Home Now: How 6,000 Refugees Transformed an American Town

A deeply reported portrait of one American town at the center of the nation’s immigration debate.

Once a thriving mill city, Lewiston struggled for decades with economic decline and population loss. Then, beginning in the early 2000s, thousands of refugees and asylum seekers—many from Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo—arrived, transforming the city into one of the most Muslim communities in the United States.

In Home Now, journalist Cynthia Anderson returns to the town near where she grew up to trace Lewiston’s uneasy, remarkable reinvention. Through intimate reporting, she follows the lives of longtime Mainers and newly arrived immigrants alike: a single Muslim mother building stability for her children, a Somali community leader navigating local politics, a Congolese asylum seeker seeking safety, and residents who question how rapidly their city has changed.

As national rhetoric around immigration and religion intensifies, the pressures facing Lewiston grow more acute. Progress is real—but fragile. Anderson shows how debates over belonging, faith, race, and economic survival play out not in Washington, but in schools, workplaces, city council meetings, and neighborhoods.

This new paperback edition includes updated reporting on the 2026 ICE enforcement surge in Lewiston and revisits many of the book’s central figures nearly a decade later, offering a rare longitudinal view of immigration, integration, and the meaning of home in America.

Clear-eyed and compassionate, Home Now captures a community wrestling with change—and reveals how the future of the country may be unfolding in places just like it.