Author: Danielle Gauthier

Welcome to the eleventh installment of our series “100 Years of Welcome: Commemorating IINE’s Boston Centennial.” The previous installment, “2005–2014: Bringing Families Together,” described how the International Institute of Boston (IIB) resettled refugee families from Iraq and Bhutan, helped “strangers become families” when refugee men who had immigrated alone were asked to share housing, launched a family reunification program for children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border unaccompanied, and formed a new “family of agencies” by officially uniting with chapters in Lowell and Manchester to become the International Institute of New England.

In 2015, Jeffrey Thielman became President and CEO of the newly unified International Institute of New England (IINE), comprised of a central administration in Boston and three service teams in the gateway cities of Boston and Lowell, Massachusetts, and Manchester, New Hampshire. The following year, IINE’s Central and Boston teams moved to their current home at the Chinatown Trade Building at 2 Boylston Street, on the edge of Boston’s historic Chinatown neighborhood, where it had been serving immigrants since the 1940s. The first full decade of the International Institute of New England would be marked by dramatic change, adaptation, and resilience. 

Resettlement Rebounds

During his second term, President Barack Obama moved away from some of the restrictive immigration policies put in place at the launch of the War on Terror in 2001 by steadily increasing the number of refugees that could be admitted to the U.S., from 70,000 in 2015, to 85,000 in 2016, and then to 110,000 in 2017—the highest ceiling since 1995.

This higher ceiling allowed IINE to continue to resettle large numbers of Bhutanese and Iraqi refugees in Greater Boston, while also welcoming hundreds of refugees from the conflict-riven Democratic Republic of the Congo, from Syria at the height of its civil war, and from other conflict zones throughout the world. Building on decades of experience, IINE’s Boston office helped refugees find housing, connect to public support, learn English and job skills, and enter the workforce.  

Strengthening Community Partnerships

Resettle Together

As arrivals increased, IINE looked to new community partners to help welcome and support refugees. In 2016, IINE piloted the Resettle Together community sponsorship program, creating a model for deeper collaboration with regional faith, education, and community groups on core refugee resettlement activities. These included securing apartments and furnishing them through donations, meeting new arrivals at the airport and driving them to their new homes, and helping them navigate their new communities, from teaching them about the public transit system, to taking them grocery shopping, to helping them with medical appointments. IINE would launch a more fully developed Resettle Together program in 2021, providing increased structure and mutual support to the partnership between case workers and neighborhood groups that has always been at the heart of refugee resettlement.

Food Pantry

Another Boston partnership that gained importance was with the Greater Boston Food Bank, as IINE expanded its onsite food pantry for Boston area clients. Groceries picked up from the Food Bank each month were made available right at IINE’s Boston office to ensure that clients who were not yet eligible to work would have access to free nutritious food year-round. Community volunteers were recruited to help with distribution, and the pantry would come to serve as many as 1,300 clients in a single year. 

Suitcase Stories® 

To further engage communities in welcoming newcomers, IINE turned back to the arts, continuing a tradition that began with its international folk festivals in the 1930s and 40s and was carried on with the Human Rights Watch Film Festival and Dreams of Freedom Museum in the early 2000s. Launched in 2017, the Suitcase Stories® program produces live performance events in which storytellers share their immigration stories, including personal tales of migration, integration, adaptation, and resilience; stories handed down from immigrant family members, and stories of the transformation and growth that comes from working with newcomers.   

In its first years, more than 2,000 audience members attended Suitcase Stories® events in venues throughout Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and thousands more were reached through broadcasts on public television. Feeling deep empathy and connection with the storytellers and their subjects, many viewers were inspired to become directly involved with IINE at what would prove to be a crucial moment.  

The Return of Restriction

When President Donald J. Trump took office in 2017, his administration swiftly enacted immigration restrictions the likes of which had not been seen since IIB’s founding in the 1920s. The U.S. Refugee Admissions Program was an early target. The Trump Administration immediately suspended the entire program for 120 days and then instituted a ban on refugee admissions from several predominately Muslim countries, including Iraq and Syria. A new policy of “extreme vetting” for refugees led to longer processing times and backlogged applications, and the refugee admissions ceiling plunged from 110,000 in 2017 to 15,000 by 2021.  

IINE had to adjust quickly. While continuing to serve the refugees in its care, focus shifted from welcoming new arrivals to more deeply supporting newly arrived individuals and families to build toward self-sufficiency through English language classes, skills training, and employment support. IINE’s dormant legal services program was revived with the introduction of a Legal Immigration Forms Service to aid with citizenship applications, family reunification, work authorization, and other crucial immigration applications. With federal support severely diminishing and inhumane new policies being enacted—most notably children being forcibly separated from their families at the U.S. border and held in detention facilities—IINE turned to individual donors to keep critical services going, raising millions of dollars to fill in funding gaps and continue helping families move forward.     

Coping with Covid

A new threat emerged in the Spring of 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic forced sudden seismic shifts in services of all kinds throughout the world. All U.S. immigration was further curtailed due to health risks—regardless of how dire the needs of those seeking refuge—and refugees and immigrants already in Greater Boston were among the most hard-hit residents. Already lacking financial resources to fall back on, many newcomers who had found jobs quickly lost them as workplaces shut down. Living in small, shared apartments compounded their health risks, and language barriers and social isolation made it difficult to access timely public health information.  

Fiercely dedicated to protecting clients, IINE adapted quickly. An Emergency Relief Fund was formed to raise direct monetary relief for clients most in need. IINE’s Boston food pantry went mobile as staff and volunteers delivered free groceries to families each month. IINE learned to operate nearly all services remotely and delivered laptops to clients so that case management and even ESOL classes could move online.  

To protect people facing language barriers from the disease itself, IINE staff continuously translated the latest recommendations from the CDC into multiple languages, sent them directly to clients’ phones and identified influencers like faith leaders and community organizers to reinforce messaging across immigrant communities.  

Rapid Rescaling

By the end of 2021, the Covid-19 pandemic had waned enough that Boston was reopening. IINE services moved from remote to hybrid, offering more flexibility than ever before. As the new presidential administration of Joseph R. Biden began reversing immigration restrictions, ending the “Muslim Ban,” and raising the ceiling on refugee admissions, IINE was able to pivot back to helping newly arriving persecuted and threatened populations from throughout the world to make Boston their new home.  

The need to ramp up services was swift and dramatic. In August, as the U.S. withdrew its troops from Afghanistan, the repressive Taliban regime quickly regained control, necessitating “Operation Allies Refuge” through which the U.S. airlifted 124,000 Afghans out of the country. Seventy-six thousand Individuals and families who had aided U.S.-led military operations and were now prime targets of persecution and retribution, resettled in the U.S.  

With little warning, IINE began an effort to resettle more than 500 Afghan evacuees in Boston, Lowell, and Manchester within four months and launched another emergency assistance fund to rally community and volunteer support. Among a wave of new hires, IINE brought on many case workers who were themselves former Afghan refugees, as well as Dari and Pashto-speaking translators, to serve arriving Afghan families.  

Next, in the winter of 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, relentlessly pummeling civilian neighborhoods with bombs and flooding the streets with tanks and troops. Ukrainians who had been living safe and comfortable lives suddenly found their families in the crosshairs. By Spring, 20,000 Ukrainians had connected with resettlement sponsors through the Unite for Ukraine, or “U4U,” program. While hosts welcomed Ukrainian families in their homes and helped them integrate into their new communities, IINE helped new arrivals with complicated application processes from getting work authorization to navigating immigration laws. Ukrainian case specialists joined IINE to help displaced families.  

By 2023, parallel wide-spread conflicts had created a worldwide refugee crisis of historic proportions. In the U.S., the Biden administration relaxed Covid-era border restrictions and designated those fleeing several destabilized nations for Temporary Protective Status and Humanitarian Parole. Included was Haiti, which had suffered a deadly combination of natural disasters and political upheaval and was now overrun by armed gangs. Thousands of Haitians embarked on long and dangerous journeys across multiple countries to reach Boston, home to the third largest Haitian diaspora in the world. Lacking the benefits and protections afforded to those officially designated as refugees, many Haitian immigrants found themselves living in state-run emergency shelters. 

IINE hired scores of new staff members to support Haitian arrivals, many of them Haitian, and held all-day “clinics” in its offices, and in libraries and churches, to help newly arrived families access cash assistance and immigration legal support. Public events like official city Flag Raisings on Haitian Independence Day helped rally community members to support their new neighbors. A new IINE department of Shelter Services was assembled to help clients exit state-run emergency shelters quickly, safely, and permanently. 

Between 2021 and 2024, in the wake of restrictive national policies and a deadly pandemic, the International Institute of New England grew from 60 staff members serving 4,000 refugees and immigrants, to a staff of 250 serving more than 20,000 newcomers. IINE’s unprecedented responsiveness was a culmination of 100 years of adaptation and innovation, driven by compassion.  

Today, 28% of Boston residents are immigrants, and many more are children of immigrants. New arrivals make up close to 30% of the city’s workforce, filling critical roles in a wide variety of industries ranging from service to healthcare to construction. Thousands who have fled persecution, war, famine, and climate disasters, often arriving with little more than the clothes on their backs, are drawn by family, Boston’s international community, and the reputation the city has earned through its commitment to welcoming immigrants. The longstanding Mayor’s Office of New Bostonians—now the Mayor’s Office for Immigrant Advancement—uplifts the critical work of welcoming and supporting newcomers, and the city itself is led by Mayor Michelle Wu, the daughter of immigrants from Taiwan.  

The International Institute remains a leader in the field of refugee resettlement and immigration services in the responsive and innovative programming it creates, the breadth of services it provides, the number of refugees and immigrants it serves (more individuals and families than all other agencies combined), and by spearheading advocacy initiatives in partnership with fellow immigrant services providers. With the support of Bostonians, IINE will continue to welcome refugees and immigrants to Boston for the next 100 years, and beyond. 

During our centennial year, we celebrate 100 years of life-changing support for refugees and immigrants in Greater Boston and prepare for our second century of service. Learn more here: IINE Boston Centennial.

Welcome to the tenth installment of our series “100 Years of Welcome: Commemorating IINE’s Boston Centennial.” The previous installment, “1995–2004: Dreams of Freedom,” described how the International Institute of Boston educated the public by opening the Dreams of Freedom immigration museum; helped newcomers build savings, buy homes, get jobs, and recover from traumas with a host of new programs; resettled refugees fleeing conflicts in the Balkans and Sudan; and was an outspoken supporter of Arab and Muslim communities at the beginning of the War on Terror.

In 2005, Carolyn Benedict-Drew, who had previously served as Chief of Policy for Providence Mayor David N. Cicilline, became the President and CEO of the International Institute of Boston (IIB) – its tenth leader. In her first year, she established the International Women’s Day (IWD) Luncheon to build support for women and girl refugees and immigrants, highlight their unique needs, and celebrate their successes. Throughout her tenure, she oversaw a variety of resettlement challenges and innovations.  

Resettling Families from Iraq and Bhutan

As the U.S.-led war in Iraq raged on, the deeply divided country began to tear apart, creating a massive displacement crisis. Millions of Iraqis were forced to flee their homes due to mass bombing campaigns, street-level military skirmishes, and sectarian violence. Particularly vulnerable were the nation’s many different religious, ethnic, and political minority groups.   

Resettling hundreds of Iraqis with varying backgrounds and needs became a major focus for IIB. The first arrivals came with Special Immigrant Visas, granted for serving the U.S. government in roles such as interpreters, engineers, or security personnel, which made them targets of the Iraqi government. Other threatened and persecuted groups followed in waves as they secured refugee status. IIB helped many Iraqis resettle in the nearby cities of Chelsea and Quincy, where one family went on to found Falafel King, a restaurant chain that now boasts two locations in downtown Boston.  

During the height of Iraqi resettlement in 2008, IIB also began to welcome hundreds of refugees from Bhutan. They were largely Nepali-speaking Lhotshampas (Southerners) who had been exiled in the early 90s when conflicts flared over the government’s promotion of a single national identity. Many spent the intervening decade living in refugee camps in Nepal where they faced dangerous health conditions, but thanks to NGOs, often learned English. IIB helped many Bhutanese resettle in Lynn, and Chelsea, and IIB Employment Specialists helped many find service jobs at Logan International Airport. Each morning and evening, Bhutanese refugees would fill busses between Chelsea and East Boston on their way to help make New England’s busiest airport function.  

Strangers Become Family

In 2011, in response to a growing need, IIB took on a new resettlement challenge: finding housing for single refugee men—most commonly Iraqi, Ethiopian, and Eritrean—who had been forced to immigrate independent of their families, were not used to living without them, and could not afford individual living arrangements. Sharing a new home with several people whom they had never met, and often beginning without a common language, created another whole level of uncertainty for people who were already enduring tremendous change. Their IIB Case Specialists made many house visits to help these new arrivals connect across languages and cultures. The results were often beautiful, as many of these households came to form tight and lasting bonds, and to rely on one another as they worked toward self-sufficiency. 

Family Reunification

In 2011, IIB launched a new initiative in response to a growing crisis in Central America. An epidemic of deadly and destabilizing gang violence throughout the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvator had led to a record surge of children no longer safe in their home countries who undertook long and dangerous journeys unaccompanied to cross the U.S.-Mexico Border in search of family members in the U.S. 

With support from the federal government, IIB began the region’s first Family Reunification Program to help unaccompanied children apprehended at the border reunite with their families in safe households, receive physical and mental health care, enroll in school, and integrate into New England communities.   

A Family of Agencies

That same year, the International Institute of Boston formally joined its own family of sorts. Back in 1994, IIB worked with a network of faith-based community groups to establish an office in Manchester, New Hampshire. In 2001, a formal collaboration began with the International Institute of Lowell, in Massachusetts, a partner agency founded in 1918. In 2011, the three offices formally merged into a new regional agency: The International Institute of New England. This union represented a new era of collaboration, facilitating the sharing of best practices and other resources across locations and giving each office more options in searching for housing and optimal services for each new arrival. 

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Building on the success of this period, the International Institute continues to provide tailored support to refugee and immigrant women and girls through our WILLOW Fund, resettles single arrivals as well as families, and serves hundreds of unaccompanied children each year through a program that now spans New England and New York. Last year, the International Institute of New England (IINE) served more than 20,000 refugees and immigrants, and through its collaborations ensures our newest neighbors find welcome and opportunity in our communities every day. 

During our centennial year, we celebrate 100 years of life-changing support for refugees and immigrants in Greater Boston and prepare for our second century of service. Learn more here: IINE Boston Centennial.

Welcome to the ninth installment of our series “100 Years of Welcome: Commemorating IINE’s Boston Centennial.” The previous installment, “1985–1994: Protecting New Bostonians,” described the International Institute of Boston’s continuing efforts to resettle refugees of displacement crises in Southeast Asia, Northern Africa, and the former Soviet Union; the organization’s growing legal and advocacy work; and how it assisted thousands of immigrants granted amnesty by the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. 

Facilitating Mutual Aid

In the mid-1990s, the International Institute of Boston (IIB) remained an important source of support for the communities it had helped to build through refugee resettlement over the past two decades by working with their mutual aid organizations. It hosted the formation of a Vietnamese Mutual Support Group, began working with Boston’s Ethiopian Community Mutual Assistance Association, and hosted meetings for several similar groups from growing immigrant populations.  

Hosting “Dreams of Freedom”

In 1998, IIB moved its offices from Commonwealth Ave, where it had been since the mid-1960s, to a larger space at One Milk Street in Boston’s Financial District, with room for more classrooms, a new computer lab, and more.  

This new space would be uniquely open to the public. In its basement, IIB created Dreams of Freedom: Boston’s Immigration Museum.  

Building on the legacy of the New England Folk Festival, which IIB helped organize to share the rich cultural traditions of new immigrants, Dreams of Freedom offered interactive exhibits showcasing photographs, artifacts, and personal stories that offered glimpses into the lives of the immigrants and refugees who resettled in Boston over the decades. The museum also hosted lectures, workshops, and community discussions on issues such as immigration laws, community integration, and the challenge of cultural and racial discrimination. In the early 2000s, the museum sponsored and hosted screenings by the Human Rights Watch Film Festival.

Pursuing Dreams

One Milk Street quickly became the home of several new integration programs that helped IIB clients pursue goals from getting a first job in the U.S., to buying a car and a home, to achieving citizenship—their own “dreams of freedom.” A one million dollar grant from the Boston Foundation and a partnership with Hilton Hotels helped launch a skills training program to place more than 260 newcomers into jobs at Boston hotels. A federally funded Saving for Success program not only offered newcomers financial literacy, banking, and money management skills, but also helped them set up a savings accounts and set savings goals for a major purchase, and then provided matching funds once the goals had been achieved. A new class in “Homebuying 101” was offered first in Vietnamese and Haitian Creole, and then later in Chinese and Cape Verdean Creole.  A new Citizenship Center provided refugees and immigrants with citizenship examination preparation and other naturalization services.

Defending the Most Vulnerable

Other new and important IIB programs served immigrant populations who needed special care in order to recover from past persecution and begin to thrive. IIB launched the International Survivors Center to provide case management and counseling services to survivors of torture and other war-related traumas, and also secured its first contract from the U.S. Department of Justice to serve victims of human trafficking, providing mental health services, housing, and legal assistance. IIB also became a regional resource in combating human trafficking, convening and training a network of law enforcement officers to better identify and serve trafficking survivors. 

Kosovo Kids and Lost Boys

IIB continued to welcome new groups of refugees to Boston and to help them recover and integrate. At the end of the 1990s, a crisis erupted in Eastern Europe’s Balkan Peninsula. Ethnic conflict had been violently tearing apart the country formerly known as Yugoslavia for several years, and in 1999, NATO intervened, bombing government forces and temporarily seizing control of the flashpoint region of Kosovo to try and end the large-scale ethnic slaughter. In the mass displacement that followed, refugees from regions on multiple sides of the conflict were resettled in Boston. Many were ethnic Albanians from Kosovo eager to join an already sizable community of Albanian Bostonians whom IIB had served over the years. As they welcomed these new refugees, IIB was particularly mindful of the many children arriving and organized a “Kosovo Kids” summer program in the Boston suburb of Lynn to help them prepare for attending local public schools in the fall. 

In the same period, IIB also welcomed to Boston 75 of the so-called “Lost Boys of Sudan,” a group of teenage refugees from the Dinka tribe of South Sudan who had been captured as young children and forced to serve as soldiers in the Northern Sudanese army. Many had fled first to Ethiopia, and then to Kenya, where they endured brutal treatment and extended confinement in the Kakuma refugee camp. In the early 2000s, escalation of violence in the Sudan Civil War had brought renewed attention to the plight of the “Lost Boys” and thousands were welcomed into the U.S. In Boston, IIB provided arrivals with English language classes and case management services. Some used the new computer lab in IIB’s Milk Street office to search for their lost family members. 

With Us or Against Us

Public sentiment towards refugees shifted dramatically in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001. Soon after members of the international terrorist group Al-Qaeda hijacked four airplanes and flew them into the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center, and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., killing nearly 3,000 civilians, President George W. Bush announced a U.S.-led “War on Terror.” For this new kind of war only one rule was made clear: all the nations of the world were “either with us, or you are with the terrorists.” 

As the U.S. military mobilized for “Operation Enduring Freedom,” an attack on the repressive Taliban regime who ruled Afghanistan and had harbored Al Qaeda’s terrorists, a mood of fear, division and prejudice reverberated across the U.S., including in Boston, from which two of the hijacked flights had originated. Many Muslim and Arab Americans became the targets of violence, threats, and prejudice. IIB sprang into action to mobilize a local response, organizing a meeting of leaders from Boston’s Afghan community to issue a press release about the crisis, arranging a meeting between Boston’s Arab American leaders and the Hate Crime unit of the Boston Police Department, and developing a community resource guide for Boston’s Muslim community. IIB also partnered with the organization Muslim Community Support Services of Massachusetts to provide counseling to immigrants confronting trauma and feeling unsafe in their communities. 

As the war in Afghanistan continued, in 2003, the War on Terror expanded with the advent of “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Both conflicts created massive displacement, but in response to the 9/11 attacks the U.S. curtailed the refugee admissions program from 70,000 in 2001 to about 27,000 in 2002 and vetting of refugees from Arab and Muslim countries became increasingly restrictive. But as the first admitted Afghan and Iraqi refugees from these wars began to arrive in Boston, IIB was there to welcome them into services and proudly help them to become Bostonians.  

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Many of the programs first established at the International Institute of Boston in the 1990s and early 2000s continue to thrive and evolve at the International Institute of New England today. Our “Ready, Set, Service!” program helps new arrivals to Boston train and find work in today’s local hospitality industry. A savings program is still offered today and continues to help refugees and immigrants to purchase their first cars and homes here. IINE continues to provide programs specifically for victims of torture and our Trafficking Victims Assistance Program (TVAP) helps hundreds each year to recover and rebuild their lives.  

IINE continues to stand with all victims of discrimination and to connect them to the community resources they need to feel welcome, safe, and supported.  

During our centennial year, we celebrate 100 years of life-changing support to refugees and immigrants in Greater Boston and prepare for our second century of service. Learn more here: IINE Boston Centennial.