Sophie Kouyate had been living undocumented in New York City for more than a decade when she was referred to African Communities Together (A.C.T.), a small nonprofit organization, in 2015. One of A.C.T.’s organizers helped Kouyate apply for legal status. “She bring me up,” Kouyate said. “Like, I was on the ground. And she said, ‘Sophie, you can make it, if you want it, you can make it.’ ” Two years ago, after Kouyate finally obtained a green card, A.C.T. offered her a job. “You better pay me good,” Kouyate recalled telling her new employers. “Because now I have my papers.”
Kouyate was born in France. Her father was born in Guinea, her mother in the West Indies. When she was twenty-two years old, she decided to move to New York City—she hoped that it would be less racist than France. She met her husband in New York, and had three children. (Her oldest teaches third grade at a Harlem charter school, and her middle child is a captain of the men’s basketball team at SUNY Maritime.) Now Kouyate is helping people navigate their very first days in town. She and her colleagues at A.C.T. are frontline workers in New York City’s ongoing migrant crisis. “It is a crisis, point blank,” Kouyate said. “A humanitarian crisis.”
City government officials say that at least a hundred and ten thousand asylum seekers have arrived in New York City since last summer. Some sixty thousand are being housed in the city’s homeless shelters, at an astronomical cost. Many are from Latin American countries such as Venezuela, Peru, and Ecuador, but thousands have also come from Mauritania, Senegal, Burundi, Chad, and other African countries. For years, African migrants have been reaching the U.S. by flying first to Latin American countries with laxer visa rules, and then embarking on the long overland journey north from there.
Every week since the start of 2023, hundreds of newly arrived African migrants have found their way to A.C.T.’s office in Harlem, which is on the second floor of a former public-school building on West 127th Street. Many migrants hear about the organization through friends of friends, or on social media. On Wednesdays and Thursdays, A.C.T.’s dedicated drop-in days, the line to get into the office stretches down the school’s linoleum hallways. When I stopped by recently, three young West African men were hovering near Kouyate as she did paperwork. She made a joke in French, and the men laughed.
This year, A.C.T. staff have helped Muslim immigrants obtain halal food in the shelters and space for prayer. They have helped parents (and not just African parents) enroll children in school. Kouyate spoke with pride about two young Guinean men A.C.T. had worked with who had applied for asylum, obtained work permits, found an apartment together, and signed up to be delivery-app workers. The nice stories, however, were outnumbered by the grim ones. This past June, A.C.T. staff helped sound the alarm after hundreds of African immigrants were transferred to a shelter in outer Brooklyn that had limited running water and air-conditioning. “No restroom, no shower,” Kouyate said. “They call that shelter? No, that was a commercial building.” Kouyate has many clients who are languishing in the shelters, running out of money, running out of patience, and pining for home. “African people, they’re very private,” she said. She remembered recognizing a pained look in one young man’s eyes. “I talked to him,” she said. “He cried. So we cried together. And I told him, ‘You’re going to be fine. You need to be strong. What you did already, you did the hardest part.’ ”
Latin Americans continue to make up more than eighty per cent of the new arrivals in the city, and Kouyate said that many African immigrants have come to feel frustrated and excluded by a system that wasn’t necessarily set up with their needs in mind. Language barriers have been the most fundamental problem. New York City offers information about its social services in many languages, most robustly in English and Spanish. Help is harder to come by in French, Arabic, Wolof, Mandinka, or Fula—to say nothing of smaller languages and regional and ethnic dialects spoken by many African migrants. (Some African migrants do speak a little Spanish, having picked it up in Latin America on their journey north.) “They say, ‘Oh, but we have Google Translate,’ ” Kouyate said, adopting the overoptimistic tone of a New York City homeless-shelter operator. “Have you tried to communicate with someone with Google Translate? The frustration.”
Many African migrants in New York feel that they are treated worse than Latin Americans because of the color of their skin. “Political things happen, and certain borders open up,” Electra Weston, another Harlem activist who runs a nonprofit called the International Child Program, told me. “When Syria was having problems, everyone was, like, Come, come, come. When Haitians were struggling, and trying to cross the border, we saw images of Border Patrol agents whipping them.” Latin Americans make up the vast majority of asylum seekers, but in August, when hundreds of migrants were forced to sleep on the sidewalk outside the city’s emergency migrant-intake shelter, in midtown, many of those laying their heads on the concrete were Africans. Kouyate hasn’t been particularly surprised that African immigrants in New York City have been neglected. “I say all the time, if you dance with someone who’s blind, if you don’t put your feet on his feet, he is not going to know that you are there,” she said. “They didn’t know that we were here.”
The crisis began last summer, when Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, began sending busloads of migrants to New York City. Local nonprofits and community groups, and then city officials, outraged by Abbott’s cruel political stunt, scrambled to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where they set up welcome stations for the new arrivals. The welcome stations distributed information about city services that are available to anyone in town. Soon, the migrants on those first buses began spreading the word about the welcome stations on social media, in WhatsApp groups and TikTok threads. Eventually, new arrivals were presenting themselves at the welcome stations regardless of whether they’d reached the city on Abbott-chartered buses. “Folks at Port Authority started pointing people to shelters,” Manuel Castro, the commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, told me. “And that just snowballed, frankly.”
Initially, the riders of Abbott’s buses were mostly Venezuelans, who passed on word to other Venezuelans. Peruvians and Ecuadorians soon followed. But very few Africans heard about the welcome stations, which were staffed primarily with English and Spanish speakers. (Some activists believe that African migrants were also deliberately kept off Abbott’s buses.) Until the winter, newly arrived Africans tried to situate themselves in New York City the old-fashioned way: staying in the legal shadows, and asking for help from preëxisting immigrant communities. In January, a Bronx imam got in touch with city officials. Dozens of African migrants were cramming into the windowless basement of his mosque every night—“a tangle of arms and feet and fitful dreams,” the Times reported. Arrangements were made for the migrants in the mosque, as well as others who were soon discovered staying at similarly cramped sites around the city, to be transferred to shelters. That’s how African migrants became aware of New York City’s unique right-to-shelter laws, which require the city to provide a bed each night to everyone in town who needs one.
City officials contacted A.C.T. after hearing from the Bronx imam. A.C.T. staff distributed toiletries, and provided language services to the people in the mosque basement. Soon afterward, people began trickling into the A.C.T. office on their own. In February, Kouyate said, things went “crazy.” By June, about a thousand people had dropped in at the office. “We didn’t even have time to go out and outreach,” Kouyate said. Before this year, A.C.T.’s New York City clients were primarily West Africans. The new drop-ins were from all over the map. “Senegal, yes. Guinea, we know,” Kouyate said. “But Chad—no. Angola—not before. Mauritania—a few, but no.”
New York City’s migrant crisis is a crisis of categories as much as it is a crisis of numbers. A hundred and ten thousand new arrivals in a given year is not a historically large figure for New York City. A hundred and thirty thousand immigrants arrived in town in 2016, for instance, when the term “migrant crisis” referred to something happening in Texas and Arizona. What has changed this year is how the newest and poorest New Yorkers see themselves. They no longer recognize the term “undocumented,” a label that generations of new arrivals in the city choked on. They are asylum seekers. Like everyone else directly involved in the migrant crisis, Kouyate describes it as a kind of political awakening. “Now they know,” she said, of asylum seekers. “You have migrants in this country that didn’t know that you had one year to apply for asylum—who are still here, undocumented, after thirty years. Do you know how many people are coming here and saying, ‘O.K., Sophie, good, taking care of the asylum seekers is great, but what about us? What is the relief for us?’ ”
Mayor Eric Adams has been asking for relief, too. Since last summer, he has alternated between embracing migrants, and New York City’s immigrant history, and angrily lashing out at asylum seekers, warning of the apocalyptic municipal consequences of their arrival. Last week, he warned that the migrant crisis would “destroy” New York City, and this week he announced that the financial burden posed by so many asylum seekers receiving services would require billions of dollars in emergency budget cuts across the city government. “Before, the right to shelter and what’s going on in New York City was like our little secret,” one of Adams’s deputy mayors told reporters last week. “Now the whole globe knows.” For months, Adams has been begging the White House to send more federal aid to New York City, and to grant asylum seekers expedited work permits. The major problem is that the migrant crisis has compounded the city’s preëxisting homelessness crisis: the city’s shelter population had already been at record highs before the migrants started arriving. It recently topped a hundred thousand for the first time ever.
