This winter, WUWM’s Status Pending podcast took an in-depth look at what people experience when they go through the U.S. immigration system.
Our team found many stories of fear and uncertainty — we see those stories reflected every day in the news and on social media.
But there were also moments of joy. Our team talked to people willing to drop everything to help their neighbor. We discovered small reminders of a home that’s thousands of miles away. We talked to people living their version of the "American Dream."
WUWM’s Katherine Kokal and Audrey Nowakowski spent time at a church on Milwaukee’s northwest side that helps settle teachers moving from African countries to work in Milwaukee Public Schools.
The church helped settle Nigerian teachers Chigozie Okonkwo and Chioma Mba after they arrived in 2023. The couple and their daughter, Sochi, were featured in an episode of Status Pending about moving to the U.S. using work visas.
Pastor Dee Anderson led West Granville Presbyterian Church for 40 years until he retired in 2025.
Here's his conversation with Katherine and Audrey, which has been edited for length and clarity:
Katherine Kokal: What is it like to help an international teacher coming to Milwaukee Public Schools get on their feet?
Dee Anderson: When they come here as new arrivals to Milwaukee Public Schools, they're put into a hotel room or an extended stay for about a month, and then they have to find an apartment and begin to settle into the community. The northwest side of Milwaukee has always been a place of affordable housing and settling.
One of the interesting things is when they move out of that hotel and move into their new apartments, they have nothing. We've been able to put out a call to the congregation that said, "Hey, we have somebody who's settling into their new apartment." And I am instantly flooded with offers of kitchen tables or sofas or chairs. We've helped them get beds. Often times, we have a kind of "rally" moment where everybody brings their pickup trucks, and we descend on their house and help them move in and settle. One of the members of our church also puts together a toolbox for them, because who moves into their apartment and brings a toolbox from Ghana? You get a sense that you're helping them make a new home and you become friends and part of their family for life because you've shared this experience of helping them settle.
Once people are on their feet, what are their lives like here?
It's a completely new beginning and a completely new experience. One of the things that we have found is that helping people settle in, that very first step, opens all of the doorways to helping them as they settle into everything else. When they need a doctor, when they need car insurance, when they need to navigate our own health care system, when they need to figure out how to get a driver's license. Suddenly we become the number that they call.
Everybody who has participated in helping a family settle in and navigate everything that they need to know in those first couple of crucial months has felt such a rich sense of reward and a sense of connection. I was just talking to...one of our African families, who said, "It feels like family." We become, in the best sense, family that is shared together.
There is so much 'othering' that I think is happening among many religious communities right now. When you're thinking about your faith and the faith of the people in this congregation, how does the immigration work that you do support or challenge that?
I can only speak from our congregation's experience about what we experience here in this community. One of the things that we have as you enter into the church is a giant circle banner that was made for our 150th anniversary. It is made up of scraps of material that have been all put together into a single quilt that hangs in the entrance of the church. It is to represent our welcoming of the fullness of diversity for whatever people have come from. And the gift of that welcome is that our community becomes richer.
If you only think of it as opposites or labels or others, you miss the fact that our community becomes stronger and richer and more vital with every person that we welcome here together. And so my understanding of Jesus is he's the one who sought out the people who are most in need of comfort and care and said, "Come on, sit down at the table with me."
