Massachusetts has seen a dramatic increase in the number of immigrants moving to the state, and local officials say it is straining the state's safety net. While each person has their own story, experts say there are consistent patterns in the path here and the motivations.
Jeannot Bocaje left Haiti six years ago for Chile. After facing discrimination there, he set out on the road again and arrived in Massachusetts last year. “At churches in Haiti, people cannot gather today,” Rev. Dieufort Fleurissaint said to about a hundred Haitian congregants who met on a recent Sunday morning in Milton. “They've been chased out of their homes, displaced from their neighborhoods, from their families. We pray.
While each family has its own journey to Massachusetts, there are common patterns in the path many families describe taking and the motivations that drove them to make the long and complex trip.For many Haitians arriving in Massachusetts, this is a second migration. Often, their first migration, out of Haiti, happened years ago.
Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, said many of the Haitians arriving in the U.S. today left Haiti between 2010 and 2020. However, in the late 2010s and early 2020s, both Brazil and Chile’s economies began to falter. Other Latin American countries were struggling too, and Bocaje said more immigrants began to arrive, ratcheting up the competition for jobs.
He cited surveys from 2019 that showed Haitians in Chile were the migrant group least likely to be employed, and almost half reported workplace discrimination, more than any other group in the survey.As the economic and social obstacles in Brazil and Chile pushed many Haitians to consider leaving, Freedman said two other forces also figured prominently.
“We now are seeing a real influx of people coming from Florida, from Georgia, from places where the anti-immigrant sentiment is very, very high,” said Geralde Gabeau, the executive director of the Immigrant Family Services Institute.that took effect last summer, making it challenging for immigrants to work and get identification cards. It also requires hospital staff to ask about patients' immigration status.
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