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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. It's Friday. It's March 1st. Happy Friday. Happy March. Spring begins this month. It's going to feel like it on Sunday. It's supposed to be a nice weekend day to be outside for once. I hope you have a chance to enjoy it. Also, happy Women's History Month. Later in the show, we'll have today's 10-question Women's History Month quiz. Well, we're only doing one Women's History Month quiz, but it's today's 10-question quiz. We're doing these ten-question quizzes each day during the membership drive. Get two in a row right and win a Brian Lehrer Show baseball cap, that's coming up.

Also, Stephen Dubner from Freakonomics and more, but here's how we'll start. One of the big stories in New York City this week has been the discovery of two makeshift shelters, one in Queens, one in the Bronx. You've heard this, where many, many migrants from Africa have been staying 74 beds in the basement of a furniture store in South Richmond Hill in Queens. 45 more beds between the first floor and the basement of another store on East Kingsbridge Road in the Fordham section of the Bronx, where the migrants were apparently paying around $300 a month in rent to the owner, same-store owner of both places, as I understand it, an immigrant from Africa himself. The Buildings Department said these were unsafe spaces for many reasons, including a concentration of e-bikes, space heaters, hot plates, and extension cords.

Now, most of the coverage of this has been about either the illegal status of this makeshift housing or criticism of Mayor Adams for imposing a 30-day limit for single adults in the city's official shelters. But we want to do something a little different consistent with what we've been trying to do on this show, through this whole asylum seeker period. Not just tell the political story and debate it, which, of course, is important to do, and we do that too, but also to humanize the humans who have been coming to New York. What are the stories of the people going through this, who the rest of us are debating?

With us now for this conversation is Amaha Kassa, founder and director of the group, African Communities Together, which describes itself as an organization working to help African immigrants to integrate socially, advance economically, and engage civically. I'm told that just yesterday, Amaha had a meeting with the Mayor's Office about the shelters and related issues. He was last here in January, some of you may remember, to describe the recent African migrant community, generally, which outsiders were just beginning to realize was growing in addition to those from Latin America. Amaha, thanks for coming on again. Welcome back to WNYC.

Amaha Kassa: Glad to be back with you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Can you give us some basics as you understand them? How many people have been sleeping in each of these stores? Is it as reported as far as you know, and where do most of them come from?

Amaha Kassa: Well, as you know, Brian, we have tens of thousands of new rivals primarily from West Africa, but from all over the continent. Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea, Burkina Faso, a number of other countries. We think that maybe 20% to 25% of the arrival of new immigrants that's happened over the last year and a half, two years, are people from Africa, primarily West Africa, along with their brothers and sisters from Venezuela, from Central America, from the Caribbean.

This story is news. This is something that became public recently. African migrants living in makeshift housing, living in spaces that were really never intended to be housing has been happening for a long time. We've reached out to folks in the community to encourage folks who've now lost whatever makeshift housing that they had and makeshift, and as you said, quite exploitative and dangerous housing that they had to support them. The truth is, for us and for other community-based organizations like us, there's very little that we can offer them. Nobody is responding to this crisis on the scale that it really requires. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: The concentration of e-bikes in both locations suggests many of the residents are working in the delivery business. How common would you say that is, or how else are these residents making a living?

Amaha Kassa: It's hugely common, Brian. I think the working in delivery is, for many African immigrants, the first job that they hold, the first rung on the ladder. It's sometimes people are working for delivery apps, sometimes people are working for businesses themselves. It doesn't require the capital that driving an Uber or a cab does. I think if people look at the names the next time that they get a delivery, there's a pretty good chance, especially if they're in places like Harlem or the Bronx, that their delivery driver is a West African migrant.

Brian Lehrer: You know what that makes me think, there's so much focus in the news driven by the mayor on how much migrant services are costing the taxpayers, and that's fair to talk about. We have to talk about that. It's a real issue. Here, we're talking about private sector housing, and the concentration of e-bikes suggests, as you were just describing, that people are earning a living in the private-sector economy. This would all be the opposite of a story of dependency on government. Do you think that's accurate or important context to point out?

Amaha Kassa: 100%. A lot of the conversation with New York City government, but also the federal government, state government, has been saying, how can we get people to work? Our response has been, we're talking about people who flew across oceans, who walked across continents, who spent everything they had in their pockets for a shot at making a living that can support themselves and their families. Mostly, we don't need to get people to work. We need to get them out of the way.

If people can get work authorization, which the federal government can speed up, the city and state government can provide supports and are providing supports for people to apply for those things, but ultimately, it's the federal government who determines how fast people get work authorized. They can even get better jobs, good jobs where there's a high demand for workers like healthcare workers.

We started a program to give people English as a second language training that is specific to healthcare. 27% of the people who applied for that program are recent arrivals. Some of them, in all of those cases, their immigration case is still pending, but they're trying to work. If people are able to do that, then they're going to be able to find better housing in the private market. Although, obviously, housing is an issue for all New Yorkers, immigrant, native-born, long-term, newcomer.

Brian Lehrer: Running the group African Communities Together as you do, do you know the store owner who set up these living quarters? I see his name reported as Ebou Sarr, and that he's an African immigrant himself

Amaha Kassa: I haven't encountered this business owner before, and you do hear rumors. I think, certainly, there's a common experience of people who might be taken advantage of by people in their own communities because that's who they know, and often, it's people who aren't so much better off than they are.

What I really want to underscore is that most of the African migrants who've taken in other African migrants have done it out of concern and compassion. I think it's what's been underreported is, for example, the large number of African mosques and churches that have put people up, that have turned their sanctuaries into literal sanctuaries, especially families with babies or young children who literally have nowhere else to go.

When we're hearing reports that not only are the official shelters turning people away, including both single adults and families, but that some of these kind of makeshift shelters that have been put together by the City of New York, have had issues with being inhabitable during extreme temperatures. I think we should be looking. There's plenty of responsibility to share around. I think makeshift has been the response in many ways.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. How do you think people should feel about this store owner, like that he's exploiting fellow African immigrants, charging them rent for sleeping in dangerous and overcrowded conditions, or providing a needed service that the city government can't or won't provide, or that some people might actually prefer to a city shelter with its problems and its rules, or anywhere along that spectrum?

Amaha Kassa: I think, as you say, it's a mixed bag. We obviously don't want. We've seen fire tragedies very recently harm our community, and so we don't want people to be in danger. Frankly, I think that if somebody is charging people money, and at that scale, then there is certainly an element of taking advantage of people. Again, most of the people, if you want to compare it to the people, the religious leaders, the mosques, and the churches that have been taking people in, they obviously haven't been charging people, but that's obviously been costly and hard for them to do.

We've been trying to raise money to defray the costs for some of that. Really, the federal government is the only entity that has the resources to respond to something at this scale. The federal government should be providing support to the city government. What this would look like in a good scenario is that people are provided vouchers. They're able to take those and use that to pay for real apartments. Then we would be creating a housing supply that is decent and affordable for all New Yorkers, including the newest ones.

Brian Lehrer: A listener asks in a text message, "Is there a program that allows people who have an extra room to rent at low cost to African immigrants to do so?"

Amaha Kassa: There's no formal program like that. I think that there's a lot of community-based organizations have been informally connecting people where those opportunities are. I think that that should be part of the solution. Obviously, I think that sometimes it can be hard to get past the regulations and bureaucratic hurdles, but I think this, we've got to figure out solutions like that. We're going to see more non-solutions, like what we've seen.

Brian Lehrer: What was your city hall meeting yesterday like? Was it with the mayor himself or other officials, or did you ask for certain things on behalf of the community? Anything you are at liberty to disclose?

Amaha Kassa: There's been a series of meetings being convened by the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs, and then other commissions and agencies that have addressed topics including, how do we speed up the process of getting people work permits? How do we speed up referrals and assistance? How do we do more coordinated advocacy for what we need from the federal government? There have been some state and federal officials that have been part of those conversations. I think it's great that it's happening. I think that it would be, the wheels of government grind very slowly at times. In some ways, we really needed this response a long time ago, but we're glad that-- I'm sorry that it takes crisis events like this to bring some of this invisible crisis to the surface and to get government to respond, but yes.

Brian Lehrer: Amaha Kassa, founder and director of the group, African Communities Together. Yes, as we say goodbye, just to reinforce what you just said, I think we forget sometimes that every one of the people coming has a story and family, and the news media focuses on them only as problems to be solved too often. Yes, the number of recent arrivals presents policy problems, and we can't ignore that, but we need to keep the people in mind, too. Thank you for the work that you're doing and for coming on to help do that here.

Amaha Kassa: Yes, thanks for shining a light on issues like this, Brian.

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