Immigration of a disabled illiterate Rohingya goes badly wrong

“Where Was Nurul Amin Shah Alam?” (New York Times, May 11, 2026):

Nurul Amin, a 56-year-old grandfather despondent over broken American promises … he spoke no English, and was illiterate.

As a Rohingya, he was part of a Muslim minority essentially stripped of Myanmar citizenship decades ago and subjected ever since to an increasing repression of rights, the burning of mosques, the destruction of villages, even what the United States has called genocide.

After traveling more than 8,000 miles, Nurul Amin and part of his family arrived in the United States on Christmas Eve. Faisal bent down to touch the snow that symbolized their new reality: Buffalo.

“Very exciting,” he recalled.

Buffalo has benefited from the presence of families like Nurul Amin’s. Immigrants, including a Bangladeshi wave moving up from New York City, and refugees, including people from Myanmar, have revived dying neighborhoods, diversified the culture and spurred the city’s first growth since 1950, when it had more than double the current population of 278,000.

“You can’t have economic growth without population growth,” the mayor, Sean M. Ryan, said in an interview. “And the new Americans have been Buffalo’s economic lifeblood.”

Caseworkers for one of the city’s resettlement agencies, Jewish Family Services, moved the family to the ever-changing Black Rock neighborhood, where they settled into the top floor of a gray, Depression-era house.

Via the magic of federal welfare dollars, e.g., for Medicaid, SNAP, and public housing, even someone who speaks no English, is disabled, and can’t read can generate economic growth in the Rust Belt. Much of the money is skimmed off by taxpayer-funded nonprofit do-gooders:

Caseworkers for one of the city’s resettlement agencies, Jewish Family Services, moved the family to the ever-changing Black Rock neighborhood, where they settled into the top floor of a gray, Depression-era house. A caseworker helped them to adjust.

Donald Trump is the bad guy here:

Even worse, the president’s executive order also meant that Nurul Amin’s three older sons and their families in Malaysia would not be coming to the United States.

(This would have been an additional 20 immigrants who didn’t speak English?)

The hero of our story had a problem with the police that might have stemmed from the police officers’ inability to speak the Bangla and Rohingya languages that the new Americans we’re welcoming speak:

The two police officers who responded found a short, stocky man in the backyard and an aluminum shed with its door yanked off. They repeatedly ordered him to drop the poles, their voices rising with each new command, but he did not seem to understand. Where he came from, people in paramilitary uniforms represented oppression. … Nurul Amin became agitated. He began walking toward the officers, swinging the curtain rods and saying words they didn’t understand. Within 45 seconds of the officers’ arrival, there came the electrified crackle of Tasers. … He didn’t understand them any more than they understood him, as he recited, over and over, a prayer for help.

The jail is fully set up to accommodate Muslims, but the jailers might not have been fluent in the Bangla and Rohingya languages.

It is unclear if he knew how to use the commissary, or had access to halal food. “Information about special diets is provided to each incarcerated individual via the inmate handbook,” a spokesman for the Erie County Sheriff’s Office said in an email. But Nurul Amin could not read.

State-paid criminal justice officials try to avoid doing anything that would result in them losing federal welfare dollars via the migrant’s deportation:

Another Buffalo February set in. Nurul Amin had spent 12 of his 14 months in America behind bars.

His son Faisal was working part-time as a housekeeper at a downtown hotel. His son Yassin was in the fifth grade. They and their mother were living now in a cramped apartment across from the old Polish Catholic church, on Buffalo’s east side, where many of the city’s 2,000 Rohingya residents had settled.

Finally, the Erie County district attorney, Mike Keane, offered to end the case if Nurul Amin pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors. “My decision was the result of a comprehensive evaluation of his conduct, criminal history, acceptance of responsibility, medical condition, time served in pre-trial custody, and the proposed resolution,” Mr. Keane later said. “I also considered the significant collateral consequences that would result from a felony conviction — including mandatory deportation.”

(Had Nurul Amin Shah Alam been deported, the Buffalo economy would have shrunk.)

The wife and youngest son:

The tale of a man who might have lived happily among fellow Muslims in Malaysia has a sad ending. Border Patrol picks him up when he’s released from jail, but then decides that they can’t deport him because the state officials didn’t convict him of a felony. They drop him off in Buffalo at the home that taxpayers had previously been providing.

In its telling, the refugee who did not speak English agreed to be dropped off near his last known address, though a call to his family or lawyer would have revealed that the family now lived on the other side of the city. In its telling, the agreed-upon drop-off point was a coffee shop “determined to be a warm, safe location.”

At 8:19, a white van pulled into a darkened parking lot on Niagara Street, near the Tim Hortons with only its drive-thru open. A short man got out. He had no cellphone, no identification, no English skills, no reading skills and no true understanding of where he was.

The Department of Homeland Security would answer such criticism, in part, this way: “Another hoax being peddled by the media and sanctuary politicians to demonize our law enforcement. This death had NOTHING to do with Border Patrol. Mr. Shah Alam passed almost A WEEK AFTER he was released by Border Patrol.”

The refugee moved past the inaccessible Tim Hortons. Past the drifts and piles of shoveled snow. He raised his black hood and disappeared into the Buffalo mist.

Loosely related, I had ChatGPT check the above headline and our AI Overlord wasn’t happy at all.

“Disabled illiterate” is harsh headline language. It may be factual, but it foregrounds deficits and can sound contemptuous unless those facts are central to the story.

The suggested corrected headline assigns blame:

“Immigration system mishandles case of disabled, illiterate Rohingya man”

Maybe ChatGPT is correct. In our infinite wisdom we have set up a system where a Swiss physician fluent in four languages, including English, is barred from immigration while we preferentially admit people who can’t read and are comfortable only in a Rohingya- or Bangla-speaking environment in which women are covered in burqas.

Related:

• Is U.S. immigration policy a form of animal hoarding?