a productive and fun activity. “My kids enjoy coming to the farm and they like it because they learn about plants and how to grow some vegetables,” Yadira Rivera tells Palmisano.
The participants then take their new found gardening skills back home, planting their own vegetables, even if the only space they have is a couple of pots.
The program, which has run for three years through a grant from the Colorado Health Foundation, needs funding to continue.
Meanwhile, Mark Waltermire, the owner of Thistle Whistle Farm, has benefitted from the program too. “They’ve suggested or requested I grow a lot of vegetables and herbs I haven’t heard or tried before and I’ve been introduced to all sorts of fun, new varieties and fun new vegetables that I would otherwise not have been exposed to. So it has changed my diet too. I eat all sorts of things that I previously never knew about.”
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Why Every American Should Read Harry Potter
Can reading a fantasy story about a British kid with glasses who befriends half-giants, house elves, goblins and mudbloods (aka wizards whose parents have no powers themselves) lead to greater kindness toward minority groups facing discrimination?
Turns out, it can.
New research suggests that reading J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” books correlates with less prejudice among young people toward minority groups, including immigrants and homosexuals, and a greater ability to understand their perspectives.
The research comprised three separate studies. In the first, a team led by Loris Vezzali of the University of Modena gathered 34 Italian fifth graders and assessed them on their attitudes toward immigrants through a questionnaire. For six weeks, they met in groups of five or six with a researcher to discuss passages from “Harry Potter.”
Some groups read passages pertaining to prejudice, while others read sections about a different topic. After that, researchers interviewed the kids about the extent of their Pottermania (to determine how many of the books they’d read and movies they’d seen) and asked whether or not they identified with Harry and wanted to be like him. Kids who identified with Harry and read passages pertaining to prejudice showed “improved attitudes toward immigrants,” the researchers write.
Another study found that high school students who identified with Harry (as opposed to the villian Voldemort) were less likely to show prejudice against gay people. And a third study focusing on college students in England discovered that those who did not relate to Voldemort were more likely to have accepting attitudes toward immigrants.
So in the melting pot that is America, it’s easy to use these findings to make our country a little bit better. After all, these studies demonstrate that we don’t need magic to reduce prejudice and racism and increase empathy. Instead, all that’s required is a library card (and a magical wizard to read about).
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Setting Politics Aside, Americans Are Stepping Up to Help Migrant Kids
A new Gallup Poll finds that the issue of immigration has become the number one national concern of Americans. And while there’s no legislative solution in sight to cope with the massive influx of refugee children fleeing Central American gang violence and arriving in the states that border Mexico, individuals across the country are putting partisan issues aside in the face of this humanitarian crisis, coming up with ways to help.
In San Francisco, 17-year-old high school student Julia Tognotti has been working tirelessly to collect clothing for the detained children ever since she saw a documentary on the crisis in her Spanish class last May. After school recessed for summer vacation, she traveled to Nogales, Texas, and volunteered in a shelter for the migrant kids.
“I talked to a boy there on the first day named Brian. He was 17 and I’m 17 and he was from Honduras and it took him two months to get to Mexico and he took seven trains. And I was so surprised to hear this because it really made me think, ‘could I do this?'” she told Sergio Quintana of ABC 7 News San Francisco.
Tognotti has collected two loads of clothes to send to Nogales and is planning to continue her work, accepting donations in Brisbane, California. She also hopes to organize a trip to the border for more teenagers to learn about the issue. Julia’s father David Tognotti told Quintana that the family doesn’t want to get “tangled up in the politics of the issue,” they just want to help the kids.
“We have a 17-year-old that’s trying to do what she believes is right to help people and it would be great if we could help support her.”
Meanwhile, the Hispanic Heritage Foundation (HHF), a Washington, D.C.-based national organization promoting Latino leadership, organized a trip for concerned people to volunteer at a refugee shelter run by Sacred Heart Church in McAllen, Texas. Actress America Ferrara, best known as the title character in “Ugly Betty,” joined the mission, reading books to the kids. HHF has also donated clothes, toys, books, and tablet computers.
In New York, La Casa Azul Bookstore is coordinating a book drive to supply migrant kids who arrive at shelters in the New York City area with free reading material. They’re looking for new and gently-used books in Spanish for kids and are offering a 10 percent discount to anyone who buys such books at their store. La Casa Azul will collect the books through August 10 and personally deliver them to children and teenagers in need.
As the actions of these caring Americans demonstrate, we don’t have to wait for government action before we reach out to help another human being.
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