Immigrants In America

Excerpt From Migration Essay:

When I asked my father how he overcame his challenge of adapting to his environment he replied, “It just clicked. One day I woke up and had the confidence and felt that this is my new home so I gotta make myself feel at home. I accepted the fact that I had to let the past go and focus on the present in order to make a better future for me and my future children.” Ever since then, my father slowly started making connections, building bonds, and networking with other people. He started to get the hang of how things worked and he learned how to speak English. At first, it was challenging for him but he kept pushing himself to step out of his comfort zone and meet new people. “I tried to meet a new person everyday. Connections was everything in this country. You never knew who you were talking to. You could be missing out on a lot of opportunities that you never knew existed simply because you didn’t push yourself to meet other people. When my father was asked about if  he had the ability to go back and change anything he responded, “There was nothing I could have changed. It was not in my hand to control whether or not the Britains were going to come and try to conquer our land. For every cause there is an effect and luckily for me, my bad situation turned into a good situation and opened up many opportunities. Have the Britains not came and tried to conquer Yemen, we would have been still living in that small village but now we live in a big house, we have access to education, a stable job, and a brighter future. I could still have been working all day on the farm under the blazing hot sun in order to provide food for my siblings and my mother” My father was such an optimistic person. He always looked into the bright side of situations rather than complaining about the negative. He claimed, ”Complaining and whining will not get you anywhere in life. You are simply wasting your time and energy by doing so, however you must ask yourself, how can I make the best out of my situation or how can I improve my current situation.” Immigration taught my father a lot about the real world and enlightened him with many new lessons. By experiencing the hardships of being forced out of your home, my father learned how to adapt to new environments, meet new people, and step out of his comfort zone. Although in the beginning he stated that he would have rather been living back in Yemen, he can still visit anytime he wants and he built a better future for his children in America because America has much more opportunities such as jobs, education, shelter, and resources. Immigration is not always a bad thing. Sometimes it is an opportunity for you to step out and experience new things that you have never tried before.

Excerpt From Essay 2: Why Immigrant Stories Must Be Shared!

There are many reasons why the media is getting in the way of immigration stories being told and it is causing many challenges and problems to arise. First of all, the social perception of immigration is negative because immigrants are seen and portrayed as villains that steal jobs and commit crimes which were stated in the previous paragraph. In a scholarly article about immigration in the media, the author states, “there exists the perception that people with irregular legal situations are problematic” (Ruiz). Second of all, the media neglects to share immigration stories because they want to avoid stigmatization. Gara, a researcher who interviewed hundreds of news reporters and owners of many huge media outlets claims, “it is a part of their agenda to try to make some kind of support away, and this, again, in a framework of creating fear or insecurity” (Ruiz). As stated by Gara, media sources tend to push their agenda of criminalizing immigrants in order to instill fear in people and validate the government's ban on immigrants. This is all a part of politics in order for them to justify their unjust, racist laws and one of the most effective ways that they do this is through the media and the news. These are just a small portion of the challenges that arise when immigration stories are not told and people get their information strictly from the media.

Call To Action:

The sacrifices and hardships immigrants go through in order to come to America seeking a better life and opportunities for them and their children should be valued, appreciated, and rewarded. Leaving their families and home, coming to America not knowing how to communicate in English, working a minimum wage job, and having to adapt to the environment and culture in order to provide a brighter future for their kids, the government should give immigrants a chance to live the ‘American Dream’. This country was built from the hard work and sweat of immigrants yet they are not given equal opportunities, treated like animals, and are seen as a lower status. They are accused of being ‘criminals’, ‘terrorists’, and ‘stealing jobs’. Life for an immigrant in America is much harder than anyone else. They are less likely to be hired to jobs and if they are hired, they are paid less making it extremely difficult for them to provide for their families and having to work multiple jobs. 

As Americans, we need to do better in general. The government must provide aid and support for these hard working immigrants who immigrated from their countries in order to live the ‘American Dream’. As a community, we must support immigrants because they are the reason why we are living in America with better opportunities, peace, education, and freedom; freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of choice. We must all work together in order to provide immigrants with the support they need in order to live the life that they came to America for.