You wouldn’t know it from the outside of Imam Omar Niass’s home, but the tidy brick building in the Bronx is packed to the brim. Every night nearly 70 men, newly arrived African immigrants, sleep cramped on a basement floor.
There is only one bathroom, and it can take several days to get a turn for a shower.
“I don’t care who you are or where you come from, I can’t let people sleep on the street,” he said as he walked back to the Masjid Ansaru-Deen Islamic house of worship from Kennedy International Airport, where he had picked up a group of Senegalese men.
The immigration crisis has become famous for the images of buses full of Latino immigrants deposited in cities in the northern United States. But there has been another hidden wave of people coming to New York City for years from Latin America: immigrants from Africa. Often they had been living in Brazil or Mexico, working as fishermen or as laborers.
As the Covid pandemic devastated many Latin American economies, these men headed north in hopes of entering the United States.
His arrival expands an already thriving African community that has existed for decades in New York City.
But unlike Latino immigrants, African and Caribbean immigrants have been largely overlooked.
Their plight was made clear after the humanitarian aid center set up on Randalls Island last fall was left half empty. Many of the expected arrivals, who were predominantly Venezuelan, were turned away at the border. When the news spread that the center had space, immigrants from West Africa showed up.
Africans tend to arrive by plane, with their tickets paid for by African community organizations, or by bus to Chinatown. Most had the name of a contact: Imam Omar.
Some 2 million African immigrants arrived in the United States in 2019, up from 600,000 in 2000, reports the Pew Research Center. New York City had about 1.1 million black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean in 2019.
Imam Omar said that he has housed about 300 men in the past two years. When he ran out of space inside, he erected a tent in his backyard.
Mankaur Ndeaya, 32, said he spent six years in Brazil, where he obtained a visa that he said made it easier for him to enter the United States. A former air conditioning technician, he flew to Nicaragua and then took buses across Central America and Mexico to the US border.
“It was very dangerous,” he said of his trip. “I have seen two Senegalese die on this road.” Ndeaya left Dakar after the death of his wife. He has a 1 year old daughter at home.
“My dream is to work, have a better life, help my family, make a good life and help my daughter,” she said.
Ndeaya said he found a job at a pizzeria, but still shares the basement of the Imam Omar Mosque.
By: KIMIKO of FREYTAS-TAMURA
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6667208, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-04-18 21:00:07
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