The Immigrant Experience

Posted by Arielle Moore in English 3 · Block/Franz/Taylor-Baranik · E Band on

​Introduction: Immigration is one of the most discussed topics in modern society. We've heard the opinions of political figures, celebrities, writers, and many others who share the public eye, but rarely do we hear from immigrants themselves. I feel that now, more than ever, we must take into account the responsibility we have as Americans to respect the culture and lifestyle of those who leave their homes to take shelter in a completely new place. Learning about their stories will ultimately teach us more about ourselves and American culture as a whole. 

Essay: America has has always been the beacon of hope for immigrants who sought a better life across the sea. In the days of Ellis Island, peoples from mainly European countries decided to make their mark in a new land. Their descendants reflect on their grand and great-grandparents’ culture as well as their solemn stories of the struggle to achieve the freedom they longed for and were compelled to find as they used their last scraps of cash for a ferry ticket, or left all their family and friends behind to a foreign land in which they didn’t speak the language. While the tales of pulling themselves up by the bootstraps that they passed down to their grandchildren about their first encounters off the boat are awfully triumphant, they often erase some important concepts about the ‘immigrant experience’ that many know. Those tales have ultimately bled into society and has almost created a standard of what the journey from alien to citizen should be like in this country, generating the utmost patriotic concept of the ‘American Dream.’ The driving force of the American Dream still lingers in patches of modern society, but around the world, this dream is the call to those who still seek the same life of promise those before them were hopeful to find.

I often ask my mother why she emigrated to this country. She was seventeen- a year older than I am. “And a lot shyer,” she jokes. Thinking about the transition to a completely new continent in the budding stages of adulthood seems incredibly hard, at least in my skin. Why she left always puzzled me. She answers, “To have a better life.” That’s funny. When I ask all of my friends or they ask their parents why they came here they answer the same, verbatim; it’s almost as if they were taught to say it, in textbooks or it was a proverb written on billboards. But what scares me the most about this singularity, this uniform belief, is there is still some sort of hope attached to it. In the book Forty-Cent Tip, a book compiled of tales from immigrants in the workforce, a woman states her experience emigrating from the Dominican Republic: “When I came to the United States from the Dominican Republic eight and a half years ago, I thought things were going to be much easier. In my country, I worked as a secretary at a law firm. When I came to this country, I started waiting tables in a restaurant. It was very difficult and tiring, ten or sometimes thirteen hours a day.”

I have heard this song before: the song of America being an escape, the better place for those with a dream to work and rise from their crumbling situation. When I listen and read their stories, I hear this song. It has an untiring melody. It is the pulse of the immigrant experience. This song inhabits the lungs of some: decades neutralized, but it still searches for the guaranteed hope. A Chinese woman shares this dream in her tales of immigrating to this country in 1996. “As I get older and can’t work anymore, I can’t be sure that I can continue to feed him. So now I put all my hopes for that in my daughter, who I finally brought over from China. I work so hard because I don’t want her to bring her own toilet paper to work. I want her life to be more colorful than mine. That will be the happiness I have been looking for.” Oftentimes, people come to this country believing the myth of this being the ‘greatest country in the world’, and coming from a land of severe oppression, this may seem like so. But the American Dream fabricates these ideas of success. Many immigrants work since the day they arrive upon our shores to find their own piece of that dream, but it is too frequently withheld from them, and that is often because of possession.

Americans can be very protective of this dream, and feel as though only a certain type of person deserves to partake of it. Emma Goldman illustrates this idea, stating: “Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot consider themselves nobler, better, grander, more intelligent than those living beings inhabiting any other spot.” As humans, migration is in our blood. Moving upwards and finding the missing variables to better ourselves is what we are always striving for, and it is a concept passed down from generation to generation. Living in a society that is an heirloom from the first immigrants should make us more aware of its importance and how it should be treated with delicacy and respect. Immigration is our culture. It is a song too frequently drowned out by the unpromised hopes of an American future, but we shouldn’t allow others to sing beside deafened ears. Though this is the land of the free, it comes at too high a price. Continuing the falsity will only generate ignorance. We must celebrate the victories, but acknowledge the undeniable struggles. We must celebrate the immigrant experience.

Sources


1. Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo M. Forty-cent Tip: Stories of New York City Immigrant Workers. Providence, RI: Next Generation, 2006. Print.

2. Goldman, Emma. What is Patriotism? San Francisco,1908. Print.


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