On Thursday February 13th, I attended an event titled “Immigrantion Story” at 5:30pm in Lazenby Hall. This event featured about 7 speakers who shared their experiences as an immigrant or as a child of immigrants. Overarching themes included the effects of discrimination, identity, the diffulty of being the only person in your family who is fluent in English, the principal barriers immigrant students face, and how citizenship impacts their lives. The speakers came from all over the world including: Yemen, Somalia, Kuwait, Sudan, India, and El Salvador.
Discrimination impacted each speaker in an unique way. One woman was told “all Muslims are terrorists” as she promoted a Peace and Justice march at her high school. Another was told to go back to her country. Other speakers faced scrutiny for their cultural practices. All of the speakers felt unwelcome in America at some point, but ultimately found a place where they were accepted like a student organization or another type of community.
Finding a place that felt like home was a common difficulty. They were always too foreign or too American. Some of them mentioned how they were not even sure where home should be. One story I found particularly interesting was about a man who grew up in Kuwait. His parents were from Southern India and moved to Kuwait for business. He then grew up in international schools before becoming a student at Ohio State University. He talked about the difficulty of growing up in a place where he did not speak the language. In Kuwait most people spoke Arabic, in his community Hindi was the dominant language, and when he visited India he visited a state that did not speak his native tongue. This impacted how he moved in the world as he was always conscious of his accent. He advised that the audience always make the extra effort to speak with and befriend those with thick accents.
Another man who grew up in many different places including Kenya, Somalia, and Djibouti spoke about the difficulties he faces as an international student. He said there were three barriers that have the biggest impact on students like him, these include: increased mental health risk, adjusting time management skills, and adapting to the culture. He talked about his desire for better resources on campus to help international students cope with these difficulties. Specifically, he mentioned the need for a gateway STEM education course that could help immigrants who did not have access to those classes in high-school. He personally struggles with this and hopes the same situation can be remedied for future students.
Status within the immigration system also had a big impact on the lives of the speakers. Being a citizen made them stand out when their family members or community members did not share that status. They had more freedoms and were able to operate in America with more ease and with less worry than green card holders or irregular migrants. Citizenship status made some feel ostracized in their communities, because they were seen as the privileged ones.
Much of the content in this event ties in with themes we have studied in my course, Politics of Immigrantion. For example: we looked at the International Asylum Regime and the issues that plague it. The speakers in this event detailed how the failing of the Institutionalized Asylum Regime has affected them personally. Some shared that they felt the burden of leaving family behind and supporting them from abroad, they had close relationships with those who were forced to partake in irregular migration, and they were overwhelmed by the fear felt in the immigrant community.
During this event I learned how we can avoid adding onto the burden immigrants feel as a result of the International Asylum Regime. We should not ask about their status, but we should make an effort to reach out when we see someone struggling. It is important to be respectful and take the time to listen and understand their stories, because we should not assume we know the right way to help. Overall, I think this was a well done event in which I learned a lot.