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.
