A Personal Story About Immigration to the U.S.

Bernadette Ludwig is a first-generation college student, the holder of a Ph.D. in Sociology, the associate dean of the Macricostas School of Arts and Sciences at WestConn, and an immigrant in the U.S.

All those experiences have shaped Ludwig’s life, but her journey as an immigrant informed both her research and now her debut as an author.

It was her understanding and interest in immigrant experiences that allowed her to connect with fellow immigrants to this country, even though the group she focused on arrived from Africa, not Europe.

What she learned from the Liberian refugees and were resettled on Staten Island — led her to write Unwelcome Shores. Black Refugees in America, (2025 Rutgers University Press) an unsparing look at how the United States treats refugees, and particularly those who are Black.

Ludwig’s father did not support the idea of her going to the university in Austria despite her graduating at the top of her class. Having no guidance, she thought majoring in business was a way to go. However, she found she disliked this major. She switched, earning a joint degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology. As a student, she completed internships in Ghana, West Africa, and later in the United States.

“I came to the United States as an immigrant to work with a refugee and immigrant organization in Atlanta, Georgia, and so I saw how policies played out on the ground when refugees were resettled, what stories were being told,” Ludwig said. “I worked for two different organizations for six years. And I always say, I am an example of the idealized immigrant story. I came as an intern to work for one organization, and eventually became the executive director. Then I co-founded a nonprofit organization. I did that for a couple years and then I decided to get a Ph.D. in Sociology. And I always knew I wanted to write about African refugees because there is not a lot of literature. Much of the research is about Mexican immigrants. Other immigrants and refugees, especially those from Africa, tend to get overlooked. Also, we don’t talk about the African conflicts. When you read about the news, it is about Ukraine and Iran. But 12 million Sudanese people are displaced, and the war has been raging in the Congo for decades. And Somalia, we also don’t talk about this.”

Liberia has a unique connection to the U.S. It was founded in 1847 by the American Colonization Society that brought together proponents and opponents of slavery with the goal to facilitate “repatriation” of free Black people in the United States to West Africa. The overwhelming majority of Black people in the United States did not support this movement.

Indigenous peoples occupied the land that became Liberia, and tensions persisted between them and the new arrivals. A civil war was fought from 1989 to 2003;. killing 250,000 people, and displacing half of the population, many internally, while others sought refuge in other countries in West Africa. From this population, about 30,000 Liberians, after proving that they were refugees according to the 1951 Refugee Convention, or close family members of other Liberians throughout the United States, were resettled through the United States Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP). Staten Island was the second most popular resettlement destination for Liberian refugees.

After earning her Ph.D. at The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, Ludwig started her academic career as a professor of Sociology at Wagner College in Staten Island, a 15-minute walk away from the community she began to study and work with while a graduate student.

“When we think about New York City being welcoming to immigrants, that’s not necessarily the narrative in Staten Island,” Ludwig said. It’s highly segregated. So I started the research when I was a grad student. But then I was a tenured professor for 11 years at Wagner and I worked with the community for years. Every chapter of the book starts with a story of a particular refugee. I really wanted to center the voices of refugees when I wrote this.”

As an example, chapter 4 begins:

• In 1992 Mr. Boakai Boakai [self-chosen pseudonym], then forty-nine years old, arrived in Staten Island with an immigrant visa that his brother, a U.S. citizen who served in the U.S. Army, had sponsored. Even though Mr. Boakai had worked for years at the U.S. embassy in Monrovia, he never planned to emigrate to the United States, but the war in his native country forced him to do so. When he first came to Staten Island, he was not able to bring his family with him. They were scattered throughout Liberia and other countries in West Africa because of the war. Some of his family members were registered refugees with the UNHCR [Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] in the Buduburam refugee camp in Ghana. (p. 66)

Ludwig said that the Liberian refugees came to trust her not only because of the time she spent with them but also because she could share experiences about being a newcomer to the U.S., and the challenges that come with living in a new place. The rest of the chapter 4 describes “what it’s like to be a refugee,” with details about how many African refugees are turned away because of systemic anti-Black racism and historical pathways that have favored resettlement of refugees from Asia, Europe, and the Middle East to the United States. This is also mirrored in the asylum system in the United States. Ludwig writes that citizens of the former Soviet Union have the highest acceptance rates for asylum applications, while those from Africa and Haiti have much lower rates.

“So why are there these different outcomes for asylum seekers?” she wrote. “There are several interconnected explanations; a dominant one is that asylum claims are evaluated by systems and individuals that (often) hold anti-Black biases.”

Her proposed solutions include:

• Address anti-Black racism with in the USRAP. This would mean opening different admissions categories under USRAP that were previously reserved for mostly Asian and European refugees. However, for this to take place, the USRAP must exist again. Currently the U.S. government has suspended it and is only processing White South Africans for resettlement, despite them not meeting the grounds outlined in the 1951 Refugee Convention.
• Provide refugees with personalized job training, education, and other skills. A refugee who arrives already knowing English, with at least a high school education, and a large family to help watch younger children, needs less support than a single head of family without those language and education levels.
• Better educate the agencies that work with refugees about language and cultural differences they are likely to encounter.
• Build better collaboration with communities where refugees are resettled.

Since starting her project with Liberian refugees when she was a graduate student, Ludwig has obtained U.S. citizenship. She also volunteers as a pro-bono country conditions expert for Liberians seeking asylum or facing deportation. She usually provides testimonials for a handful of hearings each year. And she is about to publish a second (edited) book, unrelated to refugees, titled How to Facilitate Community Engaged Learning, to be released by Edward Elgar Publishing in August.

Clearly, she has learned how to live in America herself.

“It’s the cultural pieces that are the most difficult,” she said with a laugh. “I was so naive when I first got to Connecticut. People don’t really understand that there are so many differences. Given that it has the Metro North and is part of the tri state area, I was surprised to realize that I am now in New England. I also was not ready for the many wild animals running around here. I was only used to city rats.

“But I have adjusted,” she added. “It’s great here. I’m very excited to be at WestConn.”