Bhutanese community in New Hampshire

The Bhutanese community in New Hampshire is a Nepali-speaking refugee population of Lhotshampa origin that began arriving in the Granite State in 2008 under the United States third-country resettlement programme. The community is concentrated in three municipalities — Concord, Manchester and Hooksett — with smaller clusters in Nashua and Laconia.^[2] By the mid-2010s the cohort made up more than sixty per cent of all refugees resettled in New Hampshire over the preceding six years, the largest single refugee group in the state during that period.^[1]

Population estimates

Published population figures for Bhutanese New Hampshirites vary depending on the source and the definition used. The numbers are best read as a range rather than a single count.

Cumulative federal arrivals (WRAPS). Between fiscal year 2008 and fiscal year 2023, roughly 96,216 Bhutanese refugees were resettled in the United States in total under the State Department's Worldwide Refugee Admissions Processing System.^[14] New Hampshire-specific cumulative arrivals have not been published by the NH Office of Health Equity, which administers the Refugee Program within the Department of Health and Human Services.^[15] Contemporary press accounts reported that by the mid-2010s the two New Hampshire resettlement agencies had placed roughly 800 Bhutanese refugees across Concord, Manchester and Laconia since 2008; Ascentria Care Alliance (the successor to Lutheran Social Services of New England) states that it has resettled about 200 refugees per year in New Hampshire since 2010 across all nationalities.^[16]
American Community Survey (Pew Research, 2021-2023). The US Census Bureau's ACS estimated the nationwide population identifying as Bhutanese alone at roughly 20,000 in 2023, combining the 2021-2023 ACS three-year file through Pew Research Center's Asian American fact sheet series.^[17] Because the New Hampshire sub-sample is small, a state-level ACS figure has not been published and falls within the margin of error for the ACS tabulations Pew releases.
Community organisation estimate. Building Community in New Hampshire (BCNH) and news outlets including the New Hampshire Bulletin and New Hampshire Public Radio have described the community as numbering more than 2,000 people concentrated in the Concord-Manchester-Hooksett corridor.^[18] This figure is a community estimate rather than a census count and is widely used in Pew Research's narrative reporting on the Bhutanese diaspora.^[19] A 2016 case study from the Feinstein International Center's Refugees in Towns project found that BCNH was working with 314 Bhutanese families across the state, of which 114 were in Concord — implying a caseload somewhere in the low-to-mid thousands when household sizes are included.^[7]

Taking these sources together, an honest present-day range for the Bhutanese population of New Hampshire is somewhere between roughly 1,500 and 2,500 people, with the community's own "more than 2,000" figure at the upper end. Secondary out-migration — notably southward to the larger Bhutanese clusters in Springfield, Massachusetts and the New York-Pennsylvania corridor — has partially offset the steady trickle of new primary arrivals and in-migration from other resettlement sites, and several BCNH staff and NHPR interviewees have noted in passing that some of the original Concord families have since moved on.

New Hampshire is a comparatively small refugee-receiving state by national standards, but the Bhutanese cohort has had an outsized civic footprint. In November 2024 Concord resident Suraj Budathoki, a co-founder of the local community organisation, was elected to the New Hampshire House of Representatives — the first person of Bhutanese origin to win elected office at the state level anywhere in the United States.^[3] The community has also been a focal point of national attention to the Bhutanese-American suicide cluster of the early 2010s and, more recently, to the 2025 wave of ICE detentions of long-resettled refugees.

Resettlement history

The first Lhotshampa families reached New Hampshire in early 2008, the opening year of the State Department programme to move refugees out of the Beldangi, Goldhap, Khudunabari, Sanischare, Pathri and Timai camps in eastern Nepal. Two voluntary agencies handled the placements. Lutheran Social Services of New England (LSSNE) ran the resettlement office in Concord, where most of the early Bhutanese arrivals were placed; the International Institute of New Hampshire, which became the Manchester site of the International Institute of New England after a 2001 merger, handled arrivals into Manchester and the surrounding Hillsborough County towns.^[4]

Manchester and Concord became the two main hubs. Between fiscal years 2012 and 2021, Manchester resettled 1,166 refugees of all nationalities and Concord 1,187, the two highest figures in the state; the Bhutanese were the second-largest national group statewide over that period at 770 individuals.^[5] Many families chose New Hampshire because rents in Concord and Manchester were lower than in the Greater Boston metro, and because the existing post-2003 refugee infrastructure in those two cities — built up around earlier Bosnian, Iraqi, Somali Bantu and Congolese arrivals — gave new arrivals access to caseworkers, English classes and entry-level work in food processing, hospitality and light manufacturing. Lutheran Social Services of New England, the Concord placement agency, was rebranded as Ascentria Care Alliance in 2013 and continues to run the Concord office, while the former International Institute of New Hampshire became the Manchester site of the International Institute of New England after a 2001 merger.^[4]

Building Community in New Hampshire

The most prominent community institution is Building Community in New Hampshire (BCNH), a refugee-led non-profit founded in 2009 by a group of recently arrived Bhutanese, including Suraj Budathoki and his wife Ganga, Bishnu Khadka and Bhagirath Khatiwada. The organisation was originally registered as the Bhutanese Community of New Hampshire and broadened its mission and renamed itself in 2017 to serve refugees of all backgrounds in the state.^[6]

BCNH operates from offices at 1045 Elm Street, Suite 202, in downtown Manchester, with a second office at 5 Pine Street Extension in Nashua. The Manchester office can be reached at 603-935-9620; the general organisational email is bcnh@bcinnh.org.^[6] A 2016 case study by the Refugees in Towns project at the Feinstein International Center reported that BCNH was working with 314 families across the state, of whom 114 were in Concord.^[7]

Programme areas include English-language and citizenship classes, school-liaison and after-school youth programming, employment services, health-insurance enrolment, mental-health support, senior engagement, legal assistance referrals and a Nepali-language heritage school for children born in the United States.^[6] The BCNH–Concord chapter launched a formal Nepali Learning Project to give second-generation children access to written Nepali, an important consideration for families whose adults are largely Nepali-speaking and whose children attend English-medium schools.^[2]

Two musicians from the community, both with master's-level training in Eastern folk traditions, built an unusual institutional relationship with the Concord Community Music School and the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts to teach harmonium classes — one of several examples of cultural programming originating from the refugee population rather than being directed at it.^[7]

The suicide cluster and mental-health response

From the late 2000s through the mid-2010s, Bhutanese-American communities across the United States faced a documented suicide cluster, with rates significantly higher than both the US national average and the global average. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigated the phenomenon in a 2012 study that identified at least sixteen suicides in a three-year window, and estimates that emerged later in the decade put the cumulative national toll above thirty-five.^[1]

New Hampshire was directly affected. In November 2013, Ram Gurung, a 73-year-old Bhutanese refugee who had arrived in Concord on 4 September of that year, died by suicide on Thanksgiving Day. He had been known in the camps in Nepal as Patrakar Bajhe — "Journalist Grandad" — for reading newspapers aloud to other camp residents. His death prompted the Bhutanese Community of New Hampshire to organise a two-day workshop in December 2013 for community leaders and elders on warning signs and prevention.^[1] Researchers and community organisations have linked the cluster to compounding stresses: prolonged camp life, family separation across resettlement countries, loss of agricultural livelihoods, language barriers, isolation of the elderly inside apartments after a lifetime of village life, and the cultural distance between refugee elders and English-speaking grandchildren.

Mental-health work has remained a central part of BCNH's portfolio in the years since. The Concord office added bilingual case management and worked with the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation on culturally-grounded programming aimed at older refugees and at women's health.^[8]

Civic and political life

Suraj Budathoki, who was born in Samrang in southern Bhutan and spent nineteen years in a refugee camp in eastern Nepal before arriving in the United States in 2009, became a US citizen, earned a Bachelor of Arts from Southern New Hampshire University in 2015 and a Master of Arts from Norwich University in 2018, and ran successfully for the state legislature in November 2024 as a Democrat in Hillsborough County District 40. He was sworn in on 4 December 2024 as the first Bhutanese-American state representative in any US legislature.^[3]^[9] Budathoki is also a co-founder of Peace Initiative Bhutan, a diaspora advocacy organisation, and serves as a delegate to Refugee Congress.

Bhagirath Khatiwada, who arrived with the first refugee wave around 2008 and served as board chair of the Bhutanese Community of New Hampshire in its early years, worked as a caseworker for Lutheran Social Services in Concord. Devika Bhandari, who arrived in 2009, became an interpreter for LSSNE and a co-facilitator of BCNH's Women Leadership Project.^[10] A New Hampshire-based documentary, The Refugees of Shangri-La by filmmaker Doria Bramante, drew on interviews with the Concord community and was screened in Portsmouth in early 2014.

Religious and cultural life

Most Lhotshampa in New Hampshire are Hindu, with smaller Buddhist and Christian (largely evangelical) minorities reflecting the national pattern of the resettled cohort. There is no purpose-built Hindu temple owned by the community in the state; festival observance for Dashain, Tihar, Shivaratri and Saraswati Puja takes place in rented community halls and in private homes, and some families travel to the Sri Lakshmi Temple in Ashland, Massachusetts for major rites. Buddhist families attend Tibetan Buddhist centres in Greater Boston when in the area. The Nepali Learning Project run by BCNH-Concord doubles as a cultural-transmission programme alongside the community's religious life.

The 2025 enforcement wave

The New Hampshire community has been visibly active in the response to the 2025 federal immigration crackdown that has resulted in the arrest, detention and in some cases removal of Lhotshampa Americans with old criminal records — many of them green-card holders who arrived as children. National advocacy groups have documented at least four Bhutanese-Americans deported in early 2025, and several more held in detention without clear destination, given that Bhutan has historically refused to readmit them and Nepal does not regard them as nationals.^[11]

Representative Budathoki has been one of the most prominent elected officials of Bhutanese background to speak publicly about the crisis, telling the press that "deportation is not a solution; it is a moral failure and a legal misstep" and pressing for a categorical bar on removal of stateless Lhotshampa.^[11] New Hampshire Public Radio has covered the case of Mohan Karki, a 30-year-old Bhutanese-American with family ties to New Hampshire, who was detained by ICE during a routine check-in in Ohio in April 2025 over a single 2013 burglary conviction from when he was seventeen and remained in detention as of December 2025; a federal judge in Michigan rejected his petition for release on 11 December 2025.^[12]

NHPR also reported in late 2025 that the number of ICE detainees held in New Hampshire facilities had roughly doubled compared with six months earlier. As of early 2026 no Bhutanese-American resident of New Hampshire has been publicly reported as deported to Bhutan in the 2025 enforcement wave, although community organisers have warned that the absence of public cases reflects under-reporting rather than the absence of risk.^[13]

Distinctive features

The New Hampshire community is small in absolute terms compared with the larger Bhutanese-American hubs of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas and New York, but it has a few distinguishing characteristics. It is geographically compact: nearly the entire population lives within a forty-mile axis between Concord and Manchester. It has produced the country's first Bhutanese-American state legislator. Its community organisation evolved from a single-ethnicity group into a pan-refugee non-profit while keeping a large Bhutanese leadership base. And its winter climate, harsher than Nepal or southern Bhutan, has been repeatedly cited by community elders as one of the most difficult adjustments — a recurring theme in the documentary, NPR and academic accounts of the resettlement.