Blog Feed

Introduction -

         The goal of my paper was to exemplify the constant pressure on immigrants to assimilate. I hope to move the readers of my paper and encourage them to be more conscious not to put pressure on immigrants.  When reading my paper one will realize the sacrifices one has to make both when assimilating or choosing not to do so. 

Essay -

         A young brown-skinned Native American man sits with his long sleek black hair streaming over his shoulders. He has quarter-sized gold hoops in his ears and various necklaces decorating his neck. He is covered with a short fur jacket and a white undershirt. The same man later poses, his hair cut short, with a part on the right side, brushed to the left. His neck and ears are free of jewelry. This time he wears a dress jacket, collared shirt, and tie. Although he did not come to the United States from another country, he exhibits what many immigrants must do to reflect mainstream American society, in hopes of maintaining refuge. 

         Cultural assimilation is the process by which someone from a minority group alters their values, beliefs, and behaviors to assume that of a majority group. When immigrants move to different countries the pressure to assimilate is ongoing and if they choose not to alter themselves they may find themselves branded an outsider.  

         The pressure to behave like the majority and follow their beliefs is derived from many different sources that depend on an individual's situation. For adults, it can come from peers in the working world, friends who they see doing so, or the fear of getting deported if they are undocumented. For kids, it often comes from family, peers, school teachers, and many times the media. 

         The media often portrays immigrants and/or the countries they come from in a negative light. Media outlets and journalists do this by focusing on the bad things that have happened in a country and to associate immigrants with the people doing wrong in order to give them a bad reputation. People like President Trump, who are widely covered in the media and therefore play a highly influential role in shaping public opinion, perpetuate negative ideas about immigrant groups. This makes their living in the country even harder since they are not welcomed and people have false preconceived notions about them. Assimilating won’t change ones skin tone; however, it may make it easier for them to live in a new country without attracting as much negative attention. 

         Assimilation often means sacrificing a part of one’s identity. Enuma Okoro, a woman born in Africa and migrating to America stated,  "Coming of age in foreign classrooms, my sister and I slowly shed our native skins. We let teachers mangle our names, then adopted their mispronunciations — introducing ourselves with syllables our own relatives tripped over." (Okoro 1) .  Names are a big part of who people are. Often times, names are unique to someone's culture, region or family. By not correcting her teachers’ mangled pronunciation of her and her sisters’ names, she has allowed her identity to be trampled for the convenience of another, but doing so also lightens the pressure. When she speaks of “shedding our native skin,” she is exemplifying the assimilation process. In her writing, she explains that when she first got to America from Africa she had no good thoughts about her old country.  Many immigrants experience this when trying to disassociate themselves from their past. To be someone else you must also forget who you were. She went on to say that later when she went back to visit, she got in touch with her roots, discovered many things she liked and decided to move back. 

People who choose not to assimilate either find a community where they can avoid it or live a life with the ongoing pressure of harassment. On the other hand, culturally assimilating does not ensure immunity from harassment.

         Once assimilated, one might feel as foreign to their own past and culture as they did when first coming to a new country. In We Need New Names a girl traveled from Africa to America. In Zimbabwe, she peed in the bushes, ate with her hands, played with her friends all day not attending school and spent the majority of her time outside. In America she pees in the toilet, often uses utensils, and spends her time inside and on the internet or talking to friends. In the beginning, she hated America and wanted to go back, but later she stated, “One part is yearning for my friends; the other doesn't know how to connect with them anymore, as if they are people I've never met”(212). This shows how foreign the place and people she once associated with home are. Many immigrants still yearn for their old country, but understand that it was best for them to leave considering the conditions there. The internal conflict she faces of yearning for her Zimbabwe and simultaneously wanting to fit in, in her new country makes this lack of connection hard to repair.

         How do immigrants feel about assimilation? Assimilation can involve changing religion. Adopting a different language, the slang that may come with that and even the accent.  It can also mean breaking one's own traditions and ideals to adopt new ones. Assimilation applies a lot of pressure on immigrants. For example, in We Need New Names, Darling’s Aunt Faustilina in America would practice speaking English in a mirror after she messed up a conversation in English until she spoke precisely and articulately. Aunt Faustalina, is her role model, and from her, Darling learned both what to do and what not to do. For immigrants, learning what to do and what not to do is a continual struggle that may never result in the acceptance they seek while it compels them to sacrifice parts of their identity to do so.

Citations -

Bulawayo, NoViolet. We Need New Names. Vintage Books, 2014.

Okoro, Enuma. “A Return to Nigeria.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 24 Apr. 2014, opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/a-return-to-nigeria/?hp&rref=opinion.

“A Tour of 5 Refugee Camps.” This American Life, www.thisamericanlife.org/greece/.

“Sea Prayer .” YouTube, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKBNEEY-c3s.

“Don’t Have to Live Like a Refugee.” This American Life, 19 Apr. 2019, www.thisamericanlife.org/593/dont-have-to-live-like-a-refugee.

   Americans often misunderstand the lives of refugees because of widespread misconceptions. Refugees entire lives are put on hold and are often put in danger, many even perish along the way. Many aspects of immigration are often overlooked and brushed under the carpet. Refugees do not have the option to leave their homeland and lose more than just their house in search of a better life.
   The U.S government and media often say that immigrants come into our country and steal taxpayer’s jobs. What isn’t publicized is the struggles immigrants and refugees face to make it to America or a safer place to restart their lives. There are many dangers that come with migrating and seeking refuge. An example of this is seen in the article Desperate Crossing by Scott Anderson, it tells the story of 733 refugees traveling from Eritrea to Sicily. The article includes photographs of the cramped boat, the hundreds of refugees had nothing but the clothes on their backs, which was the only thing between them and the hot summer sun. Most of the children on the boat did not know how to swim and there were no lifejackets onboard the boat. The migrants paid upwards of $1,500 for what they thought was a 6-8 hour journey, realistically though, it would take 6-8 days. Before the boat reached the island of Sicily the boat capsized, only 28 refugees survived. Sadly events like this are common, thousands of refugees die in transport to a new home some contracting life-threatening diseases or starving. Yet these are not the things that we are frequently made aware of. Instead, we are told that refugees do nothing but steal taxpayers’ jobs and create havoc within the country. If the media would allow citizens to see the struggles refugees and immigrants face there would be a better understanding of their intentions. To live a healthier and happier life in a safer environment.  
When immigrants uproot their families and lives they lose more than their home, they lose irreplaceable aspects of their life. Refugees’ homeland is somewhere they do not need to explain their identity or subside their culture, but when they are forced to leave their home they also lose their identity. This is especially clear when moving to the United States, many immigrants have to explain themselves and their identity in hopes of being accepted. In the novel, The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri she touches on the losses that come with immigrating. On page 56 Lahiri writes ¨They’ve learned their lesson after Gongol. They´ve learned that schools in America will ignore parents’ instructions and register a child under his pet name. The only way to avoid such confusion, they have concluded, is to do away with the pet name altogether, as many of their Bengali friends have done.¨ This quote represents how it is difficult to stay true to your culture when the people around you don understand its importance. Rather immigrants give up the fight to show their culture and identity, afraid of disrespect from others. United States citizens are predisposed to assumptions for Muslims, giving people the idea that they are all terrorists. Sadly people do not take the time to understand people’s differences, instead, they try to conform them to their standards. Another example of how immigration causes many people to lose their culture and identity is seen in the article A Return to Nigeria. Enuma Okoro writes of the differences immigrants feel when visiting their homeland, “Each time I boarded the plane to return to the States it was with a surprising hint of sadness. I became increasingly uncertain about what I was really going back to. Sure, there was a reliable infrastructure of basic necessities like electricity and medical care. Yet, back in Nigeria, I had the irreplaceable experience of feeling connected to an untapped part of myself. I was gaining insight into my ancestral and communal identity as a Nigerian, as an Igbo woman.” This quote shows how refugees lose their sense of culture and their identity when moving to a better living environment. This quote from the article shows how at some point refugees would rather sacrifice their living environment to live somewhere they don’t need to explain their identity and culture. Many people do not acknowledge the sacrifices refugees make to have a better life in a safer environment. 
Seeking refuge has lifelong damaging effects on immigrants. Throughout the film Beasts of the Southern Wild, the viewer realizes what being an outsider can do to a person. Immigrants and refugees often feel like outsiders in their own homes. They are treated differently even though we are all people, that cannot seem to accept each other’s differences. At the beginning of the film the protagonist, Hushpuppy narrates a conversation between her and her father as he explains life outside the “bathtub”. “ Ain't that ugly over there? We got the prettiest place on earth. Daddy says, up above the levee… on the dry side, they're afraid of the water… like a bunch of babies. They built the wall that cuts us off. They think we all gonna drown down here. But we ain't going nowhere.” This scene in the movie stuck with me as Hushpuppy is very young and is already being taught the ways in which the world discriminates against those who stray from the streamline. Those living in the bathtub make up a community of understanding individuals who come together and celebrate their differences. People living on the other side of the levee treat people of the bathtub as outsiders. Similarly, many immigrants are treated as outsiders, they have to work harder to be seen and treated as equals. Having to prove and explain themselves to be accepted causes emotional damage, feeling inadequate for being themselves. Ultimately immigrants tell their stories, passing them down from generation to generation. Another scene from Beasts of the Southern Wild that represents the emotional damage immigrants deal is when Hushpuppy says ̈If Daddy kill me I ain't gonna be forgotten, I ́m recording my story for scientists of the future.¨ Immigrants and refugees tell their stories so that their struggle is never forgotten. Immigrants and refugees lose their culture and identity when searching for the start of a better life. Sadly although they escape the struggles in their homeland they are dealt a whole new stack of difficulties that ultimately pose lifelong emotional damage. 
   In today’s society, immigrants and refugees are misunderstood and placed under a category of unworthy. They are treated with disrespect for being different when in reality every single person is unique and different and deserves an opportunity for a better life. Americans often misunderstand the lives of refugees because of widespread misconceptions. The misconception that refugees do nothing more than steal taxpayers’ jobs and money hides their struggles. That immigrants’ entire lives are put on hold, they ́re put in danger, and they ́re forced to seek refuge. The sooner this misconception is forgotten the sooner everyone can accept each other differences and respect each other enough to give others the opportunity for a better life.

Ethan Friedman English III Mr. Block January 2020

Authors’ Note:

In this essay, I wanted to connect my life and my nostalgia linked to my home with the experiences of people around the world. I wanted to stress how lucky I am to be able to call a place home and be able to experience my 17 years of life there. There are many people in the world who are forced out of their homes, and it’s important for me to highlight the issues in the world when I have the opportunity.

                                 Home Base

As he heard the bells from the departing train, he leaps off of his make-shift cot and scrambled toward the tracks. His limbs clothed in the murky mud from the swamp-like ditch he and his peers had slept in to stay warm. He got to a full sprint as he lept at the perfect time to make it in-between the ultimate and penultimate cars. He ascended the rusty ladder and sat down with his legs crossed facing the newly formed home behind him. That is where the signature picture was taken. He leaves a world of poverty and danger and heads for one with opportunity. I do not live in that same world. My world gives me more opportunities. My world gives me an education. My world provides me with friends of all different kinds. My world even lets me say and do whatever I want. There is a reason that I love my home. Philadelphia reminds me to be strong, to be caring, to be confident, and to bleed green. There will never be another home this meaning fun to me. I do not have to worry about where I am going to sleep, what I am going to eat. I have grown up to understand that there are people on the same planet that I live in who do not have those same privileges.

Some are forced to make a large magnitude of changes in their life to be able to have what I have by default. A Nigerian girl, who’s family moved to New York City to raise her and her sister, did not have the same life. Their names were not pronounced right, they were judged based on their skin, and nobody understood their language. Over time, after her father died, she started to go back to Nigeria and write about her community there. She slowly started to feel like she missed her real home. Just like I feel, you can never replace your true home. She said, “Each time I boarded the plane to return to the states it was with a surprising hint of sadness” (A Return to Nigeria). The problem is, we do not always realize that not everybody has the ability to go back to their home. Sometimes, they are forced out forever. Those are the people that we need to help.

In America, we should be willing to assist refugees. During our schooling and through the news, we learn all about the struggles the migrants and refugees have to endure just to have an opportunity to work and survive. America is most certainly not full. We should be looking for people around the world who need an opportunity. Who cares who is making your clothes? Who cares who builds your cars? Who cares about who where people are from? People are people. As long as they are not causing a problem and are not affecting your life, why does it matter? At the end of the, you never know what could happen to you. In each others’ shoes, you would beg for America to take you in and save your life. We need to understand the damage we are doing by denying immigrants. A significant majority of immigrants want to come to America to work just like everyone else. They want to go to school. They want to be happy. They do not want to hurt anybody.

There are refugees from everywhere on the planet. Not everyone can go home. We think that all of them come to our countries successfully and the struggle is whether or not we want them. The reality is what Enrique said, “Every day, hundreds of families are not as lucky. They are again being torn apart”, in Enqirue’s Journey. There are many groups who become stranded with nowhere to go. We need to look at this issue from other perspectives to understand that home is not guaranteed to everyone. What we take for granted is an incredible privilege.

Works Cited: Nazario, Sonia. Enriques Journey. Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2014.

Okoro, Enuma. “A Return to Nigeria.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 24 Apr. 2014, https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/a-return-to-nigeria/?hp&rref=opinion.

Introduction:

What I’d like the reader to take away from this essay is the significance of the seemingly insignificant aspects of immigration regarding how immigrants are viewed in society. Without looking at all aspects of immigration, it is impossible to get a solid understanding of what life is like for immigrants.

Essay:

Immigrants and Their Everlasting Attachment

A man stands looking into the path in front of him. His daughter is sitting on his shoulders; she looks to be no more than three. Their clothing is dirty, and trash lay on the ground behind them. Rundown homes are in the distance. They have just arrived in a new country after enduring a difficult journey. They were forced to say goodbye to their homeland, and hello to a foreign country in which they know nothing about. They had to leave all they have ever known for something completely foreign to them. Although this is their new home, they will always hold a special connection to their home country. This lasting attachment that immigrants have to their homeland is an aspect of immigration that is not always talked about and is often overlooked. The everlasting feeling they get when they think about their home country is something that very few can understand, as it is impossible to fully understand something without actually experiencing it. A few works that touch on this subject in order to help others understand the feeling, however, include the book Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, the film Beasts of the Southern Wild by Lucy Alibar, and the article “A Return to Nigeria” by Enuma Okoro.

Each immigrant has their own story, history, and longing for their country which makes understanding their struggles very difficult. There can either be a specified reason for one’s deep attachment to their homeland, or it can simply just be. An example of this is in Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid when Saeed and Nadia are preparing to flee from their home country and seek refuge and they are faced with the fact that Saeed’s father will not be escaping with them. Upon asking his father why his father responds with, “‘Your mother is her.’ Saeed said, ‘Mother is gone.’ His father said, ‘not for me’ (Hamid 95). Although he had the chance to, he refused to leave his wife, who had died, behind. She was buried in that country, therefore he must stay there. The connection Saeed’s father developed for his country was so much deeper than imaginable that he would rather risk his safety, let alone his life, in order to remain in the place his wife was buried. In this case, his wife being buried there strengthens the connection he has to the country, even though he already had a deep connection there before. His reason for staying is unique to him, as is anyone’s reason. It is not necessarily the country itself that he is connected to, it is what the country holds that deeply resonates with him. Although Saeed’s father ultimately stayed and is not an immigrant, he is the perfect example as to how if one were to leave their home country, their attachment and resonance to that country would remain with them throughout their whole life.

Similarly, in the film Beasts of the Southern Wild by Lucy Alibar, after the community is evacuated and brought to the dry land in attempts to “save” them, they all find a way to escape back to their land even though it is seen as unsuitable by those in the dry land. They had a deep connection to their home as there was a great sense of community that was unfulfilled during the time they spent in the dry land. Although they returned to run down, unsustainable shack-like homes, they regained their sense of belonging, which is often a leading reason as to why immigrants have such an attachment to their homeland.

Another example as to how belonging plays a role in the lasting attachment immigrants have to their home country is demonstrated in the article, “A Return to Nigeria” by Enuma Okoro. Enuma had spent only a small portion of her life in Nigeria before her family immigrated to the United States. She had grown up without feeling connected to her home country or feeling like she wanted to return. That was until she had to return to bury her father, as it is custom in Igbo culture to bury oneself in their country of origin. She reminisces, “I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that there was a land and a people that rightfully claimed me. Choosing to ignore that seemed oddly irresponsible…” (Okoro 2). Okoro had always struggled with her identity, as she felt should could not label herself as Nigerian nor American as she did not fully resonate with either of those cultures. Upon returning to Nigeria, she realized that there is a whole village that knows her name and knows who she is and is accepting of her. That feeling was something she never had in America. After contemplating it for a while, Okoro finally decided to give up her first world lifestyle, buy a one-way ticket, and move to Nigeria, which remains a poor, developing country. Okoro is the perfect example of how strong the sense of belonging and attachment can be for immigrants, even if they do not initially feel that sense of longing for their homeland.

Although discussing the attachment that immigrants have to their country of origin may seem insignificant compared to other aspects of immigration, it is very necessary to look further into it because it allows the public to attempt to understand the effects immigration has on immigrants and their wellbeing. If those who make laws about immigration do not even understand the severity of all aspects of immigration, it is not fair for them to make laws limiting resources and safety precautions for immigrants. There are a lot of components to the immigration crisis and there are many different opposing opinions, however, if one were to look at the seemingly insignificant parts of immigration, as these writers have done, it is clear to see that it goes much deeper than just “wanting to come to America.” It is not an easy decision for immigrants to make to leave their country, and only do so when necessary for their own safety and future, as they know the feeling of attachment will linger for their lifetime.

Works Cited

Alibar, Lucy. Beasts of the Southern Wild. Hamid, Mohsin. Exit West. Penguin Random House, 2017. Okoro, Enuma. “A Return to Nigeria.” The New York Times, 23 Apr. 2014. Oxfam. “7 Ways You Can Help Refugees Right Now.” Oxfam, 13 Jan. 2020, www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/stories/7-ways-you-can-help-refugees-right-now/.

Reader’s Note: The purpose of this project is to help people realize what really makes strong relations between people, how do humans create a community and if it’s fully determines on free will. There are three key examples I used, two of them being from books I read in English class. One of the things that people should keep in mind is that the purpose of this essay is to break down the major factor that contributes to creating communities, acknowledging there are other things that play a role. I hope readers finish reading this paper learning something they didn’t realize before.

Between two rows of temporary tents, about a couple hundred feet apart, are a group of children, they are all spread out, some of them are talking and playing with their friends, others are staring into space. The ground is light gray with gray pebbles and rocks spread throughout it. Every two tents have a satellite next to it. Towards the left side of tents, near the middle tents, stand 3 women monitoring the kids. 5 tents down are men that seem to be fixing a tent. These refugees are living though conditions due to how expensive it would be to move and live in Europe. They had to flee their country and leave most of their belongings. They don’t have a strong, sturdy shelter as a permanent home. There is no certainty of an actual home, and it starts to look like the camp is becoming their new home. They worked together to migrate, supporting each other by creating a system in which other refugees can also cross the water. Securing people with life vests, having people safely arrive onto the land. With these refugees going through a similar struggle, a sense of community and unity starts to emerge due to their common struggles.

This pattern could be found in many different communities, people unite because of a common struggle. One example is the black community, specifically in America. Society creates a stereotype of black people. According to “[An African American is] born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world —- a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.” - W E B DuBois. DuBois points out that black people have to view everything in two lenses, their point of view and how the rest of the world would view the same thing. Due to these two points of view, they have to watch what they do because the rest of the world already have a negative perception towards them. The only people who understand this struggle are other black people because they also go through the same thing. They find some level of comfort within each other, which creates a unique bond within each other.

In the book “The Namesake”, narrates the life of a 1st generation Bengali-American named Gogol. While he was growing up in America, he started to hate his name more and more because it was an unusual name and it made him stand out and not in a good way. The name was given to him by his dad because when his dad was in Bangladesh he almost died in a train accident. And the book he was reading on the train was written by and author whose name was Gogol. It was a major event that happened in Gogol’s father, Ashoke. It was special to him. When Gogol turned 18 he told his parents that he was changing his name to Nikhil, still preserving his Bengali heritage but a more common name. Further in the book, Ashoke dies in an accident which gathers everyone to their house (Gogol was living on his own in New York). Years later, Ashima moves out of the house and she has a party. Gogol goes in his room and finds the book with the author which he was named after, he starts reading the book that majorly impacted his life and he realizes no one will call him Gogol anymore.“The givers and keepers of Gogol’s name are far from him now. One dead. Another, a widow, on the verge of a different sort of departure, in order to dwell, as his father does in a separate world” pg 289”. At this moment, Gogol is having a moment of realization. Nobody will call him Gogol anymore, since he’s not going to see his mom as much and his father is dead. It wasn’t just a name, it was something that connected him to his parents. The difficulties and struggles that they faced adjusting to a new country, but still found ways to stay in touch with their roots. And the way they passed it on to their children was giving them special names that not only connect to their culture and traditions but to their personal lives too.

Gogol wasn’t close to many Bengali-Americans in the book, I think that’s one of the reasons he had trouble finding himself. He didn’t have people in his life that were balancing both American and Bengali culture. One of the only things he had that connected to his family roots was his name Gogol, which nobody was going to call him anymore.

The point that is being made is that even though we value the role communities in our society and specifically in our daily lives but fail to realize and appreciate two huge factors in forming bonds with others, the same struggles they face and connections to the same roots. Whether it’s having familiar yet unique names that originate from the same place, or extreme cases like going through the same humanitarian crisis. People find comfort with people they could relate to.

              ThEy'Re StEaLiNg OuR JoBs

In today’s political climate, Republicans, in particular, happen to hold a very inaccurate thought regarding immigrants (especially ones of Latin American descent). That thought is that they cross over the border as rapists and murderers. It’s fascinating they believe this because statistics suggest otherwise. There are more whites incarcerated than there are Latinos. So that whole argument is really invalid. The primary reason immigrants enter the US is to create a better life for not only themselves but also their families. They aren’t stealing our jobs, they’re simply working the ones that we don’t want. On June 16, 2015, during a speech, Donald Trump said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” With the leader of our country saying this, it’s no surprise that his followers agree with him. Trump ran his campaign on anti-immigration before he was elected he would say refer to Latinos as gangsters and Muslims as terrorists. And that’s how he won. He fear-mongered his way into office. And we must remember that fear-mongering is not new. In the nineteenth century, Americans would say that African American Men were sexual beasts, and if you weren’t careful they’d rape your white wife. And to no surprise, this led to various acts of violence against black men. And history has repeated itself in this country, mosques are being vandalized and hardworking people are being locked in cages, separated from their families, and deported. The fact that this still worked centuries later brings to light a much bigger issue in this country. And that problem is bigotry. As Americans, we love to talk about how progressive we are and how far we’ve come as a country. Now even though America can be considered progressive compared to MANY MANY countries, and we have been more and more welcoming of time. We’re still quite far from being a truly progressive and welcoming country. The 2016 presidential election did a great job of bringing this issue to light. The ugly truth is that more than 62 million Americans voted for an open bigot. And the reason why those (at least) 62 million Americans are so easily manipulated is that they’re isolated both physically and mentally. They either aren’t around enough minorities so the only experience they have with them comes from Fox News. Or they’re so stubborn that they’re really a lost cause. The primary reason I feel so adamant about this topic is because of my personal experiences. I grew up around a lot of Bengali Muslims, and interestingly enough it was always my American friends getting me into some kind of trouble. While my Muslim friends were always trying to get me to make better life decisions. The notion that Muslims are violent is factually incorrect. The Quran preaches peace. The only reason the middle east is such a war zone right now is because of US involvement. We took their natural resources and killed so many of their loved ones, they have a valid reason to not like our country. Yet, the only Muslims committing acts of terror are the extremists. The everyday people have nothing to do with it. The truth is that a lot of immigrants who come to this country (documented and undocumented) tend to work harder than the rest of Americans. They’re forced into lower-paying jobs due to their immigration status, level of fluency in English, etc. They survive with these lower-end jobs and still have to pay similar living costs as everyone else. Thus, they work much longer hours and take whatever jobs they can get. If you go out into the countryside and into the farms, you’ll see that the staff of farmhands consists of many immigrants because other Americans just don’t want to do that kind of work. When my mother first came to this country with a two-year-old daughter and not a word of english, she needed a job to provide for my sister. And she ended up working as a maid in a hotel making $4.25 per hour. She wasn’t lazy, she wasn’t stealing anyone’s jobs, she was just doing what she could to support her family just like everyone else. The only jobs she ‘stole’ was when she was picked for promotions due to her punctuality and impeccable work ethic rather than her Americans coworkers who’ve worked there longer but didn’t work as hard. Calling Immigrants violent and lazy is a slap in the face to every single hardworking American Immigrant who came here for a better life.

Citations:https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/06/16/theyre-rapists-presidents-trump-campaign-launch-speech-two-years-later-annotated/

My essay focuses on the determents of cultural assimilation as well as the ways that American life forces immigrants to leave behind the culture of their homes. I want readers to notice the critiques of the current system and begin to think about ways that we could change these things.

The choice to immigrate to another country or place is a hard decision for anyone. Having to completely change your life is a complete shock and this decision is never made lightly. People immigrate for many different reasons, it could be for safety, better job opportunities, education, family, but it is never an easy decision. One of the many challenges that immigrants face when living in a new place is the balance between the two cultures. Choosing which aspects of your native culture and the new culture to incorporate into your life is a choice that every immigrant has to make. The same goes for the children of immigrants, who in many cases are torn between the traditions that their family wants to teach them and the traditions of their friends and peers. In this essay, I will explore the sacrifices that immigrants and children of immigrants have to make to assimilate into their new culture.

“The Namesake” by Jhumpa Lahari, follows the son of two immigrants, Gogol. In Indian culture, most people have a nickname and a “good name” (one that they use on legal papers, at work and school, etc). When Gogol goes to school for the first time, his parents, Ashima and Ashoke, instruct the teachers to call him “Nikhil,” but there is some confusion and he ends up continuing to be called Gogol. When Gogol’s sister is born, their parents decide to give her only one name, “They’ve learned their lesson after Gogol. They’ve learned that schools in America will ignore parents’ instructions and register a child under his pet name. The only way to avoid such confusion, they have concluded, is to do away with the pet name altogether, as many of their Bengali friends have done.” Ashima and Ashoke were forced to give up one of the vital traditions in Indian culture to make the lives of their children easier. Gogol had to grow up with his pet name being used for everything and they didn’t want that for their second child. The entirety of “The Namesake” stresses how important names are in Indian culture, showing the level of sacrifice that giving their child only one name was for Ashoke and Ashima. One of the keywords from this quote is “Learn.” Ashima and Ashoke, like all immigrants, are forced to learn the nuances of their new culture. In American in particular, we expect immigrants to assimilate into our culture instead of celebrating and trying to understand our differences in ways of life. We can see this often in the current events in America. From crowds of people chanting “Build the Wall” to foreign language speakers being discriminated against, being told that “this is America, speak English.” The culture of America backs immigrants into a wall, where their only choices are to conform or to fail.

We see this type of behavior in “Beasts of the Southern Wild” also. While the people that live in the bathtub aren’t technically immigrants, they may as well be, as their way of life in no way resembles the culture outside of the bathtub. Once Hurricane Katrina hits, a “rescue team” comes to take the residents in the bathtub to a hospital. The only problem is that no one in the bathtub wants the help of outsiders. They created a community within themselves and distrust the outside world. In this case, the outside world wants people in the bathtub to assimilate to their culture, and leave their home for safety, because they believe that their way of life is the best one. Most of the people that live in The Bathtub are happy with their lives, even if people on the outside wouldn’t consider them ideal. America often writes a narrative of being the saviors or heroes of history, but in many cases, people are perfectly fine with their lives, and don’t want to be “saved”. This situation is reminiscent of the boarding schools that young Native American children were forced to attend, which taught them to adapt to western culture. They were taught English, forced to dress in western clothing, and converted into Christians. In the early American’s minds, they were saving and “fixing” the Native American children, but in reality, they were stripping the children of their Native culture based on extremely racist ideals. This savior complex is weaved into American history and is something we still haven’t shaken even today.

The story of immigration in the United States is a complicated one. The founders of the US were immigrants, who stole the land we live on today from Native American people. Today, that is America’s biggest fear, of having our jobs, our land, stolen from those we see as the other. Our definition of what “American” even is is shallow and weak. Instead of accepting and appreciating our mix of cultures we hold certain traits and traditions at a higher level. If we can’t realize and reconcile with these truths, we will never be able to move forward as a country.

The Impact Parents Have On Their Child?

“I am your father. Behave yourself. Stop being difficult with your grandma.” As you can see the parents are making sure to show there kid from right and wrong by telling them what they have to do. they also show them the love and making the baby know that they will always be there no matter what. You also see the mother making eye contact with her kids and husband to show that she is also showing love to them both. Parents are also the most brain in the relationship because sons and daughters would go ask them for any help because that’s what you really want to ask because they might know better from right and wrong and that can show their kids from the best and and learn what’s wrong. Kids always want what they want but parents might have another idea to teach their kids that it might be very bad and wrong to do that. The father would always be with their kids 100% even if they are wrong but they oust also teach them what is was that made them do the wrong thing. The police do not do anything. Some of them are even in on it.” This can tell you that the cops can’t even be trusted and this makes it harder because you won’t have no one to look up to, or call for help, they would just not care and keep going. This is where the father or mother shows up and tell his son that this world is. It what you really think or see, this world makes see what it wants you to see and to show you that it’s about that and it won’t change your mind. It also says that cops are in it and that can be a problem because they have more power than the people so they can do whatever they want and you can’t do anything about. This can also tell you that the police in this country are more powerful just because they can pull over people and this have no rights, and this can be worse for them because they can get killed just because they wanted to make a point. This is where a father has to take out of his time to show and go give the details to their sons to show them that not everything should be about the cops and talking with them for anything and that he should call his dad if it not that bad. People in this world do whatever they want because of the freedom and chance we have. But the father we have to show them the ways and guide them to a better place and mind set that it’s not like people that are born in a rich family that means that you will be rich and your kids and if you are born in a poor family that means you will have the same job and the same amount of money so it’s hard to tell and you can’t do anything about that because that’s the rule. But you can make your own choices and make it better and that’s what a father should say to their child because if they want the best for them they would do anything and whatever it takes. People would try to move to a better place but the problem is if you didn’t go to school and collator would be hard to find a job that would make you a lot of money so it can be the same but at the same time it can be a better life and freedom for your kids and their kids to come. So father would do whatever it takes so that the son or daughter learn from good and bad and a child needs a father in the pic so that can show that they can also be man and learn from the father from what’s good and bad. Something that does not make sense to child or a son or daughter even if it’s something that they have never seen before and that can make them overthink it or want to know more about it. They would always ask the father because that’s how life is and mother for things that are not the big because they might make a big deal about it and they father might not. This world has a lot of things to find out and for most people they don’t want to find out about it because that can cause them big problems or killed so that’s why you should always ask a father that is in the pic and ask hey do you think this is a good idea or a bad idea so that you can learn from them and their past mistakes. You should stay with what you got or ask around for help. In Conclusion, parents are the ones that keep you in check and teach you the ways on what is wrong and what is right. You might like the choices they give you or what they tell you to do but what you have to know is that they want what is best for you and your life. Sources Article Title Figure 2f from: Irimia R, Gottschling M (2016) Taxonomic revision of Rochefortia Sw. (Ehretiaceae, Boraginales). Biodiversity Data Journal 4: e7720. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.4.e7720 Enrique’s Journey

Don’t feel obligated to a stranger. It makes you feel you owe someone something who you have no connection to. Why would you allow yourself to be brought down by the thought of some else’s pain? Not to say that the suffering of a stranger is irrelevant but only that one shouldn’t let it get to them if they’re doing alright for themselves. The other side to that coin is having empathy. Being able to understand someone’s pain and sympathize for them is important. That statement can pertain to a beggar or the orphan. In this case though it pertains to the immigrant and refugee. It’s hard enough to carry out your own struggle of a life. Most Americans take things day to day if not week to week. So there isn’t any room for anything but sympathy for a refugee. It’s real easy to be in a position that many Americans are in and say that you don’t owe a stranger anything, but it’s true. With privilege comes responsibilities but not obligations to humans on the other side of the globe. War has ravaged humankind since the very beginning and only the dead see an end to war. Americans are lucky enough to live in such a safe haven where the worst blow was dealt on September 11th. Even emits all the chaos and aftermath of such an event there were no American refugees, no Americans were forced to leave the country because of a fear for their lives. The privilege to live in such a place is undeniable. Especially when on the other side of the planet there are human beings leaving behind everything they’ve ever known in hopes of a better, safer life. It’s probably the scariest and most difficult journey a person can make and yet tens of millions are forced to make it. There are so many people now that the story of the refugee is in fact the story of the modern world. Over the years, the only thing that’s changed is that there are more people to be displaced. Now with modern media and how connected everyone is it’s an issue that is recognized worldwide. The only thing is it’s so very difficult to solve. As much as locking immigrants out is looked down upon, it’s only considered because there is only so much you can do about the issue. There isn’t one definitive answer to the question of where do these people go? The one thing that is known is that they have nowhere to go. For as long as these people have been becoming displaced, where to go has been their biggest question. The ones who make it wind up somewhere but how welcolm they are is what affects their future the most. In many countries, refugees can find asylum but limited embrace from the people already there. After reaching the finish line by getting to the new country refugees are often met with disrespect and snap judgments. People who are set in their ways will create false justifications for such inhumane disrespect but all those people have one thing in common. They have never met a refugee. Never spoken to the people they think they hate so much. Somehow people are able to create such a strong opinion of something they have never experienced, and this plays into many more aspects of life rather than just immigration issues. Although, refugees seem to get the worst of it. People who have already been through so much get thrown aside like nothing.
When people are face to face it’s a whole different story. There must be only a handful of truly awful people who can look refugee in the eye and explain how they feel no different than how they felt before. Most people can empathize and relate with someone who has a drastically different story than your own. That’s why the video by the New York Times was so good. It showed exactly that. In the video refugees got to sit down and speak to native people living on the island they migrated to. The video was sobering in the fact that these people are so similar to everyone else. Their conversations were genuine as were the laughs, these people got along. Possible because of the mentality that the natives went into such a project with. They understood the refugees situations and had empathy for them. Of course there was no obligations, just a genuine conversation. If more people could have this opportunity with migrants things would be much different.

Works cited: “The New York Times.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 29 Feb. 2016, www.nytimes.com/video/multimedia/100000004237409/migrants-stories-from-a-greek-island.html.

Introduction:

I would like the readers to see that I tried to include both my own opinion and the connections from the real world. I think when writing this I just wanted to express all my thoughts and my view on the society we currently live in. I would like you, the readers to recognize and understand the story of Ibanez. The story in some way shows the misconception we have about Immigration and the misconception of what happens once someone migrates to a new country. Writing this essay was hard in the sense of I have a lot of opinions and there are a lot of facts the dilemma is how do I write all of this in a way where it’s not confusing.

Full Essay:

A garage full of immigrants sits wondering. Why was this happening? What had they done besides seek refuge in a country that once screamed freedom? What they would later find out due to it making national news was that they were being detained and sent back to their native country due to fear from the American government. The excuses for why this was happening in the belief of what an immigrant brings with them the word immigrant or illegal alien is associated with drugs, violence, and being unamerican. The government that we are supposed to trust in an attempt to unify the world we inhabit has in many ways failed to deliver their promise. Most take the words of our government as truth and in turn have ruined the opportunity to build a relationship with those trying to live the life that we are privileged to have. We live in a country where we judge without having experienced, we respect and listen to the wealthy, but in reality, we have more in common with immigrants than we do with American billionaires and politicians. We just like immigrants have dreams and aspirations, and we in some cases struggle to get by. Compared to the billionaires of the world we are all at the bottom of the melting pot. The cause of this Immigration issue is due to the fear of change in power within American society.

Immigration according to American politicians is a contributing factor to America’s economic growth. But if that’s the case why has it become such a wedge in American society? We now live in a society where change is inevitable, but as just as many people want to see a change many want things to either stay the same or revert to what they used to be. The policy concerning immigration in the US has changed constantly. In 2016 ICE removed 240,255 immigrants in 2018 that would increase to 256,085. There has been an increase in the removal of immigrants from the US and there have been countless policies set in place to try and limit the illegal migration of immigrants. The most recent and in my opinion the most drastic was the zero-tolerance policy which allowed children to be separated from their parents who were unlawfully entering the United States.

After all that has happened the question began to arise, Are our leader’s actions a representation of the country as a whole? Which formed the bigger question Do American citizens understand and sympathize with immigrants? The answer is simply no, we do not understand nor sympathize with the struggle of an immigrant because we simply have not experienced it. In the CBS News article “You have to live in fear” Is the story of an immigrant named Ibanez who illegally crossed the border after his family at the age of 14. He was born in Mexico and while there he lived a life where a meal wasn’t to be expected every day which he says was one of his hardest memories from living in Mexico. His family snuck into the United States, but while they were on the land of the free they were far from freedom while his siblings are safe from having to immigrate back Ibanez and his mother are not. He is fearful that one day will be the day in which he is separated from his family, but until then he continues to go to school and work to provide for his family.

A common misconception that Americans tend to have about immigrants is that once they cross that border their lives and their families’ life instantly change for the better and that is simply just not true. The life of an immigrant is hard it is full of loss, struggle, and pain you are in every sense of the word on your own whether an immigrant is legal or illegal. Due to the policies that exist today that revolves around immigration the relationship that people from other countries have with one another including our own has made things weird in a sense of probable difference of opinion. I don’t think the word immigrant or any synonym of the word should exist. I think as human beings we inherited the land that was left to us and it’s not the property of one single individual or an established group of people. I think it is one thing to have established a set of rules in a society, but when you begin to prohibit others from pursuing their dreams then something is truly wrong.

We are letting the ideas of our government officials create these ideas of who and what immigrants are. Trump recently said, “We have people coming into the country or trying to come in, we’re stopping a lot of them, but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are, These aren’t people. These are animals.” The basis of what America was formed on does not match the America of today and even early America wasn’t what life for an individual should have been. The idea that we are indoctrinated with unalienable rights for the pursuit of liberty and happiness is not present in the laws of immigration and modern-day America.

Works Cited: Shaban, Bigad. “‘You Have to Live in Fear’: One Undocumented Immigrant’s Story.” CBS News. CBS Interactive, November 22, 2014. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/you-have-to-live-in-fear-one-undocumented-immigrants-story/.

Korte, Gregory, and Alan Gomez. “Trump Ramps up Rhetoric on Undocumented Immigrants: ‘These Aren’t People. These Are Animals.’.” USA Today. Gannett Satellite Information Network, May 17, 2018. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/05/16/trump-immigrants-animals-mexico-democrats-sanctuary-cities/617252002/.

Treat Others how you Wish to be Treated Jackson Shumard

In a picture, taken by Vadim Ghirda there is a lot of people doing different things. We can see about a dozen men, knee-deep in a flowing river doing various tasks. Some of the men look to be holding one man back from the others. Most of the other men are standing around watching this happen while a man in the back stands around with his camera taking pictures. At the same time, we can see a baby being passed from man to man which seems to be in hope to get it away from the water. Although it is a very chaotic photograph, it is obvious the baby is the focal point of the picture.This picture was taken to show that even in a time of chaos there will be ones who put other priorities first and feel an obligation to others. This is significant because there is a wide range of responses people have in situations of despair. Growing up, and to this day I commonly hear the phrase “treat others how you wish to be treated” and I keep it fresh in my memory. This phrase holds a lot of weight when having a discussion about obligations to others. Obligations can look very different when dealing with people of varying importance in your life. Most people would say they feel the most obligation towards their family and friends, but what about strangers? I think that when dealing with strangers peoples obligations greatly vary. Many people feel little to no obligation to strangers and no pity to those in situations below theirs, but there are also a ton that are the complete opposite. For example, the people that serve in the military, the fire department, first responders, teachers, and policemen are all careers that are based on serving the needs of others who are almost always strangers. But even more specific than that, what about the people who do more to help individuals? The ones that feed the homeless, or help people cross the street, or even holding the door. What caused such the variation in levels of obligation people feel and what obligations (if any) do we have to strangers? While reading “Enrique’s Journey” there was many obvious examples of people helping strangers they had never seen and probably never would again. “Enrique is stunned by the generosity. In many places where the train slows in Veracruz-at a curve or to pass through a village-people give. Sometimes twenty or thirty people stream out of their homes along the rails toward the train. They wave. They smile, they shout, and then they throw food.” In this scenario dozens of people ride the tops of trains for days through mexico, few with money for food or water. In the small and very poor town that this train is traveling through countless families come out of their homes on the regular to give a portion of what little they have to the migrants on the trains. I found this significant because of how much it is related to the question of what obligations people feel towards strangers. In this case these people feel obligated to feed the countless different people coming through their village every week when they themselves have very little. When it is looked into more closely, many people can’t afford to be giving away food or water, but they do. “These are unlikely places for people to be giving food to strangers. A World Bank study in 2000 found that 42.5 percent of Mexico’s 100 million people live on $2 or less a day. Here, in rural areas, 30 percent of children five years old and younger eat so little that their growth is stunted, and the people who live in humble houses along the rails are the poorest.” If this information is true, and they still give away little of what they have why is it rare to see someone help a stranger at in Philadelphia? The variation of obligation people feel to others is something that I think exists a lot less in America. I think for the most part Americans are greedy. Many have ten times what those people in Mexico do, but won’t share a penny to someone who needs it. I think that the level of variation that people feel towards others is a response to how a person grew up. It is much more likely for someone who has struggled themselves and gone through hardships to recognize when someone else is and lend support. That is why so many of the Mexican families living along the tracks feed others, because they too have been hungry or poor at a point. In a place like America the attitude is different. There is a stigma to work and get it on your own and little pity to those who rely on others. While in certain situations this may be the appropriate response, I think that many people just need a little help or proof that someone cares about them to get them back on their feet. If everyone would show a little more obligation to help those around them it would benefit everyone.

https://politiken.dk/fotografier/art5849931/Click-the-black-background-and-switch-on-their-reality Pg.106 “Enrique’s Journey” Pg.105 “Enrique’s Journey”

My goal for this essay was to make people think about their obligations to others. When we look at how people treat strangers it varies from person to person with a wide range of responses. I am proud of how I examined the responses of the people living in Mexico along the train tracks. using the book “Enrique’s Journey.” It greatly shows the difference in how strangers are treated there compared to other places in the world and bring up the question of why that is.

Introduction

The goal of my essay is to determine who belongs and what makes someone a native. Something that I am proud of is how I describe the photograph in the beginning of my essay. I would like the readers to notice the analysis I used to prove my points. I tried to connect all the sources we in class to my topic.

Who Belongs?

In a photograph from a refugee camp at the Islahiye Camp in the southeastern Turkish province of Gaziantep, the ground is covered in dust, dirt, and rocks. The sky is filled with clouds hanging over the bunched up mountains in the background. There were about 15 white tents lined up along the sides of the dirt. About 7 on one side and 8 on the other. In the middle of all this are about 30 people, more than half are kids. It seems most of the kids aren’t happy and are looking for something to do.

When people think about immigration the main focus is about immigrants not belonging. But the main reason why they think they don’t belong is because they moved from another place but the reality is that people choose what they want the criteria of an immigrant to be based on the situation. In the book We Need New Names the kids are going around trying to find something fun to do. It reminds me of that part because the environment they were in wasn’t the cleanest and didn’t have the best living conditions. The difference is that those kids in that book weren’t immigrants. Their environment was in that condition because of crime, war, and other world problems. In the picture the immigrants were put in an environment with similar conditions because that’s how immigrants are treated since they aren’t natives.

This raises the question of who belongs and what makes someone a native? A widespread belief is that decisions about “who belongs” are often based on appearance. I actually believe this to a certain extent though. I believe this is true because usually the people being targeted in the United States are people that don’t identify as white or black. Such as Latino/Mexican, Chinese/Asian, Middle Eastern, and many more. I’ve rarely seen people with the fairer skin color be questioned on rather they belong in the United States or not compared to other races. One reason I disagree with that is because one way they determine “who belongs” is if that person was born in that country. If they were then that person is automatically considered a citizen of that country. Another way they determine “who belongs” is by checking if a non-native born person has their citizen papers because if they don’t have them than they believe that person should be allowed to live in that country.

According to We Need New Names one of the main characters Darline, moved from Africa to the United States specifically Detroit, Michigan. When she got there she pronounced it as Destroyedmichygen. She met this girl named Kristal and they weren’t really friends. Kristal was teaching them how to put on makeup and she felt superior to them because of that. Darline did not feel the same way. She thought to herself “Kristal thinks that since she taught us to wear makeup and has a weave, she is better than Marina and myself, but the truth is she can’t even write a sentence correctly in English to show that she is indeed American.” I chose this quote because this shows one of the “qualifications” of a native. Since Kristal could barely write in English (the native language of the U.S) Darline is a little skeptical about Kristal actually being American.

According to another book Exit West one of the main characters Nadia was describing her neighborhood. There were many people moving in and out throughout her time there. As she was describing that she said “We are all migrants through time.” What I got from that quote was that everybody is a migrant to another place. For instance when you are from a certain place you are considered a native but when you travel to somewhere different you are now considered a migrant or an immigrant and the same goes vice versa. Another example of this was in an article called A Return to Nigeria. The boy was describing his childhood when he said “Coming of age in foreign classrooms, my sister and I slowly shed our native skins.” He is saying that he is losing his native culture because where he is at now it is considered foreign which forces him to adjust to fit in with natives. Another thing is when someone doesn’t belong they are forced to adapt to the culture around them and sacrifice very important things from their home. When Darline moved from her hometown of Africa to the United States, she had to leave her friends (which were like family to her), her mom, and all the fun things she did there. When she got to the United States it was very unfamiliar to her. She thought the way they danced, ate, and talked was weird. Immediately after she got there she started looking for things that she would see back home. She couldn’t find anything. Her cousin that she didn’t even really know she was related to told her “This is America, yo, you won’t see none of that African shit up in this motherfucker.” This shows that Darline has to adapt to the culture of the United States because what she is used to is nowhere to be found. Since the culture there is not the same as Africa’s culture she has no choice but to learn to adapt to it. In Exit West Saeed and Nadia had to leave Saeed’s father behind along with their jobs and their homes. That was hard because they had to adapt to an unfamiliar place with other each other. In the beginning of the journey they weren’t even that close but as the journey went on their bond got stronger.

In conclusion there are a lot of different factors that go into determining who belongs and what makes someone a native. For example someone isn’t considered a native simply because they weren’t born in that place. Many people believe that theory. So in that case everybody is considered an immigrant when they go somewhere else.

Sources 16 Children – 16 Photos: Click the Black Background and Switch on Their Reality Peter J - https://politiken.dk/fotografier/art5849931/Click-the-black-background-and-switch-on-their-reality Exit West by Mohsin Hamid We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo A Return To Nigeria by Enuma Okoro

Being a refugee is hard. It can be mentally and physically draining. Leaving everything you know to be somewhere else, a place that you potentially won’t be welcome is a very big sacrifice. Nothing will ever be the same, no matter how hard you try. But one thing that could be affected specifically is relationships. It is very rare that a set of people remain together for the entirety of their trip to wherever they decide to go. When this happens, particularly with children, it can cause many problems and strain in the relationship. And even if they stay together, the harrowing living and traveling conditions can cause arguments and any misstep can ruin the fate of everyone that you are with. Through reading all of the things that I’ve read in class within the past two or three months, I have come to realize that stressful situations can almost always cause a (sometimes permanent) strain on a relationship.

In Enrique’s Journey, the titular character, Enrique, has a mother that immigrates to the United States from Honduras when he was very young. She promises to return, but he grows up and lives a portion of his adult life without her. After a life of yearning for his mother’s love, he decides to travel up to the US to be with her. When he gets there, it’s not at all what he expected. On page 191, it compares this to that of the Odyssey and the works of O. Henry, stating, “Children like Enrique dream of finding their mothers and living happily ever after. For weeks, perhaps months, these children and their mothers cling to romanticized notions of how they should feel toward each other. Then reality intrudes. The children show resentment because they were left behind. They remember broken promises to return and accuse their mothers of lying… The mothers, for their part, demand respect for their sacrifice: leaving their children for the children’s sake. When their children say, “ You abandoned me,” they respond by hauling out tall stacks of money transfer receipts.” As you can presume, what ended up happening was something that neither of them would have expected. The relationship between him and his mother is so strained that they barely even know each other. Her decision to immigrate for a better life ended up messing up whatever great relationship she could have had with her son.

In the story Exit West, Saeed and Nadia are a pair of young people living in an unnamed city that end up falling in love with each other. However, a sudden war enters their city and they were forced to flee. Throughout the entirety of the book, we see Nadia and Saeed drift farther and farther apart from each other. They speak about it a little bit on page 204. “Saeed and Nadia were loyal, and whatever name they gave their bond they each in their own way believed it required them to protect each other, and so neither talked much of drifting apart, not wanting to inflict a fear of abandonment, while also themselves quietly feeling that fear, the fear of the severing of their tie, the end of the world they had built together, a world of shared experiences in which no one else would share, and a shared intimate language that was unique to them, and a sense that what they might break was special and likely irreplaceable.” We can see that all of this traveling and moving around has definitely taken a toll on their relationship. They ended up dating other people by the end of the book. Now, no one can be sure that they would have definitely worked out if the war never happened, but everything that happened in the book definitely expedited the process.

In the short story Wildwood, the main character (and narrator) is a teenager living with her mom and younger brother in New Jersey. This is one story that is not really focused on immigration/refugees; instead focusing on poverty, which is a different kind of stressful situation. The narrator has a very bad relationship with her mother; she constantly berates and abuses her daughter, verbally and sometimes physically.

Immigration is usually a grueling and unenjoyable process. If you add on being a refugee, the process becomes the ultimate test of strength and perseverance. You rarely ever end the journey the same person you were when you started. And based off of stuff that I’ve read in this class, many relationships cannot stand the aforementioned test. The situation is too stressful and strenuous on the psyche, usually in a negative way. In fact, I think that any stressful situation can take a toll on a relationship, in a multitude of different ways.

Works Cited: Nazario, Sonia. Enriques Journey. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2014.

Mbue, Imbolo. Behold the Dreamers: a Novel. New York: Random House Inc, 2017.

Meloy, Colin, Carson Ellis, and Junot Diaz. Wildwood. St. Louis, MO: Turtleback Books, 2017.

My goals for this essay are: to get as much writing time as I can, try to exceed the requirements and not do the bare minimum Have my writing be clearer get my essay proofread and go deeper into ideas that need it. I’m most proud of my essay is the part when I talked about the article because I feel like I went into depth and explained.

This is a picture of refugees trying to cross into another country. There are barbed wires that go from the ground and past their heads. When you look into the distance, it seems like the wires never end as if it’s a maze and what you can see past that is just barren land. It looks as though the people have been walking for a while. The man on the far left in the front is trying to squint to see how much longer the walk is for them. The child in red at the back looks like he or she has no clue as to what’s happening. Everyone is walking in pairs of three, probably because their traveling as a group or there isn’t enough room for everyone to walk together. Another thing is that everyone is wearing jeans and jackets. It’s nothing too heavy that might slow them down but no one is carrying luggage.

When it comes to moving to another country, it’s all about the different opportunities that you can have. The legal way of moving to America, getting a green card or an immigrant visa, can take more than 10 years. Some of the different ways of getting a visa are getting a family petition or an employment sponsor. Even with these options, people still have to get different forms and money. Another thing is that not everyone gets approved or don’t have enough time. That’s when people have to resort to sneaking into a country, which is dangerous and could put them back into the situation they once were or worse. After arriving and settling migrants need jobs and money to support themselves and whoever else might’ve arrived with them. Unfortunately, most jobs don’t pay as much and don’t give migrants the same respect as everyone else. The main jobs that people usually associate with migrants are agricultural workers, construction workers, drivers, tailors, maids, and housekeeping. What people don’t realize is that as long as they’re citizens and have working papers and some money to start with, they can be whatever want. It’s not uncommon for migrant families to have their own business because they do have a lot to bring to society and our economy.

The article, Immigration Must Be Considered An Opportunity For America Not A Problem by Steve Case says, “Countries are either open and growing — absorbing new ideas, people and ways of doing things — or they are closed and falling behind, trying to defend the status quo, exclude outsiders and shut out new thinking.” This quote relates to my topic of opportunities because if countries continue to evolve and let the idea of immigration become normalized then people won’t have to come here both illegally and legally just to worry about getting deported or getting treated as less of a person. It might also the immigration process easier. People wouldn’t have to worry about the types of forms they have and when they might expire, and they wouldn’t need immigration lawyers.

The book that I’m currently reading, Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue, starts off with a guy named Jende, who moved from Cameroon (Central Africa) to America with his wife and daughter, going to a job interview to be a chauffeur. He was able to get his job because a family member talked to the employer and recommended him even though Jende did have to lie about his work permit and driver’s license. A quote from page 17 says, “You think a black man gets a good job in this country by sitting in front of white people and telling the truth? Please, don’t make me laugh. I just didn’t want to tell you beforehand and get you even more nervous.” When moving to somewhere new, people should make sure that they have connections with others so that they can get job opportunities and things that would put them in a comfortable position.

In Exit West, the form of magical realism that the author used was portals for the people that needed it the most. There were numerous people that went through portals to go somewhere safer than where they originally were. Nadia and Saeed needed to leave their home country as soon as possible because of the ongoing violence and lack of resources that were there. In Chapter 6, they were successfully able to pass through a portal that took them to a restroom on the Greek island of Mykonos. I used this example because, without the portals, the refugees in the book would probably still be at wherever they came from.

In conclusion, opportunities are a huge part of migration. Without opportunities, most of us wouldn’t be where we are today.

Citations: “How Does the U.S. Refugee System Work?” Council on Foreign Relations, Council on Foreign Relations, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/how-does-us-refugee-system-work.

Case, Steve. “Immigration Must Be Considered an Opportunity for America, Not a Problem.” Vox, Vox, 3 Aug. 2016, https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2016/8/3/12362390/immigration-visa-policy-entrepreneur-immigrant-education-snapdeal-kunal-bahl.

Change is a natural part of life. If happens to everyone. Little do they know this family’s life is about to change forever. The family above is standing with their backs to the camera. The people, a man and a woman with two young children. They are all standing on a marshy landing, with water to the right of them, and the front. There is a young boy maybe aged 3. He is wearing a jumpsuit with a sailor-like flap on the neck. It has a black square with a thick white stripe on the edges. He is gripping the hand of a broad-shouldered man. He [the man] is wearing an all-black suit and a hat. In his other hand is a tattered briefcase. Next to him stands a woman wearing a dark-colored dress and a hat, she has a jacket draped on her arm. Next to her is a wicker basket with leather handles. Next to her is a boy around 10 years old. He is wearing a tailored jacket and a hat. They are all staring out across the water. They see buildings and cloudy sky. The buildings are tall and short wide, and thin. It is the New York City skyline. The immigrant hub of the 20th century. The family will now have to learn how to adapt to this new and strange American world.

Immigration has changed so much over the past 100 years. For Central American immigrants, they often have to come here illegally. Many of them are minors. They have to traverse the dangerous journey to America, then they have to learn how to assimilate into American society. They have to learn how to speak English and hide their culture. If they don’t if, they seem at all like they don’t belong then they could risk deportation. In Sonia Navereo’s book Enrique’s Journey, she says; “For if he were deported a migration saga that began with Enrique’s mother departing from Honduras will begin anew.” This shows the day to day fear undocumented immigrants feel. It shows how many people come for a better life only to be greeted by fear. If we call America the land of opportunities then who are these opportunities for? Since immigrants are not always given the wealth and prosperity the metaphorical immigration brochures promise. She later talks about how Enrique’s undocumented daughter has to learn how to hide behind cars when police are near to prevent deportation. This is crazy; no child should have to live with this fear. Kids, especially undocumented kids should not have to worry about being deported. They should be able to play with friends and go to school. They should not be concerned with being deported. I can’t imagine what it must be like for a child to be living this way, fearing that the only home they have ever known will be taken from them.

This contrasts from immigration at the turn of the century. At this time the country needed workers, so they wanted immigrants. This meant it was way less scary to be undocumented. Citizenship was also different back then in the 1800’s citizenship was tied to your marriage this meant that if someone married a U.S. citizenship they were granted citizenship as well. I know that in my family my father’s great aunt tried to enter this country but was barred because she was a single woman with children; the United States was worried she would be a public charge. Immigration was not anywhere as close to as monitored as it today. The first time there was any moderation was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. This act prohibited Chinese Immigrants from entering the United States for ten years and prevent those already in America from being naturalized. Before the 1960s there were a lot of restrictions on who could come to this country. These include quotas that stated how many people of each nationality would be allowed in the United States. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 changed this, this act removed the quotas and allowed relatives to sponsor their loved ones’ admission into the U.S.

These two immigration experiences are vastly different from one another. Eastern European Immigrants were and to an extent are still welcomed into the country with open arms. On the other hand, Central American Immigrants who come here now without documentation are greeted with fear and discrimination. A lot of this has to do with how our government treats these people. In 2003 an organization called Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was founded as a response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Its main priority is to remove or deport immigrants living in this country without documentation. Under the Obama administration, their priority was to deport undocumented immigrants who had committed serious crimes. Now under our current administration, they are targeting any undocumented people regardless of criminal status. This instills fear in so many people living here. Some undocumented people came here as young children. America is the only home they know. Under the Obama administration, there was a program called DACA (Deferred Action for Child Arrivals) put in place to protect these people. This prevents them from deportation and gives them a work permit. On September 5, 2017, our president, Donald Trump announced he was going to end DACA this put many undocumented people in fear. As of now those who have DACA can still have it renewed. This leaves the question of; what happens when this program is terminated will it’s beneficiaries be forced to live in the shadows? This is not the only thing this administration has done to hurt immigrants on the campaign trail President Trump threatened and eventually was able to build a physical separation between the United States and Mexico. Even threatening to do this promotes xenophobic ideals. It allows those who feel the same thing to use these ideas to hurt others.

How our country treats immigrants is not okay. Immigrants should not have to live in the shadows. They should be welcomed into our country with open arms. We should be building bridges, not walls. As Emma Lazarus said “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Let’s make this ring true as it did when it was put on a plaque below the Statue of Liberty in 1903.

These two immigration experiences are vastly different from one another. Eastern European Immigrants were and to an extent are still welcomed into the country with open arms. On the other hand, Central American Immigrants who come here now without documentation are greeted with fear and discrimination. A lot of this has to do with how our government treats these people. In 2003 an organization called Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was founded as a response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Its main priority is to remove or deport immigrants living in this country without documentation. Under the Obama administration, their priority was to deport undocumented immigrants who had committed serious crimes. Now under our current administration, they are targeting any undocumented people regardless of criminal status. This instills fear in so many people living here. Some undocumented people came here as young children. America is the only home they know. Under the Obama administration, there was a program called DACA (Deferred Action for Child Arrivals) put in place to protect these people. This prevents them from deportation and gives them a work permit. On September 5, 2017, our president, Donald Trump announced he was going to end DACA this put many undocumented people in fear. As of now those who have DACA can still have it renewed. This leaves the question of; what happens when this program is terminated will it’s beneficiaries be forced to live in the shadows? This is not the only thing this administration has done to hurt immigrants on the campaign trail President Trump threatened and eventually was able to build a physical separation between the United States and Mexico. Even threatening to do this promotes xenophobic ideals. It allows those who feel the same thing to use these ideas to hurt others. How our country treats immigrants is not okay. Immigrants should not have to live in the shadows. They should be welcomed into our country with open arms. We should be building bridges, not walls. As Emma Lazarus said “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Let’s make this ring true as it did when it was put on a plaque below the Statue of Liberty in 1903.

Works Cited Nixon, R., & Qiu, L. (2018, July 3). What Is ICE and Why Do Critics Want to Abolish It? Retrieved January 10, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/03/us/politics/fact-check-ice-immigration-abolish.html.

Nazario, S. (2014). Enriques journey. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks.

                Introduction

My goals for my paper was having enough evidence making sure my writing has some kind of flow, have a way to ease into my essay, and no grammar errors. Something that I am proud of with my writing is that I actually accomplished all of my goals that I had when I wrote my paper. I would like my readers to notice my analysis and how I tried to relate real life people when talking about change.

                Environment Changes 

If all places were the same, people would stay where they are, instead of exploring other options. In different areas of the world, there are always different things going on. The main differences are people, culture, and opportunities.. Human migration usually happens when there is something going on that shouldn’t be or just looking for a better life. When coming to a new environment, change plays a big part in adapting.

Something that is common in certain places is refugee crisis. By having refugee crisis, it makes people want to get out of wherever they are to keep themselves and family as safe as possible. With this, they have to leave where they came from and start a new life. For example, in the book Exit West, Nadia and Saeed had to adapt to all the places they went to, so that they can be safe. When Saeed and Nadia arrived to a specific house, after going through a magical door, Nadia immediately made herself at home. She did this by immediately washing her clothes and taking a hot shower to get herself and her clothes clean. Saeed was shocked by how fast Nadia was adapting to where she was, but at the same time, Nadia knew she had to adapt sooner than later. From this example, this shows that since this is a new change, you have to learn how to be comfortable, because everywhere you go isn’t always going to be what you want it to be.

Another example is when Darling first came to America in the book We Need New Names. One of the first things she had to adapt to in America was the seasonal weather. At this time, it was winter, and Darling has never experience the outside being as cold as it was, because in Africa, it’s usually always warm. By Darling feeling something new, it shows that each day she will have to adapt to something, until she’s used to it.

Once you are used to the environment you are in, that’s when the change within yourself really starts. For example, in the book We Need New Names, one of the things that Darling starts to change is her appearance. When she used to live in Paradise, she didn’t like getting dressed up or taking showers. The only time that she got dressed up and clean was when she had to go to church, but once she arrived to the United States, that changed. On page 169, it says, “I finish putting on my lip gloss, smack my lips together like I’ve seen Aunt Fostalina do.” This specific quote shocked me, because back in Paradise, Darling barely even wanted to take showers. Now that she is in America, she is being exposed to different things. With her being in America, she can be herself and most importantly, focus on what she wants to be in the future without being judged by others. Darling trying new things also shows that she is growing up in a way. Usually when girls wear makeup around her age, it shows that she is starting to mature and interested. Appearance is something that changes in lots of girls as they get older. It’s a preference that every girl has and it’s something that frequently changes.

Another way that Darling has changed in the book We Need New Names, is her way with communication. The day that Darling was leaving to come to the United States, she promised her friends that she would call and send letters to them, but that changed once she settled in. On page 212, it says, “One part is yearning for my friends; the other doesn’t know how to connect with them anymore, as if they are people I’ve never met.” This quote explains that there’s one part of Darling that feels like she will always miss her friends and misses the things they used to do together, but she also feels like she can’t connect with them anymore. This has a lot to do with coming to America, of course. Since her friends are back in Africa, they don’t know what it feels like to live in America. By Darling living in America, she is starting to adjust, and the girl she was back in Africa is slowly fading. Change can sometimes be a good thing and others times it can be a bad thing. The good and the bad part about it is that it can either make you a better or worse person. There is conflict that comes with this change. By deciding how you want to handle change, there are other people that will like or dislike the person you’ve become.

Something similar to this is Exit west, it says, “While they wished to look out for each other, and to keep tabs on each other, staying in touch took a toll on them, serving as an unsettling reminder of a life not lived, and also they grew less worried each for the other, less worried that the other would need them to be happy, and eventually a month went by without any contact, and then a year, and then a lifetime.” This quote shows that relationships is another thing that doesn’t always work out. The feelings that people can have towards each other can change by the changes people make with themselves. Changes in friendships and relationships are always going to happen. You might not see who a specific person for who they really are, until later on. By having a different perspective of someone makes you not know how to connect with them anymore.

In conclusion, change can happen in multiple forms. Change can happen with your appearance, communication, and your connection towards people. These types of changes aren’t something that is made by force; it is made normally as you are processing as a person. Some people may or may not like the new changes you make within yourself. The more people are exposed to new things and new people, changes within the self’s mind start to change as well.

Citations:

Quotes from We Need New Names and Exit West

“Exit West Quotes by Mohsin Hamid.” Goodreads, Goodreads, https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/51234185-exit-west.

Foreword-

For my advanced essay, I wanted to highlight not only the hardships of migration, but the shock and effect that it has on people who are put in these stressful situations. I attempted to highlight the realities of immigrants, and bring he reader’s attention to the risk and danger that these people live in in order to bring awareness to the desperation that comes with seeking safety.

I saw an article while I was scrolling through my computer the other day. And an image popped up that made me start to think. The image featured a family. A family that walks, carefully and cautiously, away from a large place of greenery and down a strip of barren road. The father, on the far left, carries his baby in a carrier on his front and looks after a child to the right, patting his head comfortingly. The aforementioned boy has a thick, puffy jacket draped around his shoulders, a few sizes too big but efficient in keeping him warm. His brother next to him has a thick jacket as well, but the hood up and the rest of the jacket hanging off his small body. Their mother next to him dotes over him, a worried expression on her face. On her back are several jackets and supplies for their journey, but on her front she as well has a carrier. Unlike the husband, hers is empty. She holds the hand of the last child on the far right, his expression frozen in a crying face as his mother pulls him along. They seek one thing: safety within the place they’re going.

What is often misunderstood about the experience of immigrants is how desperate immigrants are to seek safety. Immigration is a very dangerous journey with several potentially life-threatening risks. Why take them? Why put so much effort or money into leaving a country that’s been your home all your life and go into a country that you know nothing about? You would only put everything on the line if you had to. This is the dilemma that immigrants face when coming into a new country. Whether for personal wellbeing, family or education, nobody immigrates on a whim. It is a frustrating and difficult process, and people do not consider how many risks people take to immigrate.

Mr. Block, in english class, showed us a very insightful video. This video featured syrian refugees that immigrated to Lesbos, Greece, having conversations with tourists who were in greece on vacation. During these conversations, a lot is opened up about the narratives on both sides, but we see the thoughts of the immigrants more so, and a compelling story is brought to the surface.

Two men talk on the beach, one a tourist and the other a refugee. When sharing introductions, the refugee says, “I was a refugee in Turkey for two years, and now I am in Greece.” His tourist counterpart expresses his concern when he says, “How awful. That is quite a journey.” To which the syrian refugee responds, “the trip was relatively safe, because I was nearly killed three times in Syria.”

In just this small exchange, we see two very different perspectives. On one hand, we have this refugee who clearly has been through several ordeals, and was in such an unsafe environment that he was willing to risk everything he had to leave. His life was in danger, and he prioritized leaving that situation to start a new, healthier and safer life. On the other hand, we get to see the realization in this tourist, who up until that point had no idea of any of the perspectives that came from immigrants. He was so taken aback by the nonchalant-ness in his refugee counterpart when talking about potentially facing death three times, it became clearer to him that no one leaves just on impulse. Something that perfectly frames this is later in the video, we see two women talking, and the female refugee declares, “we love Syria, but fate has brought us here.” Most people misunderstand the desperation of some refugee situations and how they are willing to do virtually anything to escape them.

The importance of migration is encapsulated beautifully in the book Exit West by Mohsin Hamid. Exit West is a book about two young lovers, Nadia and Saeed, and their struggles trying to stay together as they try to immigrate to a foreign country. Exit west is a commentary on how migration is treated and reacted to on both sides, the immigrant side and the non-immigrant side. The book does an amazing job of highlighting the struggles of immigrants seeking refuge. To highlight the position that refugees are put in when they immigrate, Moshin Hamid writes, “when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.” This quote is an in-depth look of the immigrant experience, in a sense that desperate actions are taken for the promise of refuge in countries they aren’t home to. You can feel the essence of the pain of leaving behind all you know, and all of the people you love for the greater good, with hopes to start a new chapter that brings forth promise.

In Mr. Kay’s race theory class, we studied in-depth some of the lives that immigrants lead. To assist with the perspective, Mr. Kay gave us an amazing resource, called the Interactive Immigrant Experience. What it is, is a compilation of biographies of real life immigrant experiences and what it does is it takes you through the life of an immigrant trying to get into the United States. I followed the journey of a young man named Hamid from Iran, a very gifted computer scientist who was trying to get into the United States to find schooling and work in his field. He is granted a visa, and is hit with good luck when his job offers to upgrade his visa to a work one, and he meets a wonderful woman whom he falls in love with. Trouble arises when said wife’s mother becomes ill, and you have to decide whether to let your wife go and visit her ill mother, or make her stay where it’s safe. I decided to make her stay, and sacrifice her never seeing her mother again, because if she had, she would not have been granted re-entry into the U.S. when Trump’s muslim ban took place. This helped me put an insane amount of things into perspective, and realize how shallow and blind people are to these real life experiences that immigrants are going through.

The immigrant experience has never been an easy one. Throughout the generations, people have had to put themselves into life-threatening situations. But why? The answer is almost horrifying. It’s to escape life-threatening situations. When we peel back the layers of the experiences of immigrants, we find shocking truths in other people’s realities. We are blind when it comes to the amount of hoops people have to jump through and the risks people take to seek what they need to survive. People ignore the reality of people’s situations, and the dangers that they face day to day and instead see it as an infraction upon their country. It’s quite the opposite. People risk everything to be able to live safely and happily, and should be respected when they immigrate. Nobody knows the other half of the story, but my hope is that people will begin to.

Works Cited:

J, Peter. “16 Children – 16 Photos: Click the Black Background and Switch on Their Reality.” Politiken. Politiken, February 28, 2017. https://politiken.dk/fotografier/art5849931/Click-the-black-background-and-switch-on-their-reality.

McEvoy, Gráinne. “What Would You Do? Take an Immigrant’s Journey.” Experience Magazine. Accessed January 14, 2020. https://expmag.com/immigrant-experience/#all_opening.

“Migrants’ Stories From a Greek Island.” The New York Times. The New York Times, February 29, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/video/multimedia/100000004237409/migrants-stories-from-a-greek-island.html.

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

In this essay my main goal was to show negligence we show as a nation to international problems altogether , but solely as Americans do we have an obligation to strangers? The question I’ve been trying to solve throughout this whole unit, though there are many different answers to this question, I showed my point of view when answering this question.

         As we can see in the image above, we observe a picture of two mindless individuals playing golf in this notorious club, but as you take a closer look at the picture you can observe men along the top of the picture, attempting to ascend over the fence into a Spain province from Morocco. Do the golfers really not see them or do they pretend they don’t know what's going on and go on with their privileged lives like any other day? As Americans, what obligations do we have to outsiders? And with the United States being the most powerful country in the world, what obligations do we owe, as a nation, to others outside of America?
       Even our smallest decisions as a nation may affect others around the world, both negatively and positively. With the United States being the biggest consumers in the world, we continue to support numerous unjust systems, because without consumers there aren’t  many producers because if there was a lack of demand, there would be no supply. A clear example of this is sweatshops, which are factory workshops with unacceptable working conditions. An estimated 158 million kids from the ages of 5 to 14 are forced to work everyday. Workers work an average of 17 hours days, and surveys show most of their income is just to be able to support their families with enough food to last for the day. Sweatshops are located all over the world, mostly in Asia. Workers wages vary from country to country, in Bangladesh workers can make as low as $0.13 cents an hour, others in China can make anywhere from $0.44 cents an hour then there’s others in Central America like Honduras that can make up to $1.31 an hour. This is way below America's hourly minimum wage. Big companies decide to manufacture their products overseas due to it being extremely cheap, making their losses smaller and profits larger. These big corporations don’t care about these inhumane conditions amongst their company, they just prioritize their profits to ensure that they continue to increase.  
      We are in some way at fault, because we as consumers continue to buy the products, if there was minimal to no consumers, there would be no need to manufacture these products, but since there is such a high demand for these products, the crisis continues. At the same time, there’s so much we could do. And as much as we would like to resolve all the epidemics happening around the world it’s just simply close to impossible because of how dependent we’ve become on buying the smallest things to fit our needs. Like my mother said, “How do you want to go out and fix a broken home when yours isn’t even fixed?” It isn’t our obligation to help all these other countries that are in need, but to an extent it’s our responsibility to be more aware of the problems going on in the world. Although some may not care, it’s important for all of us to be at least informed on how 95% of our clothes are being made, that the clothes we wear on a daily basis are being made by underpaid innocent men, women and even children. Even our smallest actions have a bigger impact than what we can imagine.
    Thanks to social media, we are able to go out and search for answers ourselves to see more about what's happening around the world, because if the news outlets aren’t putting enough international stories out, then we should go searching for them. Why is it that these news outlets don’t put out international news unless it involves the United States? Is it the government controlling what we get to know or is it our own negligence?
     As a nation, I think we act turn a blind eye when it comes to knowing how all these products get made, we instead decide to carry on and contribute to this system. We push away the truth, because that’s all so easy for us to do since we aren’t directly affected. But what about those living in those conditions that can’t just push away the problems they are faced with day to day? We as a nation should all be more educated on where all our products come from and how they are produced, because no matter how much we turn our head the other way, the problem still lies there and will still be there until we stop turning our head and do something about the problem. This starts off small but it’s something, and something is always better than nothing. 

INTRO: My goal when writing this essay was to help readers realize the weight that the word “foreign” holds as well as go in-depth trying to explain the psychology on why I believe immigrants struggle so much in America. I also try and dismiss previous stereotypes of immigrants and rather than replace those stereotypes with the opinions I have on immigrants, I encourage the reader to try and understand things and people that are foreign instead of blindly following other people’s thoughts on them. I feel as though I did a good job with achieving my goal and hope that my essay engages the reader’s mind to not only agree with my opinions, but also help the reader create opinions of their own.

ADVANCED ESSAY:

Foreign… “ from, in, or of a characteristic of a country or language other than one’s own”… or better yet, something “strange and unfamiliar”. A quick Google search would reveal those definitions. But is it really that simple? Is anything that is strange and unfamiliar automatically foreign? Or does the word hold a greater weight than it is credited? The word “foreign” is like a fingerprint, it’s unique to every person. When faced with something foreign, or “strange or unfamiliar”, people often reject it or simply brush it off as if it never existed. This is because something “foreign” can interfere with what is already known, experienced, and seen. When we are born, the entire world is foreign, and the years and decades that make up your lifetime was spent learning what surrounds you. Eventually we become comfortable with what surrounds us because we understand it and have observed it for years until eventually it doesn’t become foreign. But if something foreign comes into the picture, like perhaps you travel to another country or maybe a person with a foreign background comes into your life, it scares you. And I believe that is the reason for the struggle of immigrants, its because everybody is scared of them… their culture, their effect on their everyday life and their homeland. Allow me to dig deeper.

In the book, We Need New Names, Darling moves to a foreign country, America, and finds out about something unusual about the culture here… pornography. In the book you can see Darling’s reactions through these quotes: “These days, we get off school we hurry home to watch flicks. We always do it at my house because nobody there in the afternoons… Before, we used to watch XTube, but now we have discovered RedTube, which is way classier and doesn’t have many viruses.”pg. 202 and “I reach forward and click on Mute because when the real action starts we always like to be the soundtrack of the flicks. We have learned to do the noises, so when the boy starts working the woman we moan and we moand and we groan, our noise growing fiercer with each hard thrust like we have become the woman in the flick… ”pg. 203. Now obviously she isn’t necessarily scared by this, but it does show that this is foreign to her. You can see that what she is doing is weird and not normal. The way she interacts and reacts to this is very odd and experimental. This shows that when people are faced with something new or foreign they react in very odd ways if they don’t reject it already. Understand that their reactions or interactions will not always be the same because like I said before, what’s foreign to a person is unique to that person, but more often than not people will act in a negative manner towards what is foreign to them.

An example of a world leader demonstrating a negative mannerism towards foreign people is our president here in the United States of America, President Donald J Trump. I think we all know his stance on immigration, refugees, etc. but let me pull a statement he made on November 1, 2018 at 4:19 PM in the Roosevelt Room: “It’s like an invasion. They have violently overrun the Mexican border. You saw that two days ago. These are tough people, in many cases. A lot of young men, strong men. And a lot of men that maybe we don’t want in our country. But again, we’ll find that out through the legal process. But they’ve overrun the Mexican police, and they’ve overrun and hurt badly Mexican soldiers. So this isn’t an innocent group of people. It’s a large number of people that are tough. They’ve injured, they’ve attacked, and the Mexican police and military has actually suffered.” As you can see, this is the definition of ignorance. First, he titles illegal immigrants coming into the US as an “invasion” which makes it sound like illegal immigrants are coming into our country to overrun it which, for the most part, is not the case. Second, he titles these people as “A lot of young men, strong men. And a lot of men that maybe we don’t want in our country.” He does this to strike fear into the public so that the citizens of America fear these people and view them as monsters so that his harsh actions are justified. Lastly, he states that “They’ve overrun the Mexican police, and they’ve overrun and hurt badly Mexican soldiers.” Now this may be true, however, he pulled a fact about a small amount of illegal immigrants and made this a generalization about a group 100x bigger. Now, I am not supporting illegal immigration, but I also do not support how Trump describes these illegal immigrants. Instead of bashing them to the public, maybe he can encourage people to actually research and understand these foreign people so that the citizen’s can actually know why these people are illegally migrating(which for the most part is to have a better life).

There are different ways that someone can react to something foreign… people tend to be on the “safe” side by not interacting with foreign things/people or trying to understand them and more often than not, people tend to act negatively towards things that are foreign because they fear them. I feel as though this is not a proper way to live life and I encourage people to try and interact with all that is foreign to get a better understanding of them instead of listening to the media’s opinion on them. “Foreign”, like the objects and people it describes, is not just a one layered thing… it holds history, it holds meaning, and it holds emotion.

Citations:

• Bulawayo, N. V. (2014). We need new names. London: Vintage Books.
• Remarks by President Trump on the Illegal Immigration Crisis and Border Security. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-illegal-immigration-crisis-border-security/.

In a picture of a narrow road surrounded by grass and trees is a family walking. Three young children are walking alongside their parents with jackets on and sad faces. The mother of the children is carrying luggage on her back and around her neck while holding the hand of her crying child. A bag is in the father’s hand while he is carrying a baby strapped onto his chest. The family is walking on highways and fields sunshine to sunset. While attempting to cross the border, this family along with many others were found by the authorities and sent back to their refugee camps. An immigrant is told to be someone who moved to live in another country permanently. Today, there are over forty million immigrants living in America. All of these humans contain backgrounds from a diverse selection of countries. These migrants came to America for reasons that are clear to them but not clear to Americans. When immigrants come into America, Americans tend to misunderstand their purposes and reasons. Immigrants are unique and deserve a fair opportunity to live in America to create a new life for themselves without complications. Not only do immigrants deserve a fair chance but they bring something different into America that can not be achieved without accepting them. The backgrounds of immigrants are heavily misunderstood. This misunderstanding creates fear which leads to judgment.

In the movie Beasts of the Southern Wild, a film created in 2012 capturing a daughter and father having to prepare for the end of the word, there are many instances of the hardships families have to go through back at home. Hushpuppy is the name of a little girl who is six-years-old. She and her dad were living off of the last of what they had. The place they lived in consisted of people who were about to witness what they thought would be the end of the world. This end of the world phrase was really an enormous flood. While many people decided to flee the area, others stayed along with them.

This idea of fleeing versus staying is what many immigrants have to decide. In the movie, the family decided to stay because they loved home so much but this caused sickness which led to death. “Everybody loses the thing that made them, even in nature”. This quote was from Hushpuppy after losing her father through the natural disaster. A risk that migrants have to take is if they want to stay home or leave to lose everything and start over. This is jeopardizing their lives which could put their families in mental trauma. Moving away is not always the easiest choice but is sometimes the choice that has to be made.

Another example of the turnout of immigrants is in the book Enrique’s Journey by Sonia Nazario. A mother left her son and daughter in Honduras to start a new life in America. The family was dirt poor and the mother could barely afford food. Jobs were limited and making money to feed three people was extremely difficult. Without a father, Enrique and his older sister who made slow money were abandoned by their mother and were supposedly receiving money sent by their mother in America. Enrique got a taste of what is what like for immigrants to cross the border and sneak by the officers. On page 13, Enrique said, “Although I often felt exhausted and miserable, I knew I was experiencing only an iota of what migrant children go through…The journey gave me a glimmer of how hard this is for them.”

This story is nonfiction and is similar to many other experiences. By moving to America, jobs and opportunities that occur are the only hopes for families and without that hope, families will be passing away years to short. This choice of leaving then becomes a must. A popular argument in which Americans are against immigration is because they believe immigrants will take American jobs, hurt the poor, vote against republicans, and many more. These are all decent reasons to be frustrated with immigration but people are not seeing the big picture.

These human beings are coming from places with no opportunity to live a healthy life and raise their kids. Not only are these families desperate to start a new life but they are also desperate to simply go to America untouched. In Enriques Journey, Enrique said, ¨He’d told me about the gangsters who rule the train tops, the bandits along the tracks, the Mexican police who patrol the train stations and rape and rob, about the dangers of losing a leg getting onto and off of moving trains¨ (page. 9). People were so desperate to leave their homes because their lives were being threatened. Not only are their home lives scary but then attempting to leave is scarier. After being sent back and trying over and over, if these people actually make it to America, their hardships continue.

“The 14 Most Common Arguments against Immigration and Why They’re Wrong.” Cato Institute, 10 Sept. 2019, https://www.cato.org/blog/14-most-common-arguments-against-immigration-why-theyre-wrong.

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Society changed over time. We either help people or we don’t. Obligations. What should we do? How do people interact with others? People have their own ways of showing their obligations towards others, but people shouldn’t be treated with disrespect. Every human being in the world is the same. We went through obstacles to get where we are today.

E S S A Y

“What kills us isn’t one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can’t turn down for fear of disappointing others,” Alain de Botton, a swiss-born British philosopher and author stated. In today’s society, what even is obligations? Do we even have any? No one doesn’t have any obligations, they don’t know how to leave someone alone. As reported by OpenBoarders, “part of the case for open borders is that at very minimum, our obligations to strangers is to leave them alone. Immigrations restrictions, by denying strangers the freedom to move to another country, violates this basic obligation.” This indicates that “strangers” don’t have the respect, or should I say obligations towards others. Everybody is human, no one is different. We all went through petrified phases of our lives and manage to deal with all the negativity, but yet manage to not let those things affect us.

Enrique’s Journey, a story about a boy, Enrique, who travels to the U.S., taking El Tren de la Muerte to reunite with his mother, but there are situations that occur throughout his journey with “truckers,” known as guards. As illustrated in Enrique’s Journey, “one after another, they turn him down. Many, having made the lonely haul from Mexico City, would welcome company for the remaining 380 miles to the border. Still, at least nine in ten truckers here, one trucker at the stop says, refuse migrants. If they said yes, police might accuse them of smuggling. Drivers say it is enough to worry about officers planting drugs on their trucks and demanding bribes. Moreover, some of the truckers fear that migrants might assault them.”(133) This indicates that a lot of guards play a role in the story, in which they are not the definition of obligation because they treat immigrants with disrespect, like garbage, and use them in any way that they can help themselves. For example, they rob immigrants (strangers), they rape them, and they abusive them. As stated in the book, a guard said, “if you can’t pay with cash,” one said, “you know how women pay.”(145) This proves that this is an ongoing situation that is not being brought to their attention that this isn’t how “strangers” should be treated. Another quote states, “her mother was terrified that Gabi would make the trip alone and be raped. She asked Gabi’s aunt Lourdes, twenty-six, to go with her. A smuggler promised to deliver them for $2,000 up front, but he robbed and abandoned them in Tapachula, just inside the southern border of Mexico. They were deported to Guatemala.”(145) This indicates that guards will do anything for themselves and that they have no obligations towards “strangers.” They have no respect for anything nor anyone, but if the roles were switched as them being strangers and strangers being guards then they would know how it feels to be put in an uncomfortable and dangerous situation.

“When I die, the scientist of the future would all know, there was a hushpuppy who lived with her daddy in the bathtub.” Beast of the Southern Wild, a film about a six-year-old Hushpuppy, who lives with her father, Wink, in a remote Delta community, known as “The Bathtub.” Wink is an independent man who is preparing his daughter for “the end of the world.” The Bathtub, in Louisiana, is located in an unsafe environment. Homes, food sources, transportation are all on the ground, which water almost sometimes rises to touch each thing. Every dark storm is a warning for them to know that they are probably not going to survive. Shelter services saw that there were people located at the Bathtub and came back for them to put them in shelters. Wink, the father of Hushpuppy, refuses to leave to be put in a safer environment for him and his daughter, so then they were dragged from there rotten, dirty, and destroyed homes and were sent to the shelter. Doctors ran tests on the people who lived in the Bathtub, without their consent and drugged them, giving them medicine that they are not telling what it is for, and basically doing surgery when they don’t want anything to be done, even though they are going to die.

Obligation; “the social force that binds you to your obligations and the courses of action demanded by that force.” In today’s society, we have our ways of obligations. Do we have respect? Yes. Do we treat people the way we want to be treated? Yes. Do we live from the past? Who knows. Laws, policies, rules, changes over time. We have new things every day, every second, every hour. Obligations from the past are different from today because we don’t live with a harsh, threatening, and abusive past. We’ve outgrown from situations. For example, the LGBTQ community. People would disrespect them in any way, either if the same sex is holding hands, kissing, or just minding their own business. They still manage to face those obstacles. I remember when I was a little younger, I saw two girls kissing each other and two guys kissing each other, who had more disrespect? The guys. But people don’t realize that everyone is the same, we have feelings just like everyone else. We faced obstacles to get where we are today, even if they are obligations or not. People will still manage to bring you down.

In conclusion, obligations aren’t just something that everyone has. We all have our version of obligations, even if it’s in a good or bad situation. My version of obligations would be “treat people the way you want to be treated because we are all human.” People don’t realize how difficult things that people go through. People get treated with disrespect for the things they do, where they live, what they wear, or what they look like. Why cant everyone be treated the same? In 2020 and in the future, we need to learn the respectful way to use obligations. How can you change your obligations?

C I T A T I O N S

“Obligations to Strangers.” Open Borders: The Case, 10 Mar. 2012, https://openborders.info/obligations-to-strangers/.

“Obligation.” Dictionary.com, Dictionary.com, https://www.dictionary.com/browse/obligation.

“Beasts of the Southern Wild.”

I N T R O D U C T I O N

In this essay you will be noticing how I explore the misunderstanding of immigrants. What Americans tend to think but is not always the case when it comes to immigrants. Once you read my essay you will have a better understanding about what assumptions and ideas people believe about immigrants.

E S S A Y

Imagine waking up one day not knowing where your next meal will come from, not knowing when the next time you will see your family, not knowing where you’re going but knowing you have to go somewhere. Immigrants deal with this and so much more. To come to a place you know nothing about, and have to deal with people who think they know what you’ve been through is very frustrating. Some people think immigrants have a choice but it is actually a necessity for most of them. Immigrants are in no way shape or from in control of their life.People make false judgments about Immigrants just because they are not american. People have unexplained biases towards immigrants towards fear of the unknown.

Immigrants take a long, miserable, dangerous journey to a place that they know nothing about just to hope and pray that they get a chance at a better life. They put their life in jeopardy just to come to America and be misunderstood. Their experiences and what they have been through get belittled because of people’s judgements. They never really get to fully tell their story and so misunderstandings will happen. Misunderstandings such as, coming here and hurting the country financially because they are taking all american jobs. People all over the country believe that immigrants take american jobs, which is not true. Immigrants need jobs just as much as any american citizen and in fact recent study found that undocumented immigrants alone pay approximately $11.64 billion in taxes each year. Moreover, undocumented immigrants nationwide pay an estimated 8 percent of their income in state and local taxes but since so many angry Americans don’t like immigrants they begin to believe that they are hurting the country financially.

Another thing that is often misunderstood about immigrants or people living in difficult condition is that they need help and/or are helpless, which sometimes isn’t the case. In the movie Beast Of The Southern Wild we see the main character, Hushpuupy, and her father break out of the healthcare place once they were taken there to get help but they didn’t really want it or ask for it. There is a misunderstanding that people in rough places or in places where there are harsh circumstances want help but that is not always the case as we see. Also, in the movie we see how people from these dangerous places don’t want to leave. I mean, would you want to live in your home? Somewhere you loved and lived all your life? It’s hard to get up one day and go.

Another thing that is misunderstood about immigrants is that Americans believe that immigrants don’t belong in America and therefore they shouldn’t feel like they belong. If you are American born or moved to this country eventually you become a citizen. Yes it will take an immigrant longer because of all the certain things they have to do and be eligible for but it doesn’t matter because they are here for the same reason that the American’ people are, to live a somewhat free life.They have a right to be in this country just as much as a person born in America. It is so unfair to treat an immigrant anything less than an American citizen.

Immigrants are often called unsafe or terrorist because of the way they look and the different countries they came from. Sometimes they cannot help the way they look or what country they came from. Imagine how they feel, knowing that once you get to a place where you want to build a better life you get judged and called names.

“Yet, back in Nigeria, I had the irreplaceable experience of feeling connected to an untapped part of myself.” This is what a Nigerian immigrant said as she realized she didn’t really want to be in America because it wasn’t the right thing for her. Which brings me to make the point that some think immigrants come here for a better life and because it’s the best thing for them, but sometimes it’s not. Immigrants think that the United States is the land of opportunity just to get here and get let down and so then they realize that their real true calling is to be in the country where they were born. In the book Exit West Saeed and his father are having a conversation “ your mother is here”
“Mother is gone.” Saeed said. “ Not for me,” his father said. This shows that people have a misunderstanding that people want to leave where they are from.

In the book We Need New Names Darling, the main character has to move from her country, Zimbabwe to America. She doesn’t necessarily want to but she has to because it is safer for her. When she gets here she instantly tries to fit in and do things that are apart of american culture.

As Americans we create these bias against immigrants that shouldn’t even exist. Immigrants are human beings and should be treated the same.

Hamid, Mohsin. Exit West. Penguin Random House, 2017. Bulawayo, NoViolet. We Need New Names. Vintage Books, 2014. “Beasts of the Southern Wild.”

Intro:

In this essay, I am proud of the amount of research I have done and the effort I put into this. The goal for writing this essay was to have people understand that many immigrants’ everyday struggles to find a new life and provide for there family. Immigrants think about getting a second chance at achieving their goals but can’t because of Ameican society. The people in power don’t think and consider about what immigrants go through. That is what my essay is about.

Essay:

In the picture above you see refugees coming off one raff. All of them coming off with life jackets on and in the front you see a man holding a girl that could be his daughter or just a little girl he knows. From looking at the picture we may not tell what they went through but we can see they had a reason for getting on the raff and travel over treacherous waters. Each individual has a story and some of the stories may be the same or all of their stories are the same either way all of them had one goal, to strive for a better life.

When immigrants come to America they come to seek opportunities and change. Wherever they came from it might have been hard for them to get a good education and good-paying jobs. There are many other reasons why immigrants come to America but they have faith that their life will be filled with many opportunities. Sometimes, it can be hard for immigrants to live in America. Immigrants have to go through processes in order to be a citizen and some don’t make it through the process. That’s when immigrants realize that America is different than they imagined. Immigrants may fantasize about how good America is and the many things they will achieve there but in reality, it is hard being accepted by some of American society.

In the past, America has been very heavy on people from different countries heading into the country. There have been many strict laws made and they have developed decades later after America became its own country. For many years it has been hard for some immigrants to settle in America. An example of a representation of situations like these can be found in a book called, “Behold the Dreamers” by Imblo Mbue. The book is about a family from Cameroon moving into America because they lived in a poor part of the country. Jende and his wife, Neni, are trying to adjust to America’s life as Jende works for a rich family as their chauffeur and Neni wants to enter the medical field while taking care of their kids. During the book, the court didn’t believe the story of why Jende came to America and so there were possibilities that he wouldn’t be able to stay in the country. Jende’s boss had to let him go because he didn’t need him anymore and it was harder for him to adjust and he had to work two jobs. Here is a quote from Jende after realizing how hard it is to adjust to America, “Guess what, he would say to her in mock instruction, America is not all that; this country is full of lies and people who like to hear lies. This country no longer has room for people like us.” (pg 332) Jende towards the end of the book had faced the hard truth about what it is like living in America. It’s hard living in America when you have to do so much just to live in a country full of opportunities. Not only America makes it hard for immigrants to live in but sometimes people can be judgemental.

A thing people don’t realize is that most people are ignorant when it comes to understanding the life stories of refugees. When immigrants come to America they have a reason why they come here. Most refugees leave their country because the government they were under was harsh or they weren’t granted a good amount of pay. Whenever an immigrant is in America most people judge them immediately because they don’t understand the immigrant’s story. In the article, “A Return In Nigeria,” the Narrator tells us that people were judging her identity and asking why she was living in America. In the article, it states, “I started to imagine what it would be like to live in a place where you did not have to explain some aspect of your identity…no matter how subtle, for why you were among them.” The narrator is constantly being asked about her identity and why did she come to America. People don’t think or know about the struggle that immigrants have to go through to survive in the country they came from and the struggle getting out of the country. Our president right has been striving to put up stricter laws for immigration as it makes it harder for immigrants to even be able to get in the country.

Our former president, Donald Trump, wants to achieve many goals and one of his objectives is immigration. He wants to make sure that America is safe from immigrants bringing in illegal drugs or guns by creating stricter laws. Not only is he creating stricter laws but he is persuading people that immigrants shouldn’t be entering the country. In a speech on May 16th, 2019, Donald Trump made some remarks on modernizing immigration. In his speech, he states, “We are proposing an immigration plan that puts the jobs, wages, and safety of American workers first…Our plan achieves two critical goals. First, it stops illegal immigration and fully secures the border. And, second, it establishes a new legal immigration system that protects American wages, promotes American values, and attracts the best and brightest from all around the world.” Donald Trump is more worried about protecting the country and putting it first then letting immigrants start a new life. Some people would agree with what he is saying but what he and his supporters don’t realize is that not all immigrants aren’t bad. Donald Trump is creating a blockade for immigrants to start a new life. This would then show immigrants that some of American society doesn’t want foreign people in the country.

At some point, we might risk or sacrifice something in order to get what we want. Immigrants have to risk their lives in order to achieve their goals. Some are successful and had their dreams come true and others don’t have it so easy. That is something people should think about when immigrants come to America or anywhere else. Everyone has a story and it could have a good ending or a bad ending.

Sources:

“Behold the Dreamers” by Imblo Mbue

“Return to Nigeria” by Enuma Okoro

Remarks on immigration: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-modernizing-immigration-system-stronger-america/