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/.