Advanced essay #3 What america has sheltered us from

In what ways has America shaped Americans from the world beyond U.S grounds? The La Bestia train, located in Central America, is generally used for transporting foods from Mexico to the United States. From the picture above, you can see many people from all ages and genders putting their life at risk by hopping the train hoping for safety travel to the US. It is not guaranteed that you will make it on this train or even get off safely. Despite the risk of jumping on the train and possibly losing a limb, you have to watch out for tree branches or other objects knocking you off. This conditions immigrants have to go through on this train are inhumane. The US should be more lenient with accepting immigrants and the Mexican government should step in, especially knowing how hard it is to get into the US the legal way. Depending on the season, it can be life or death just waiting for the train. Immigrants can go through excruciating heat waiting for this train and possibly run out of water or wait in the cold with little to nothing to wear. The train doesn't have a schedule therefore, you will never know when it's actually coming until it gets close enough for you to hear it. In the winter, people wait for the train in the freezing weather, some people even die from frostbite. If they make it on the train, they have to sit on top while it's moving because there aren't any seats due to the fact that it's not supposed to be ridden by people. These people try to create a better life for themselves and their families because their living conditions weren’t suitable.. Everyone that gets on the train is on the train for the same reason but people aren't always nice. Being on the train is like every man for themselves, instead of helping each other and ensuring safe travel, everyone worries about not getting accidentally knocked off by another person or a sharp turn. There are even gang members on the train prying on the weak. Most of the time the gang members, or just ignorant people in general, would rob others and strip them naked from head to toe. If there's a woman or man that refuses to give up their belongings they get thrown off, or even raped. People will do anything to you on this train to make their chances of getting to the U.S alive better. They don’t care what they do to anyone else as long as it's benefiting them. Here's a quote from Enrique's Journey, “In Chiapas, bandits will be out to rob him, police will try to shake him down, and street gangs might kill him. But he will take those risks, because he needs to find his mother”. When you're on this train, it's just you, you're on your own. If you’re with family it's just you all, and you can not trust anyone else, not even the police. The police might kill you just because they don’t care about you due to the fact that you aren't legally supposed to be there anyway. America hid all of this. As a 17-year-old young man, I think the U.S should let the entire world know about this. They didn’t necessarily say “don’t talk about this because we don’t want our country to know” but they never told us either, especially since there is no news coverage from any major media outlets. When something happens it's always on the news or publicized even if it's something small like a broken window of a convenience store, especially when it’s about black people. These people are still humans at the end of the day, they risk their lives just to come here to start over. This doesn't even sniff the news. I think the US should at least warn them and tell the truth. If you successfully make it onto the train and make it all the way to the border that isn't it. You still have to walk through the desert in order to actually make it to US territory. Depending on if our US guards are out patrolling, you can be stuck in the desert for a whole month. With extreme temperature like that, from sunrise to sunset, the body will not be able to take it, it's almost impossible. If the US knows about this, why hasn’t this been addressed by officials and people of a higher power who are supposed to ensure the safety of their people? The way the US guards treat immigrants at the border are horrible. “The United States treats immigrants worse than prisoners of war.” The guards beat them up severely, drag them, harass them, they even spit on them. Kids get sexually assaulted for as long as the guards want, until they decide to take them into custody. They treat them as if they aren't human by feeding them little meals that can barely hold them over. “Earning” citizenship in the US is extremely hard and the process is ridiculous. One of my classmate’s mother took the test to become a citizen and some of the questions that was asked was tremendously hard and irrelevant to today's life, they were questions that born citizens couldn’t even answer. For example, one of the questions that was asked is “Name the 8th president of the United States?” As a US citizen, born and raised in the US, I don’t even know the answer to that question. We learn about history, and our former presidents but only the ones who were deemed relevant or those who impacted our lives in good and/or bad ways. In the book Exit West, there was magical realism by traveling to places through doors. I never really understood the real meaning behind it until I read Enriques’s Journey. It was more than Nadia and Saeed going from place to place just to escape the bad doings of others. They were leaving to get away from all the things that are happening right in front of them. If you were in their situation, having to go through everything they did you would probably do the exact same thing they did. There was this one part in the book where someone came out of the closet into the havoc. I tied that to Enrique's journey and real-life because people in both the text and in reality share the same experiences. They will act upon their feelings at any given moment. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/21/us/migrant-children-border-soap.html https://apnews.com/1a8db84a88a940049558b4c450dccc8a/Immigrant-children-describe-treatment-in-detention-centers