These story is part of an occasional Granite State News Collaborative series focusing on immigration issues and the experiences of immigrants settling in New Hampshire, including what it's like seeking asylum here and finding work as an immigrant -- the challenges involved, as well as efforts underway to help remove barriers and create more opportunities for advancement.
In a tight labor market, employers have been proposing some novel ways to fill positions. According to Andrew Cullen, career service manager at the International Institute of New England, Manchester, one manufacturing company is considering providing a van on a temporary basis for a group of potential employees that need transportation in order to work.
Bruno D'Britto left his home in Rio de Janeiro as a teenager, arriving in Nashua to join his father, who had left Brazil for the United States years earlier after his parents divorced. Coming to the U.S. was a chance to seek better opportunities, he said, and to leave a neighborhood beset by violence.
“I saw many people being shot. Like a month before I came (to the United States), this kid got shot, killed pretty much in front of my school as we were leaving. When you are living with that, you kind of become numb to it,” he said. “It actually took me a couple of years after I came to realize that wasn't the norm.”
Mentoring developmentally disabled youth in New Hampshire may not seem like a logical career step for a former bank manager from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
But for Bienfait, a Congolese immigrant -- he declines to use his last name for reasons of personal safety -- the job is highly satisfying.
For those seeking asylum in the United States, the process can be long and fraught, involving multiple government agencies and, sometimes, detention while they await decisions on their applications. That does not sit well with Judith Reed, co-founder of Project Home. “Our conviction is that it isn't necessary or even right for people to be in detention when they're just asking for asylum. That doesn't make sense to us. So we thought, if they're not going to be in detention, then where will they be? Well, they'd be in our communities.”With this in mind, Reed and a group of like-minded residents in the Keene and Peterborough area set out to establish host homes for asylum seekers. They are currently involved in cases involving asylum seekers from Rwanda, Mexico, Honduras, and El Salvador. Project Home is part of the N.H. Host Home Network, a statewide network of volunteers who offer shelter and support, providing an alternative to detention