About eight months after she arrived in New York City with her two elementary school–age daughters, Beatriz, 30, has gone from a person alone and adrift in a strange land after escaping her native Venezuela to a hard-working matriarch for her extended family as other members have arrived here.
With her support, her brother, two cousins and their respective partners made it here and are rapidly finding places in New York City’s voracious off-the-books economy, like generations of immigrants have before them.
But unlike those past arrivals, Beatriz can’t offer her brother a couch to crash on while he gets on his feet. That’s because she’s still staying in a midtown Manhattan hotel transformed into rooms for asylum-seekers, with strict rules about who can enter.
When she got there last fall, and walked around for two weeks before finding her job as a cook in the kitchen of an Irish pub in Hell’s Kitchen, around 18,000 asylum-seekers were staying in 46 emergency shelters and hotels sponsored by New York City.
Within a few months, Beatriz had managed to save enough money to help her younger brother Jhon, 28, and two of their cousins make their own journey.
“Things were bad in Venezuela and in Colombia, they were even worse,” Beatriz said last month in Spanish. Her brother spent several years working as a courier in Columbia making barely enough to pay his rent, let alone support his three young kids back in Venezuela.
“I said to him, ‘Come, I’ll pay for your passage, I’ll lend...
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