This poster hangs in the front lobby of my school. I smile every morning when I walk by it because it serves as a reminder that no matter who you are or where you are from, you are welcome in our school community.
I often wonder what students think when they view this poster. I hope that when a new student from another county enters the school they can find “welcome” in their language and know they are seen and will be accepted for who they are.
When reading the articles for this module, I started thinking about my own identity as an immigrant, more specifically an Asian immigrant.
My parents immigrated to New York City when I was 6 years old, but they had their own reason. As Kelly (2009) puts it, “It is important to avoid any inclination to collapse or homogenize all migrations and instead to note the specificity of context” (Kelly, 2009, p.31). My parents believed that raising me in the United States would offer better opportunities for my educational and professional future. They gave up their jobs and said goodbye all our family members to pursue a life in Brooklyn. Even though they both held college degrees, they returned to school in a community college to learn English. Due to language barriers, my parents could not find jobs that matched their years of skill and experience. My dad transformed from a manager in a medicine company to an assistant who cleaned medical equipment, and my mom went from a middle school teacher to a paraprofessional. They chased the “American dream”, but we did not experience much upward social mobility. We had to move back to China during the financial crisis of 2008 because of financial troubles.
I chose this article because it addresses a lot of the issues that I have thought about, both in general and through reading the articles in this module. Asian Americans are associated with the “model minority” term, and stereotyped to be hard and intelligent workers. On the surface, this may seem like a positive term, but the stereotype also includes quietly working without protest, or serving non-leadership jobs. Furthermore, this gives a false sense of success. Experiences are diverse across any racial group, and this over-generalization seems to single out one group. Just as the article mentions, there is still a high-income gap among Asian Americans. I agree with the article that not only does the myth mislead people, it also compares and pits different minority groups against each other. The myth views Asians in technical roles, and not as outspoken representatives in business or politics. Just like how English language learning does not necessarily lead to success (Warriner, 2007) discrimination simply cannot be avoided just by working hard and increasing income as the model minority myth suggests.
Works Cited:
Kelly, U. (2009). Migration and education in a multicultural world: Culture, loss, and identity. Springer.
Warriner, D. S. (2007). Language learning and the politics of belonging: Sudanese women refugees becoming and being “American”. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 38(4), 343-359.
This is an article from September 2021 discussing the arrival of about 1,169 Afghan refugees into my home state of North Carolina. When I began searching for media to include in this assignment I was overwhelmed by how unaware and disconnected I am about current issues of migration and globalization. This article piqued my interest because it concerns the state in which I live and connects to the recent US withdrawal from Afghanistan. After the withdrawal and subsequent Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, the subject has not been as prevalent on cable news programs or national newspapers.
In this article by Will Wright of The Charlotte Observer, some lines that stood out to me are, “in 2015, then-Gov. Pat McCrory, who is now running for U.S. Senate, was one of about two dozen governors who asked the federal government to halt the settlement of Syrians to their states. Saying at the time that his ‘primary duty as governor is to keep the citizens of North Carolina safe,’ McCrory said he wanted to halt the flow of Syrian refugees until he was satisfied with the vetting process. Although the request was condemned by human rights advocates, other North Carolina politicians, including U.S. Sen. Richard Burr, also called for halting the refugee program for Syrians.”
I am thinking about those kinds of statements regarding safety, which plant seeds of fear and separation in the hearts of listeners and readers. Why is their an assumption that welcoming refugees threatens our safety?
This is a picture of my Nana. She and my grandfather passed away in 2020 at the start of the pandemic. I chose this picture because Nana immigrated to the USA from Kinvarra, Galway Ireland. She wasn’t able to have children, so she adopted my dad. Before she died she kept asking to travel home to Kinvarra. My maternal grandfather also immigrated to the USA from Ballindoon, Sligo, Ireland. He’s not well right now, so family is very much on my mind. My grandfather now spends about half the year in Sligo on the family arbor farm. Unfortunately the pandemic has kept him in the States.
I cannot imagine the journey they went though. Lately my grandfather has been writing short stories about his childhood before emigrating. My mom loves it now because she is a genealogist. Although, my father and mother described being embarrassed by their parent’s accents or not normal habits as children. I can imagine it was very hard for them to be transplanted into a new culture. My grandfather’s siblings moved with him, but my grandmother’s sister stayed in Ireland. Also, as an older woman, I think my Nana probably had the hardest time adjusting and experienced the most pressure to blend in. Even today, its hard for me to imagine the challenging immigrant experience as I’ve only spent significant time in the USA. When I’m across the pond, I’m seen as the American. When my grandparents are here, they’re still seen as Irish after all this time.
This was an image that I came across when designing a week long unit on immigration to the US. When I look at this image, it makes me think about the difficult journeys many immigrants take to get to where they are going and just how much they have to leave behind, both physically but also in terms of identity. In this image, the people are continuing to walk on and into the American flag, and I think this does a nice job symbolizing how the journey for immigrants does not stop once they reach their destination but rather it is just the beginning, and often not an easy one. The image also makes me think about immigrant children and how their experiences may differ from those of their parents. I have worked with students of varying immigrant statuses, and it is always interesting to hear them share about the commonalties and differences in terms of how they relate to both each other’s stories/experiences but also the stories/experiences of their parents. Some students have shared that they no longer feel a want to go back to their country while others miss it greatly. Some students have shared they feel torn between both places and cultures, and some have shared that their parents hold one set of expectations for their child while the child is trying to navigate and discover who they are on their own. Immigration is a very complex and important topic, and I am looking forward to how this course will expand my knowledge about it.
When I think about immigration, one of the first images that pops into my mind is Ellis Island in New York City. I grew up on stories of my grandparents traveling from Italy and arriving in the United States at Ellis Island (one of my favorites being how my grandfather corrected the spelling of our last name on his documentation from “Marinelli” to “Marinilli”). While immigrants may not be entering the US through Ellis Island anymore, it resembles the idea that people will migrate and ultimately find themselves in a host country that could become their next home. However, what happens to these people upon entering the United States has a much fuzzier image to it: how will children get an education? How will people make money? Find a home? Learn a new language? Adapt? Conform?
I have been researching trauma and the effect of Adverse Childhood Experiences play on children’s physical and mental health for many years. However, I have always considered that the ACE screening was not inclusive enough to screen people who are refugees, asylum seekers, or undocumented immigrants. I have long believed that the ACEs framework screening should include screening questions including if a person had to flee their home country to seek safety, if one or more persons in a family had been deported, if the person suffered forced family separation as a child, if one had been forced into a detention center when seeking safety.
In this article, the team of authors shows that Latinx children with varying degrees of immigration statuses, whether US-citizen born to immigrant parents, permanent resident, temporary resident, or undocumented face a higher level of macro-level trauma. The article details different aspects of trauma for Latinx immigrants and the effect this trauma has on children.
While this study is specific to many specifics of the Latinx experience, I believe that parts of the study could apply to Middle Eastern, African, or Asian immigrants as well.