Essay #2: The Misunderstandings

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.