A daughter of a refugee repays kindness by hosting migrants
Massachusetts is strapped for housing and struggling to find room for thousands of migrants. Elizabeth Nguyen and Oscar Quint have been doing their part to ease the pressure on the state’s shelters by hosting one migrant family at a time in their three-story house in Malden.
In a modest room on the second floor of their house in a vibrant immigrant-rich neighborhood, they have sheltered new arrivals — Haitians, Kurds, Angolans, and Hondurans, among others — sometimes for a few days, sometimes for a month or more, until they were able to find other housing arrangements.
Nguyen says she can’t imagine not opening her doors to people who deserve a new life.
“You cannot sleep at night when you have a spare room, knowing that another family is sleeping at the airport or out in the cold,” says Nguyen, who is a migrant justice worker and a minister.
Over the past year, thousands of migrants have flowed into Massachusetts from a tide of millions fleeing poverty, crime, war, or dictatorship in the Caribbean, Ukraine, Latin America, and Asia. The influx has overwhelmed the state’s emergency shelter system, prompting Governor Maura Healey to urge homeowners to take in migrant families temporarily.
As the daughter of a Vietnamese refugee herself, Nguyen says she is “paying forward” the kindness of the Browne family of Waukesha, Wis., who hosted her father and his parents when they came to the United States in 1975.
“They were total strangers. But they still decided to welcome my father’s family into their home,” she says. “That changed their whole life.”
Nguyen’s father, Donald, was just 17 at that time. Now he’s a pediatric surgeon in Ohio. He’s still in awe of the humanity of the family that took him in.
“That all-white, blond middle-class family living in a Midwestern conservative city sheltered a strange family they had never seen before,” he recalls. “We were invading their privacy, their space, their family dynamics. But they were accepting, kind, tolerant, and generous.”
His family stayed with the Brownes for several months before they settled into a new place. Donald’s siblings, who arrived later, got resettled in different parts of the United States.
Hearing about the hospitality her family received taught Nguyen that at every moment when there is horrific violence in the world, there is also an opportunity for healing. An opportunity for being human.
“Whenever I see so much devastation around,” she says, “I think about the family that hosted my dad and the moment they decided to embrace humanity.”
Donald Nguyen says the toxic narratives about migrants have not changed much. He is saddened to hear the same anti-immigrant sentiments and racial discrimination that divided societies during his youth continue to play out.
“If you look at the waves of immigrants who came before me and after me, they all have similar stories — of fleeing wars, persecution, and poverty,” he says.
But he is glad there are Nguyens in Massachusetts as there were Brownes in Waukesha.
“My daughter is the epitome of ‘what goes around comes around.’ And I am so proud of the work and advocacy she does,” he says.
Nguyen and Quint, an immigrant from Bolivia, began offering temporary shelter to migrants in 2017. At the time, Nguyen says, the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Trump presidency was at its peak. The couple took in people who had been released from detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and let them stay until they could find other shelter with the help of friends or nongovernmental organizations.
Many of the people the couple have hosted over the years have gone on to do well and are now opening their own doors to new immigrants, Nguyen says.
The spare room in their home has a queen bed and a chair. “Depending on the needs of the family, we have set up cribs, an extra mattress, or a futon too,” she says.
Nguyen and Quint also share their living room, kitchen, dining room, and three bathrooms with the migrant families.
Their most recent guests were a Portuguese-speaking family with three kids, ages 1, 3, and 4. They came through the southern border seeking asylum and stayed in the house for three weeks in February.
For Nguyen, it is absurd that her father had the opportunity to find refuge in the United States but doing so is much more difficult for others facing similar tragedies. She says it breaks her heart that the US immigration system has made the legal path narrower and harder for people coming into the country seeking a better life, as her father did.
The influx of migrants has become a huge political issue, with growing concerns about border security and the costs of sheltering people awaiting resolution of their immigration claims. Massachusetts expects to spend a whopping $1 billion this fiscal year for its shelter program.
However, Nguyen believes there is no “migrant crisis” in Massachusetts.
“What we have is a housing crisis,” she says. “We need to have rent control and affordable housing for all. How can one of the richest states in the richest country in the world shut its doors on people seeking shelter?”
In the meantime, she says, “we cannot solve the housing crisis. But we can do our bit. My message to everyone is, if you have an extra room, share it.”