immigrant struggles essay

The Struggles Of A First Generation Immigrant

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By Nabanita De, founder of Nabanita De Foundation , helping caregivers to return to the workforce after a career gap through free course , forum , community , podcast and book .

This week, Leena Nair was named the new Chanel’s CEO, a major luxury fashion brand with over $10 Billion Revenue. Last week, Parag Agarwal was named the CEO of Twitter, with the Company revenue of $3.72 Billion. What do they have in common? They are both Indian born immigrants, dominating their respective industries with exceptional leadership and impact. According to Fwd.us, 45% of Fortune 500 companies are founded by immigrants. A Nabanita De Foundation research list states some of the world’s biggest companies and their current/former Immigrant CEOs , employing over 13.5 million people, with trillions of dollars in combined annual revenue:

• Sundar Pichai , Google , Company revenue $182.5 billion, No. of Employees - 150,028
• Satya Nadella , Microsoft , Company Revenue $168 Billion, No. of employees - 182,268
• Elon Musk , Tesla , SpaceX, Paypal, Neuralink ; Tesla Company Revenue $31.54 Billion, No. of employees 70,757
• Arvind Krishna , IBM , Company Revenue $73.62 Billion, Number of employees 350,000
• Indra Nooyi , Pepsico , Company Revenue $67.16 Billion, Number of Employees 291,000
• Anshu Jain , Deutsche Bank , Company Revenue $28.76 Billion, Number of Employees 78,000
• Safra Catz , Oracle , Company Revenue $11.2 Billion, No. of Employees 132,000
• Jerry Yang , Yahoo , Company Revenue $5.17 Billion, No. of Employees 8600
• Dara Khosrowshahi , Uber , Company Revenue $11.1 Billion, No. of Employees 26,900
• Francisco D’Sourza , Cognizant Tech , Company Revenue $16.8 Billion, No. of Employees 289,500
• Nikesh Arora , Palo Alto Networks , Company Revenue $4.26 Billion, No. of Employees 10,000+
• Rajeev Suri , Nokia , 23.33 Billion Eur, No. of Employees 92,039
• Sanjay Mehrota , Micron Technology , Company Revenue $21.44 billion, No. of employees - 40,000
• Ajaypal Singh Banga , MasterCard , Company Revenue : $22.08 Billion, No. of Employees - 21,000
• Shantanu Narayan , Adobe , Company Revenue : $11.17  billion, No. of Employees - 24,000
• Dinesh Paliwal , Harman International Industries , Company Revenue : $8.8 Billion, No. of Employees : 30,000
• Vivek Sankaran , Albertsons Companies , Company Revenue $62.5 Billion, No. of Employees : 270,000

A 2012 White House report states that immigrants are 30 percent more likely to start a business in the US than non-immigrants & form 18 percent of all US small business owners.  Immigrants added $2 trillion to the US. GDP in 2016 & about $460 billion to state, local and federal taxes in 2018.

According to a government survey , one-in-seven of the total US population is foreign born (46 million people) and one-in-six workers in the United States are foreign born (28 million workers). The potential of this demographic, with the right opportunities, is impeccable. As part of Nabanita De Foundation , we want to amplify their voices and generate awareness on behind-the-scenes challenges and pressure faced with this demographic, to survive & facilitate them with opportunities and education to be financially independent. 

Here are some of the struggles we captured from our fellow immigrant communities: 

1. Carving your own path without any guidance: Being the first generation immigrant and women in tech from my small community, I often struggled on identifying and characterizing my authentic identity. The lack of guidance to define unique milestones, goal set and lack of relatable micro-community role models in personal life, has been the most challenging part. Being the flag bearer and representative of a community, no-one really prepares you for the added unsaid responsibility to not only accurately represent the voices of your community but also put your community on a global map & pave way for your future generations, as often your actions could make or break the entire future of your entire community. When you become the first to achieve the most basic milestones through being your own knight in shining armor and a role model for your community, you become the source of inspiration for so many people. It often comes with the added pressure to keep your life together at all points since you become the indicator/possibility of “making it through”. Carving out your authentic path, battles community based traumas, while staying true to inculcated cultures of your community in a new country is entirely another journey to traverse on its own. Thus it often becomes difficult, explaining your own decisions, influenced by backgrounds, culture and thought processes, passed on by generations, to the peers around you.

2. Supporting everyone back home: A lot of immigrants come to the US, with dreams of changing the trajectory of their families and are the result of several years of collective hard work of their respective families and community to send a representative as their biggest leap and ticket out of Poverty. As the Christopher Columbus of your community, you become the guide for your community back home, wearing multiple hats. Breaking generational traumas, supporting family financially, reparenting/reverse-parenting your family/community with healthy practices and changing the course of your community for the better, often becomes a part of daily occurrences and takes enormous amounts of mental effort. According to a NY Times article , “even when immigrants lost jobs, they sent money home. Remittances are also a vital source of hard currency for developing countries, often dwarfing foreign direct investment and foreign aid. Last year, the transfers accounted for 20 percent of the gross domestic product of El Salvador and Honduras.”

No one talks about the sudden realizations and grieving process of what it could have been, if things were handed in a platter, without constantly having to work for every simple small achievement. The invisible burden to take part and get on through the current rat race in the immigrated country, while being a changemaker of your home country community, is no longer running the same race, as it isn't the same starting point and cannot be quantified in any way or form. For example, If you are supporting several dependents in another country, they don't count towards tax benefits or health/life insurance.

3. The feeling of not truly belonging anywhere:  In 2020, several Asian and Black communities, were verbally/physically abused in public, discriminated against their skin color, asked to “go back to their country” and their identity was diminished to a “virus”, despite building a life in their immigrated countries with hard-work. According to Americanprogress.org report , policy to remove all undocumented immigrant workers from workforce would reduce the nation’s GDP by 2.6 percent and reduce cumulative GDP over 10 years by $4.7 trillion. No matter how easy immigrants make it look, it's always considered the immigrant’s responsibility to adapt to people’s different upbringing, contradicting school of thoughts and navigate “Culture shocks” with grace, often making them feel alone in the crowd. According to Teen Vogue , “Immigrant youth are more likely to be bullied than US Born. An UN paper on Violence against Children recognizes refugees and children, “Who are indigenous or belong to ethnic, racial, linguistic, cultural or religious minorities, as groups at higher risk for bullying, pointing that it may include bullying that target another’s immigrant status or family history of immigration in the form of taunts and slurs, derogatory references to the immigration process, physical aggression, social manipulation or exclusion because of immigration status.”

While the immigrants' adaptability makes them the citizens of the world, the requirement to fit into a new country’s culture, language, mindsets and way of living, the changed parts, no longer completely fits with their home country either. 

4. The silent uphill battles: A Linkedin User , manager at a top Fortune 500 company, blogged that due to Pandemic, border closures and lack of H1b stamping slots in US itself, immigrants on work visas, on verge of renewal or job change, got locked out from traveling overseas, as leaving the country would prevent them from re-entering the country without a stamp and return to their job. He further states this also “prevented him from getting to his dying parents during Covid Pandemic”.  According to another Linkedin post , When the borders opened, the situation did not improve and more than 50,000 Indian H1b holders are not able to find appointments to get their visa renewed, with wait times more than 2 years and hence have continued to be stuck and unable to reunite with their families. In a dire unexpected situation like the Pandemic, enacting exceptions like Visa stamping in US itself, can help circumvent this problem. 

According to the quint, “The current estimated wait time for an Indian national entering the green card backlog to get permanent residency in the US is 195 years – a number that is expected to reach 436 years in the fiscal year 2030.” Losing a job on H1b while waiting for the green card to arrive, could lead folks to be deported at any point, back to their country if it exceeds 2 months of career gap. The uncertainty that at any moment the life you have worked for can be uprooted and taken away can become a lot to live with. 

5. The constant self-doubt and survivor guilt: According to Ined , in 2017, 64% of international migrants (58% in 2000), or 165 million persons, were living in a developed country. According to a Harvard study , imposter syndrome is significantly higher among ethnic minorities. Escaping the grim realities by coming to a country with land full of opportunities, can often lead to feeling the survivor’s guilt, wondering if you truly deserve the recognition you have worked hard for, knowing the community back home is still suffering through social-economic oppression or under the poverty line.

If you related to any of these first generation immigrant struggles or want to share your struggles, share this article and your thoughts with #immigrantstruggles on social media. Are you navigating the job market as an immigrant? Checkout Nabanita De Foundation’s free resources with presence in 93 countries, to help you land that six figure salary and further support your family. Find mentors/Life coaches/therapists and help a first generation caregiver restart their life & return to work after a career gap, through our free course , forum , podcast , cohort and members site . Connect with the author and founder on her webpage , Linkedin , Twitter and Instagram .

This is a content marketing post from a Forbes EQ participant. Forbes brand contributors’ opinions are their own.

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Immigrants — Immigrants Coming To America: Challenges and Opportunities

Immigrants Coming to America: Challenges and Opportunities

• Categories: Immigrants

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Published: Mar 8, 2024

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Challenges faced by immigrants, opportunities available to immigrants.

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Waking Up from the American Dream

By Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

If you are an undocumented person anywhere in America, some of the things you do to make a dignified life for yourself and your loved ones are illegal. Others require a special set of skills. The elders know some great tricks—crossing deserts in the dead of night, studying the Rio Grande for weeks to find the shallowest bend of river to cross, getting a job on their first day in the country, finding apartments that don’t need a lease, learning English at public libraries, community colleges, or from “Frasier.” I would not have been able to do a single thing that the elders have done. But the elders often have only one hope for survival, which we tend not to mention. I’m talking about children. And no, it’s not an “anchor baby” thing. Our parents have kids for the same reasons as most people, but their sacrifice for us is impossible to articulate, and its weight is felt deep down, in the body. That is the pact between immigrants and their children in America: they give us a better life, and we spend the rest of that life figuring out how much of our flesh will pay off the debt.

I am a first-generation immigrant, undocumented for most of my life, then on DACA , now a permanent resident. But my real identity, the one that follows me around like a migraine, is that I am the daughter of immigrants. As such, I have some skills of my own.

You pick them up young. Something we always hear about, because Americans love this shit, is that immigrant children often translate for their parents. I began doing this as a little girl, because I lost my accent, dumb luck, and because I was adorable in the way that adults like, which is to say I had large, frightened eyes and a flamboyant vocabulary. As soon as doctors or teachers began talking, I felt my parents’ nervous energy, and I’d either answer for them or interpret their response. It was like my little Model U.N. job. I was around seven. My career as a professional daughter of immigrants had begun.

In my teens, I began to specialize. I became a performance artist. I accompanied my parents to places where I knew they would be discriminated against, and where I could insure that their rights would be granted. If a bank teller wasn’t accepting their I.D., I’d stroll in with an oversized Forever 21 blazer, red lipstick, a slicked-back bun, and fresh Stan Smiths. I brought a pleather folder and made sure my handshake broke bones. Sometimes I appealed to decency, sometimes to law, sometimes to God. Sometimes I leaned back in my chair, like a sexy gangster, and said, “So, you tell me how you want my mom to survive in this country without a bank account. You close at four, but I have all the time in the world.” Then I’d wink. It was vaudeville, but it worked.

My parents came to America in their early twenties, naïve about what awaited them. Back in Ecuador, they had encountered images of a wealthy nation—the requisite flashes of Clint Eastwood and the New York City skyline—and heard stories about migrants who had done O.K. for themselves there. But my parents were not starry-eyed people. They were just kids, lost and reckless, running away from the dead ends around them.

My father is the only son of a callous mother and an absent father. My mother, the result of her mother’s rape, grew up cared for by an aunt and uncle. When she married my father, it was for the reasons a lot of women marry: for love, and to escape. The day I was born, she once told me, was the happiest day of her life.

Soon after that, my parents, owners of a small auto-body business, found themselves in debt. When I was eighteen months old, they left me with family and settled in Brooklyn, hoping to work for a year and move back once they’d saved up some money. I haven’t asked them much about this time—I’ve never felt the urge—but I know that one year became three. I also know that they began to be lured by the prospect of better opportunities for their daughter. Teachers had remarked that I was talented. My mother, especially, felt that Ecuador was not the place for me. She knew how the country would limit the woman she imagined I would become—Hillary Clinton, perhaps, or Princess Di.

My parents sent loving letters to Ecuador. They said that they were facing a range of hardships so that I could have a better life. They said that we would reunite soon, though the date was unspecified. They said that I had to behave, not walk into traffic—I seem to have developed a habit of doing this—and work hard, so they could send me little gifts and chocolates. I was a toddler, but I understood. My parents left to give me things, and I had to do other things in order to repay them. It was simple math.

They sent for me when I was just shy of five years old. I arrived at J.F.K. airport. My father, who seemed like a total stranger, ran to me and picked me up and kissed me, and my mother looked on and wept. I recall thinking she was pretty, and being embarrassed by the attention. They had brought roses, Teddy bears, and Tweety Bird balloons.

Getting to know one another was easy enough. My father liked to read and lecture, and had a bad temper. My mother was soft-spoken around him but funny and mean—like a drag queen—with me. She liked Vogue . I was enrolled in a Catholic school and quickly learned English—through immersion, but also through “Reading Rainbow” and a Franklin talking dictionary that my father bought me. It gave me a colorful vocabulary and weirdly over-enunciated diction. If I typed the right terms, it even gave me erotica.

Meanwhile, I had confirmed that my parents were not tony expats. At home, meals could be rice and a fried egg. We sometimes hid from our landlord by crouching next to my bed and drawing the blinds. My father had started out driving a cab, but after 9/11, when the governor revoked the driver’s licenses of undocumented immigrants, he began working as a deliveryman, carrying meals to Wall Street executives, the plastic bags slicing into his fingers. Some of those executives forced him to ride on freight elevators. Others tipped him in spare change.

My mother worked in a factory. For seven days a week, sometimes in twelve-hour shifts, she sewed in a heat that caught in your throat like lint, while her bosses, also immigrants, hurled racist slurs at her. Some days I sat on the factory floor, making dolls with swatches of fabric, cosplaying childhood. I didn’t put a lot of effort into making the dolls—I sort of just screwed around, with an eye on my mom at her sewing station, stiffening whenever her supervisor came by to see how fast she was working. What could I do to protect her? Well, murder, I guess.

Our problem appeared to be poverty, which even then, before I’d seen “Rent,” seemed glamorous, or at least normal. All the protagonists in the books I read were poor. Ramona Quimby on Klickitat Street, the kids in “Five Little Peppers and How They Grew.” Every fictional child was hungry, an orphan, or tubercular. But there was something else setting us apart. At school, I looked at my nonwhite classmates and wondered how their parents could be nurses, or own houses, or leave the country on vacation. It was none of my business—everyone in New York had secrets—but I cautiously gathered intel, toothpick in mouth. I finally cracked the case when I tried to apply to an essay contest and asked my parents for my Social Security number. My father was probably reading a newspaper, and I doubt he even looked up to say, “We don’t have papers, so we don’t have a Social.”

It was not traumatic. I turned on our computer, waited for the dial-up, and searched what it meant not to have a Social Security number. “Undocumented immigrant” had not yet entered the discourse. Back then, the politically correct term, the term I saw online, was “illegal immigrant,” which grated—it was hurtful in a clinical way, like having your teeth drilled. Various angry comments sections offered another option: illegal alien . I knew it was form language, legalese meant to wound me, but it didn’t. It was punk as hell. We were hated , and maybe not entirely of this world. I had just discovered Kurt Cobain.

Obviously, I learned that my parents and I could be deported at any time. Was that scary? Sure. But a deportation still seemed like spy-movie stuff. And, luckily, I had an ally. My brother was born when I was ten years old. He was our family’s first citizen, and he was named after a captain of the New York Yankees. Before he was old enough to appreciate art, I took him to the Met. I introduced him to “S.N.L.” and “Letterman” and “Fun Home” and “Persepolis”—all the things I felt an upper-middle-class parent would do—so that he could thrive at school, get a great job, and make money. We would need to armor our parents with our success.

We moved to Queens, and I entered high school. One day, my dad heard about a new bill in Congress on Spanish radio. It was called the DREAM Act, and it proposed a path to legalization for undocumented kids who had gone to school here or served in the military. My dad guaranteed that it’d pass by the time I graduated. I never react to good news—stoicism is part of the brand—but I was optimistic. The bill was bipartisan. John McCain supported it, and I knew he had been a P.O.W., and that made me feel connected to a real American hero. Each time I saw an “R” next to a sponsor’s name my heart fluttered with joy. People who were supposed to hate me had now decided to love me.

But the bill was rejected and reintroduced, again and again, for years. It never passed. And, in a distinctly American twist, its gauzy rhetoric was all that survived. Now there was a new term on the block: “Dreamers.” Politicians began to use it to refer to the “good” children of immigrants, the ones who did well in school and stayed off the mean streets—the innocents. There are about a million undocumented children in America. The non-innocents, one presumes, are the ones in cages, covered in foil blankets, or lost, disappeared by the government.

I never called myself a Dreamer. The word was saccharine and dumb, and it yoked basic human rights to getting an A on a report card. Dreamers couldn’t flunk out of high school, or have D.U.I.s, or work at McDonald’s. Those kids lived with the pressure of needing a literal miracle in order to save their families, but the miracle didn’t happen, because the odds were against them, because the odds were against all of us. And so America decided that they didn’t deserve an I.D.

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The Dream, it turned out, needed to demonize others in order to help the chosen few. Our parents, too, would be sacrificed. The price of our innocence was the guilt of our loved ones. Jeff Sessions, while he was Attorney General, suggested that we had been trafficked against our will. People actually pitied me because my parents brought me to America. Without even consulting me.

The irony, of course, is that the Dream was our inheritance. We were Dreamers because our parents had dreams.

It’s painful to think about this. My mother, an aspiring interior designer, has gone twenty-eight years without a sick day. My dad, who loves problem-solving, has spent his life wanting a restaurant. He’s a talented cook and a brilliant manager, and he often did the work of his actual managers for them. But, without papers, he could advance only so far in a job. He needed to be paid in cash; he could never receive benefits.

He often used a soccer metaphor to describe our journey in America. Our family was a team, but I scored the goals. Everything my family did was, in some sense, a pass to me. Then the American Dream could be mine, and then we could start passing to my brother. That’s how my dad explained his limp every night, his feet blistered from speed-running deliveries. It’s why we sometimes didn’t have money for electricity or shampoo. Those were fouls. Sometimes my parents did tricky things to survive that you’ll never know about. Those were nutmegs. In 2015, when the U.S. women’s team won the World Cup, my dad went to the parade and sent me a selfie. “Girl power!” the text read.

My father is a passionate, diatribe-loving feminist, though his feminism often seems to exclude my mother. When I was in elementary school, he would take me to the local branch of the Queens Public Library and check out the memoir of Rosalía Arteaga Serrano, the only female President in Ecuador’s history. Serrano was ousted from office, seemingly because she was a woman. My father would read aloud from the book for hours, pausing to tell me that I’d need to toughen up. He would read from dictators’ speeches—not for the politics, but for the power of persuasive oratory. We went to the library nearly every weekend for thirteen years.

My mother left her factory job to give me, the anointed one, full-time academic support. She pulled all-nighters to help me make extravagant posters. She grilled me with vocabulary flash cards, struggling to pronounce the words but laughing and slapping me with pillows if I got something wrong. I aced the language portions of my PSATs and SATs, partly because of luck, and partly because of my parents’ locally controversial refusal to let me do household chores, ever, because they wanted me to be reading, always reading, instead.

If this all seems strategic, it should. The American Dream doesn’t just happen to cheery Pollyannas. It happens to iconoclasts with a plan and a certain amount of cunning. The first time I encountered the idea of the Dream, it was in English class, discussing “The Great Gatsby.” My classmates all thought that Gatsby seemed sort of sad, a pathetic figure. I adored him. He created his own persona, made a fortune in an informal economy, and lived a quiet, paranoid, reclusive life. Most of all, he longed. He stood at the edge of Long Island Sound, longing for Daisy, and I took the train uptown to Columbia University and looked out at the campus, hoping it could one day be mine. At the time, it was functionally impossible for undocumented students to enroll at Columbia. The same held for many schools. Keep dreaming, my parents said.

I did. I was valedictorian of my class, miraculously got into Harvard, and was tapped to join a secret society that once included T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens. I was the only Latina inducted, I think, and I was very chill when an English-Spanish dictionary appeared in our club bathroom after I started going to teas. When I graduated, in 2011, our country was deporting people at record rates. I knew that I needed to add even more of a golden flicker to my illegality, so that if I was deported, or if my parents were deported, we would not go in the middle of the night, in silence, anonymously, as Americans next door watched another episode of “The Bachelor.” So I began writing, with the explicit aim of entering the canon. I wrote a book about undocumented immigrants, approaching them not as shadowy victims or gilded heroes but as people, flawed and complex. It was reviewed well, nominated for things. A President commended it.

But it’s hard to feel anything. My parents remain poor and undocumented. I cannot protect them with prizes or grades. My father sobbed when I handed him my diploma, but it was not the piece of paper that would make it all better, no matter how heavy the stock.

By the time I was in grad school, my parents’ thirty-year marriage was over. They had spent most of those years in America, with their heads down and their bodies broken; it was hard not to see the split as inevitable. My mom called me to say she’d had enough. My brother supported her decision. I talked to each parent, and helped them mutually agree on a date. On a Tuesday night, my father moved out, leaving his old parenting books behind, while my mom and brother were at church. I asked my father to text my brother that he loved him. I think he texted him exactly that. Then I collapsed onto the floor beneath an open drawer of knives, texted my partner to come help me, and convulsed in sobs.

After that, my mom became depressed. I did hours of research and found her a highly qualified, trauma-informed psychiatrist, a Spanish speaker who charged on a sliding scale I could afford. My mom got on Lexapro, which helped. She also started a job that makes her very happy. In order to find her that job, I took a Klonopin and browsed Craigslist for hours each day, e-mailing dozens of people, being vague about legal status in a clever but truthful way. I impersonated her in phone interviews, hanging off my couch, the blood rushing to my head, struggling not to do an offensive accent.

You know how, when you get a migraine, you regret how stupid you were for taking those sweet, painless days for granted? Although my days are hard, I understand that I’m living in an era of painlessness, and that a time will come when I look back and wonder why I was such a stupid, whining fool. My mom’s job involves hard manual labor, sometimes in the snow or the rain. I got her a real winter coat, her first, from Eddie Bauer. I got her a pair of Hunter boots. These were things she needed, things I had seen on women her age on the subway, their hands bearing bags from Whole Foods. My mom’s hands are arthritic. She sends me pictures of them covered in bandages.

My brother and I now have a pact: neither of us can die, because then the other would be stuck with our parents. My brother is twenty-two, still in college, and living with my mom. He, too, has some skills. He is gentle, kind, and excellent at deëscalating conflict. He mediated my parents’ arguments for years. He has also never tried to change them, which I have, through a regimen of therapy, books, and cheesy Instagram quotes. So we’ve decided that, in the long term, since his goal is to get a job, get married, have kids, and stay in Queens, he’ll invite Mom to move in with him, to help take care of the grandkids. He’ll handle the emotional labor, since it doesn’t traumatize him. And I’ll handle the financial support, since it doesn’t traumatize me.

I love my parents. I know I love them. But what I feel for them daily is a mixture of terror, panic, obligation, sorrow, anger, pity, and a shame so hot that I need to lie face down, in my underwear, on very cold sheets. Many Americans have vulnerable parents, and strive to succeed in order to save them. I hold those people in the highest regard. But the undocumented face a unique burden, due to scorn and a lack of support from the government. Because our parents made a choice—the choice to migrate—few people pity them, or wonder whether restitution should be made for decades of exploitation. That choice, the original sin, is why our parents were thrown out of paradise. They were tempted by curiosity and hunger, by fleshly desires.

And so we return to the debt. However my parents suffer in their final years will be related to their migration—to their toil in this country, to their lack of health care and housing support, to psychic fatigue. They were able, because of that sacrifice, to give me their version of the Dream: an education, a New York accent, a life that can better itself. But that life does not fully belong to me. My version of the American Dream is seeing them age with dignity, being able to help them retire, and keeping them from being pushed onto train tracks in a random hate crime. For us, gratitude and guilt feel almost identical. Love is difficult to separate from self-erasure. All we can give one another is ourselves.

Scholars often write about the harm that’s done when children become caretakers, but they’re reluctant to do so when it comes to immigrants. For us, they say, this situation is cultural . Because we grow up in tight-knit families. Because we respect our elders. In fact, it’s just the means of living that’s available to us. It’s a survival mechanism, a mutual-aid society at the family level. There is culture, and then there is adaptation to precarity and surveillance. If we are lost in the promised land, perhaps it’s because the ground has never quite seemed solid beneath our feet.

When I was a kid, my mother found a crystal heart in my father’s taxi. The light that came through it was pretty, shimmering, like a gasoline spill on the road. She put it in her jewelry box, and sometimes we’d take out the box, spill the contents onto my pink twin bed, and admire what we both thought was a heart-shaped diamond. I grew up, I went to college. I often heard of kids who had inherited their grandmother’s heirlooms, and I sincerely believed that there were jewels in my family, too. Then, a few years ago, my partner and I visited my mom, and she spilled out her box. She gave me a few items I cherish: a nameplate bracelet in white, yellow, and rose gold, and the thick gold hoop earrings that she wore when she first moved to Brooklyn. Everything else was costume jewelry. I couldn’t find the heart.

I realized that, when my mother found the crystal, she was around the same age I am now. She had probably never held a diamond, and she probably wanted to believe that she had found one in America, a dream come true. She wanted me to believe it, and then, as we both grew up, alone, together, she stopped believing, stopped wanting to believe, and stopped me from wanting to believe. And she probably threw that shit out. I didn’t ask. Some things are none of our business. ♦

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By Patricia Marx

By Susan B. Glasser

By Kyle Chayka

Immigration: Complexities and Challenges

Duke researchers are informing the debates with factual data on why and how people immigrate to the U.S., what happens after they arrive and how immigration affects everyone involved.

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Regardless of who’s in charge, immigration and the U.S. government’s approach to it is a thorny topic. Researchers across Duke are informing the debates with factual data on why and how people immigrate to the U.S., what happens after they arrive and how immigration affects everyone involved.

HOW VIOLENCE AND CLIMATE CHANGE ARE DRIVING MIGRATION

Long-term solutions to the increasing number of migrants crossing the U.S. border with Mexico requires research into what drives migration.

Sarah Bermeo, director of graduate studies at the Duke Center for International Development, found immigration from Honduras – which jumped sharply in 2019 after years of steady increase – has resulted from persistent violence coupled with sharp increases in food insecurity linked to climate change.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN MIGRANTS ARE SENT BACK

Scholars know little about what happens to people once they’re deported from the U.S., including whether they plan to return to the United States.

Political science Professor Erik Wibbels was one of a group of political scientists who studied the fates of immigrants deported to Guatemala, which receives the most U.S. deportees after Mexico.

DEPORTATION OVER MINOR CRIMES

In March, a divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a case involving whether an immigrant living in the country without authorization can seek relief from deportation for a minor crime.

Kate Evans, a clinical law professor who directs the Immigration Law Clinic at Duke Law School, explains how the ruling could have strict consequences for some non-citizens seeking deportation relief.

CROSSING THE DARIEN GAP

For most U.S.-bound migrants crossing the Colombian border with Panama, the only option is to find clandestine routes through the Darien Gap, an unforgiving jungle where they are left without guides, with little or no food to find along the way, and under the constant threat of robbery.

Piotr Plewa, a visiting research scholar at Duke who specializes in international migration, explains what migration trends through the Darien Gap mean for the region.

THE U.S./MEXICO RELATIONSHIP: COMPLEX, CHALLENGING AND UNIQUE 

As Mexican Ambassador to the U.S., one of Martha Bárcena Coqui’s biggest challenges is to make the American public understand how their own future is directly linked to Mexico and its people.

Coqui shared with a Duke audience how in the last 30 years, the two countries have gone from distant neighbors to essential partners.

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Eight brilliant student essays on immigration and unjust assumptions.

Read winning essays from our winter 2019 “Border (In)Security” student writing contest.

For the winter 2019 student writing competition, “Border (In)Security,” we invited students to read the YES! Magazine article “Two-Thirds of Americans Live in the “Constitution-Free Zone” by Lornet Turnbull and respond with an up-to-700-word essay. 

Students had a choice between two writing prompts for this contest on immigration policies at the border and in the “Constitution-free zone,” a 100-mile perimeter from land and sea borders where U.S. Border Patrol can search any vehicle, bus, or vessel without a warrant. They could state their positions on the impact of immigration policies on our country’s security and how we determine who is welcome to live here. Or they could write about a time when someone made an unfair assumption about them, just as Border Patrol agents have made warrantless searches of Greyhound passengers based simply on race and clothing.

The Winners

From the hundreds of essays written, these eight were chosen as winners. Be sure to read the author’s response to the essay winners and the literary gems that caught our eye.

Middle School Winner: Alessandra Serafini

High School Winner: Cain Trevino

High School Winner: Ethan Peter

University Winner: Daniel Fries

Powerful Voice Winner: Emma Hernandez-Sanchez

Powerful Voice Winner: Tiara Lewis

Powerful Voice Winner: Hailee Park

Powerful Voice Winner: Aminata Toure

From the Author Lornet Turnbull

Literary Gems

Middle school winner.

Alessandra Serafini

Brier Terrace Middle School, Brier, Wash.

Broken Promises

“…Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

These words were written by Emma Lazarus and are inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty. And yet, the very door they talk about is no longer available to those who need it the most. The door has been shut, chained, and guarded. It no longer shines like gold. Those seeking asylum are being turned away. Families are being split up; children are being stranded. The promise America made to those in need is broken.

Not only is the promise to asylum seekers broken, but the promises made to some 200 million people already residing within the U.S. are broken, too. Anyone within 100 miles of the United States border lives in the “Constitution-free zone” and can be searched with “reasonable suspicion,” a suspicion that is determined by Border Patrol officers. The zone encompasses major cities, such as Seattle and New York City, and it even covers entire states, such as Florida, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. I live in the Seattle area, and it is unsettling that I can be searched and interrogated without the usual warrant. In these areas, there has been an abuse of power; people have been unlawfully searched and interrogated because of assumed race or religion.

The ACLU obtained data from the Customs and Border Protection Agency that demonstrate this reprehensible profiling. The data found that “82 percent of foreign citizens stopped by agents in that state are Latino, and almost 1 in 3 of those processed are, in fact, U.S. citizens.” These warrantless searches impede the trust-building process and communication between the local population and law enforcement officers. Unfortunately, this lack of trust makes campaigns, such as Homeland Security’s “If You See Something, Say Something,” ineffective due to the actions of the department’s own members and officers. Worst of all, profiling ostracizes entire communities and makes them feel unsafe in their own country.

Ironically, asylum seekers come to America in search of safety. However, the thin veil of safety has been drawn back, and, behind it, our tarnished colors are visible. We need to welcome people in their darkest hours rather than destroy their last bit of hope by slamming the door in their faces. The immigration process is currently in shambles, and an effective process is essential for both those already in the country and those outside of it. Many asylum seekers are running from war, poverty, hunger, and death. Their countries’ instability has hijacked every aspect of their lives, made them vagabonds, and the possibility of death, a cruel and unforgiving death, is real. They see no future for their children, and they are desperate for the perceived promise of America—a promise of opportunity, freedom, and a safe future. An effective process would determine who actually needs help and then grant them passage into America. Why should everyone be turned away? My grandmother immigrated to America from Scotland in 1955. I exist because she had a chance that others are now being denied.

Emma Lazarus named Lady Liberty the “Mother of Exiles.” Why are we denying her the happiness of children? Because we cannot decide which ones? America has an inexplicable area where our constitution has been spurned and forgotten. Additionally, there is a rancorous movement to close our southern border because of a deep-rooted fear of immigrants and what they represent. For too many Americans, they represent the end of established power and white supremacy, which is their worst nightmare. In fact, immigrants do represent change—healthy change—with new ideas and new energy that will help make this country stronger. Governmental agreement on a humane security plan is critical to ensure that America reaches its full potential. We can help. We can help people in unimaginably terrifying situations, and that should be our America.

Alessandra Serafini plays on a national soccer team for Seattle United and is learning American Sign Language outside of school. Her goal is to spread awareness about issues such as climate change, poverty, and large-scale political conflict through writing and public speaking.

  High School Winner

Cain Trevino

North Side High School, Fort Worth, Texas

Xenophobia and the Constitution-Free Zone

In August of 2017, U.S. Border Patrol agents boarded a Greyhound bus that had just arrived at the White River Junction station from Boston. According to Danielle Bonadona, a Lebanon resident and a bus passenger, “They wouldn’t let us get off. They boarded the bus and told us they needed to see our IDs or papers.” Bonadona, a 29-year-old American citizen, said that the agents spent around 20 minutes on the bus and “only checked the IDs of people who had accents or were not white.” Bonadona said she was aware of the 100-mile rule, but the experience of being stopped and searched felt “pretty unconstitutional.”

In the YES! article “Two-Thirds of Americans Live in the ‘Constitution-Free Zone’” by Lornet Turnbull, the author references the ACLU’s argument that “the 100-mile zone violates Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.” However, the Supreme Court upholds the use of immigration checkpoints for inquiries on citizenship status. In my view, the ACLU makes a reasonable argument. The laws of the 100-mile zone are blurred, and, too often, officials give arbitrary reasons to conduct a search. Xenophobia and fear of immigrants burgeons in cities within these areas. People of color and those with accents or who are non-English speakers are profiled by law enforcement agencies that enforce anti-immigrant policies. The “Constitution-free zone” is portrayed as an effective barrier to secure our borders. However, this anti-immigrant zone does not make our country any safer. In fact, it does the opposite.

As a former student from the Houston area, I can tell you that the Constitution-free zone makes immigrants and citizens alike feel on edge. The Department of Homeland Security’s white SUVs patrol our streets. Even students feel the weight of anti-immigrant laws. Dennis Rivera Sarmiento, an undocumented student who attended Austin High School in Houston, was held by school police in February 2018 for a minor altercation and was handed over to county police. He was later picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and held in a detention center. It is unfair that kids like Dennis face much harsher consequences for minor incidents than other students with citizenship.

These instances are a direct result of anti-immigrant laws. For example, the 287(g) program gives local and state police the authority to share individuals’ information with ICE after an arrest. This means that immigrants can be deported for committing misdemeanors as minor as running a red light. Other laws like Senate Bill 4, passed by the Texas Legislature, allow police to ask people about their immigration status after they are detained. These policies make immigrants and people of color feel like they’re always under surveillance and that, at any moment, they may be pulled over to be questioned and detained.

During Hurricane Harvey, the immigrant community was hesitant to go to the shelters because images of immigration authorities patrolling the area began to surface online. It made them feel like their own city was against them at a time when they needed them most. Constitution-free zones create communities of fear. For many immigrants, the danger of being questioned about immigration status prevents them from reporting crimes, even when they are the victim. Unreported crime only places more groups of people at risk and, overall, makes communities less safe.

In order to create a humane immigration process, citizens and non-citizens must hold policymakers accountable and get rid of discriminatory laws like 287(g) and Senate Bill 4. Abolishing the Constitution-free zone will also require pressure from the public and many organizations. For a more streamlined legal process, the League of United Latin American Citizens suggests background checks and a small application fee for incoming immigrants, as well as permanent resident status for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) recipients. Other organizations propose expanding the green card lottery and asylum for immigrants escaping the dangers of their home countries.

Immigrants who come to the U.S. are only looking for an opportunity to provide for their families and themselves; so, the question of deciding who gets inside the border and who doesn’t is the same as trying to prove some people are worth more than others. The narratives created by anti-immigrant media plant the false idea that immigrants bring nothing but crime and terrorism. Increased funding for the border and enforcing laws like 287(g) empower anti-immigrant groups to vilify immigrants and promote a witch hunt that targets innocent people. This hatred and xenophobia allow law enforcement to ask any person of color or non-native English speaker about their citizenship or to detain a teenager for a minor incident. Getting rid of the 100-mile zone means standing up for justice and freedom because nobody, regardless of citizenship, should have to live under laws created from fear and hatred.

Cain Trevino is a sophomore. Cain is proud of his Mexican and Salvadorian descent and is an advocate for the implementation of Ethnic Studies in Texas. He enjoys basketball, playing the violin, and studying c omputer science. Cain plans to pursue a career in engineering at Stanford University and later earn a PhD.  

High School Winner

Ethan Peter

Kirkwood High School, Kirkwood, Mo.

I’m an expert on bussing. For the past couple of months, I’ve been a busser at a pizza restaurant near my house. It may not be the most glamorous job, but it pays all right, and, I’ll admit, I’m in it for the money.

I arrive at 5 p.m. and inspect the restaurant to ensure it is in pristine condition for the 6 p.m. wave of guests. As customers come and go, I pick up their dirty dishes, wash off their tables, and reset them for the next guests. For the first hour of my shift, the work is fairly straightforward.

I met another expert on bussing while crossing the border in a church van two years ago. Our van arrived at the border checkpoint, and an agent stopped us. She read our passports, let us through, and moved on to her next vehicle. The Border Patrol agent’s job seemed fairly straightforward.

At the restaurant, 6 p.m. means a rush of customers. It’s the end of the workday, and these folks are hungry for our pizzas and salads. My job is no longer straightforward.

Throughout the frenzy, the TVs in the restaurant buzz about waves of people coming to the U.S. border. The peaceful ebb and flow enjoyed by Border agents is disrupted by intense surges of immigrants who seek to enter the U.S. Outside forces push immigrants to the United States: wars break out in the Middle East, gangs terrorize parts of Central and South America, and economic downturns force foreigners to look to the U.S., drawn by the promise of opportunity. Refugees and migrant caravans arrive, and suddenly, a Border Patrol agent’s job is no longer straightforward.

I turn from the TVs in anticipation of a crisis exploding inside the restaurant: crowds that arrive together will leave together. I’ve learned that when a table looks finished with their dishes, I need to proactively ask to take those dishes, otherwise, I will fall behind, and the tables won’t be ready for the next customers. The challenge is judging who is finished eating. I’m forced to read clues and use my discretion.

Interpreting clues is part of a Border Patrol agent’s job, too. Lornet Turnbull states, “For example, CBP data obtained by ACLU in Michigan shows that 82 percent of foreign citizens stopped by agents in that state are Latino, and almost 1 in 3 of those processed is, in fact, a U.S. citizen.” While I try to spot customers done with their meals so I can clear their part of the table, the Border Patrol officer uses clues to detect undocumented immigrants. We both sometimes guess incorrectly, but our intentions are to do our jobs to the best of our abilities.

These situations are uncomfortable. I certainly do not enjoy interrupting a conversation to get someone’s dishes, and I doubt Border Patrol agents enjoy interrogating someone about their immigration status. In both situations, the people we mistakenly ask lose time and are subjected to awkward and uncomfortable situations. However, here’s where the busser and the Border Patrol officer’s situations are different: If I make a mistake, the customer faces a minor inconvenience. The stakes for a Border Patrol agent are much higher. Mistakenly asking for documentation and searching someone can lead to embarrassment or fear—it can even be life-changing. Thus, Border Patrol agents must be fairly certain that someone’s immigration status is questionable before they begin their interrogation.

To avoid these situations altogether, the U.S. must make the path to citizenship for immigrants easier. This is particularly true for immigrants fleeing violence. Many people object to this by saying these immigrants will bring violence with them, but data does not support this view. In 1939, a ship of Jewish refugees from Germany was turned away from the U.S.—a decision viewed negatively through the lens of history. Today, many people advocate restricting immigration for refugees from violent countries; they refuse to learn the lessons from 1939. The sad thing is that many of these immigrants are seen as just as violent as the people they are fleeing. We should not confuse the oppressed with the oppressor.

My restaurant appreciates customers because they bring us money, just as we should appreciate immigrants because they bring us unique perspectives. Equally important, immigrants provide this country with a variety of expert ideas and cultures, which builds better human connections and strengthens our society.

Ethan Peter is a junior. Ethan writes for his school newspaper, The Kirkwood Call, and plays volleyball for his high school and a club team. He hopes to continue to grow as a writer in the future. 

University Winner

Daniel Fries

Lane Community College, Eugene, Ore.

Detained on the Road to Equality

The United States is a nation of immigrants. There are currently 43 million foreign-born people living in the U.S. Millions of them are naturalized American citizens, and 23 million, or 7.2 percent of the population, are living here without documentation (US Census, 2016). One in seven residents of the United States was not born here. Multiculturalism is, and always has been, a key part of the American experience. However, romantic notions of finding a better life in the United States for immigrants and refugees don’t reflect reality. In modern history, America is a country that systematically treats immigrants—documented or not—and non-white Americans in a way that is fundamentally different than what is considered right by the majority.

The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment states,“No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” When a suspected undocumented immigrant is detained, their basic human rights are violated. Warrantless raids on Greyhound buses within 100 miles of the border (an area referred to by some as the “Constitution-free zone”) are clear violations of human rights. These violations are not due to the current state of politics; they are the symptom of blatant racism in the United States and a system that denigrates and abuses people least able to defend themselves.

It is not surprising that some of the mechanisms that drive modern American racism are political in nature. Human beings are predisposed to dislike and distrust individuals that do not conform to the norms of their social group (Mountz, Allison). Some politicians appeal to this suspicion and wrongly attribute high crime rates to non-white immigrants. The truth is that immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. In fact, people born in the United States are convicted of crimes at a rate twice that of undocumented non-natives (Cato Institute, 2018).

The majority of immigrants take high risks to seek a better life, giving them incentive to obey the laws of their new country. In many states, any contact with law enforcement may ultimately result in deportation and separation from family. While immigrants commit far fewer crimes, fear of violent crime by much of the U.S. population outweighs the truth. For some politicians, it is easier to sell a border wall to a scared population than it is to explain the need for reformed immigration policy. It’s easier to say that immigrants are taking people’s jobs than explain a changing global economy and its effect on employment. The only crime committed in this instance is discrimination.

Human rights are violated when an undocumented immigrant—or someone perceived as an undocumented immigrant—who has not committed a crime is detained on a Greyhound bus. When a United States citizen is detained on the same bus, constitutional rights are being violated. The fact that this happens every day and that we debate its morality makes it abundantly clear that racism is deeply ingrained in this country. Many Americans who have never experienced this type of oppression lack the capacity to understand its lasting effect. Most Americans don’t know what it’s like to be late to work because they were wrongfully detained, were pulled over by the police for the third time that month for no legal reason, or had to coordinate legal representation for their U.S. citizen grandmother because she was taken off a bus for being a suspected undocumented immigrant. This oppression is cruel and unnecessary.

America doesn’t need a wall to keep out undocumented immigrants; it needs to seriously address how to deal with immigration. It is possible to reform the current system in such a way that anyone can become a member of American society, instead of existing outside of it. If a person wants to live in the United States and agrees to follow its laws and pay its taxes, a path to citizenship should be available.

People come to the U.S. from all over the world for many reasons. Some have no other choice. There are ongoing humanitarian crises in Syria, Yemen, and South America that are responsible for the influx of immigrants and asylum seekers at our borders. If the United States wants to address the current situation, it must acknowledge the global factors affecting the immigrants at the center of this debate and make fact-informed decisions. There is a way to maintain the security of America while treating migrants and refugees compassionately, to let those who wish to contribute to our society do so, and to offer a hand up instead of building a wall.

Daniel Fries studies computer science. Daniel has served as a wildland firefighter in Oregon, California, and Alaska. He is passionate about science, nature, and the ways that technology contributes to making the world a better, more empathetic, and safer place.

Powerful Voice Winner

Emma Hernandez-Sanchez

Wellness, Business and Sports School, Woodburn, Ore.

An Emotion an Immigrant Knows Too Well

Before Donald Trump’s campaign, I was oblivious to my race and the idea of racism. As far as I knew, I was the same as everyone else. I didn’t stop to think about our different-colored skins. I lived in a house with a family and attended school five days a week just like everyone else. So, what made me different?

Seventh grade was a very stressful year—the year that race and racism made an appearance in my life. It was as if a cold splash of water woke me up and finally opened my eyes to what the world was saying. It was this year that Donald Trump started initiating change about who got the right to live in this country and who didn’t. There was a lot of talk about deportation, specifically for Mexicans, and it sparked commotion and fear in me.

I remember being afraid and nervous to go out. At home, the anxiety was there but always at the far back of my mind because I felt safe inside. My fear began as a small whisper, but every time I stepped out of my house, it got louder. I would have dreams about the deportation police coming to my school; when I went to places like the library, the park, the store, or the mall, I would pay attention to everyone and to my surroundings. In my head, I would always ask myself, “Did they give us nasty looks?,” “Why does it seem quieter?” “Was that a cop I just saw?” I would notice little things, like how there were only a few Mexicans out or how empty a store was. When my mom went grocery shopping, I would pray that she would be safe. I was born in America, and both my parents were legally documented. My mom was basically raised here. Still, I couldn’t help but feel nervous.

I knew I shouldn’t have been afraid, but with one look, agents could have automatically thought my family and I were undocumented. Even when the deportation police would figure out that we weren’t undocumented, they’d still figure out a way to deport us—at least that was what was going through my head. It got so bad that I didn’t even want to do the simplest things like go grocery shopping because there was a rumor that the week before a person was taken from Walmart.

I felt scared and nervous, and I wasn’t even undocumented. I can’t even imagine how people who are undocumented must have felt, how they feel. All I can think is that it’s probably ten times worse than what I was feeling. Always worrying about being deported and separated from your family must be hard. I was living in fear, and I didn’t even have it that bad. My heart goes out to families that get separated from each other. It’s because of those fears that I detest the “Constitution-free zone.”

Legally documented and undocumented people who live in the Constitution-free zone are in constant fear of being deported. People shouldn’t have to live this way. In fact, there have been arguments that the 100-mile zone violates the Fourth Amendment, which gives people the right to be protected from unreasonable searches and seizures of property by the government. Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently upheld these practices.

One question that Lornet Turnbull asks in her YES! article “Two-Thirds of Americans Live in the ‘Constitution-Free Zone’” is, “How should we decide who is welcome in the U.S and who is not?” Instead of focusing on immigrants, how about we focus on the people who shoot up schools, rape girls, exploit women for human sex trafficking, and sell drugs? These are the people who make our country unsafe; they are the ones who shouldn’t be accepted. Even if they are citizens and have the legal right to live here, they still shouldn’t be included. If they are the ones making this country unsafe, then what gives them the right to live here?

I don’t think that the Constitution-free zone is an effective and justifiable way to make this country more “secure.” If someone isn’t causing any trouble in the United States and is just simply living their life, then they should be welcomed here. We shouldn’t have to live in fear that our rights will be taken away. I believe that it’s unfair for people to automatically think that it’s the Hispanics that make this country unsafe. Sure, get all the undocumented people out of the United States, but it’s not going to make this country any safer. It is a society that promotes violence that makes us unsafe, not a race.

Emma Hernandez-Sanchez is a freshman who is passionate about literature and her education. Emma wan ts to inspire others to be creative and try their best. She enjoys reading and creating stories that spark imagination. 

  Powerful Voice Winner

Tiara Lewis

Columbus City Preparatory Schools for Girls,

Columbus, Ohio

Hold Your Head High and Keep Those Fists Down

How would you feel if you walked into a store and salespeople were staring at you? Making you feel like you didn’t belong. Judging you. Assuming that you were going to take something, even though you might have $1,000 on you to spend. Sometimes it doesn’t matter. This is because people will always judge you. It might not be because of your race but for random reasons, like because your hair is black instead of dirty blonde. Or because your hair is short and not long. Or just because they are having a bad day. People will always find ways to bring you down and accuse you of something, but that doesn’t mean you have to go along with it.

Every time I entered a store, I would change my entire personality. I would change the way I talked and the way I walked. I always saw myself as needing to fit in. If a store was all pink, like the store Justice, I would act like a girly girl. If I was shopping in a darker store, like Hot Topic, I would hum to the heavy metal songs and act more goth. I had no idea that I was feeding into stereotypes.

When I was 11, I walked into Claire’s, a well-known store at the mall. That day was my sister’s birthday. Both of us were really happy and had money to spend. As soon as we walked into the store, two employees stared me and my sister down, giving us cold looks. When we went to the cashier to buy some earrings, we thought everything was fine. However, when we walked out of the store, there was a policeman and security guards waiting. At that moment, my sister and I looked at one another, and I said, in a scared little girl voice, “I wonder what happened? Why are they here?”

Then, they stopped us. We didn’t know what was going on. The same employee that cashed us out was screaming as her eyes got big, “What did you steal?” I was starting to get numb. Me and my sister looked at each other and told the truth: “We didn’t steal anything. You can check us.” They rudely ripped through our bags and caused a big scene. My heart was pounding like a drum. I felt violated and scared. Then, the policeman said, “Come with us. We need to call your parents.” While this was happening, the employees were talking to each other, smiling. We got checked again. The police said that they were going to check the cameras, but after they were done searching us, they realized that we didn’t do anything wrong and let us go about our day.

Walking in the mall was embarrassing—everybody staring, looking, and whispering as we left the security office. This made me feel like I did something wrong while knowing I didn’t. We went back to the store to get our shopping bags. The employees sneered, “Don’t you niggers ever come in this store again. You people always take stuff. This time you just got lucky.” Their faces were red and frightening. It was almost like they were in a scary 3D movie, screaming, and coming right at us. I felt hurt and disappointed that someone had the power within them to say something so harsh and wrong to another person. Those employees’ exact words will forever be engraved in my memory.

In the article, “Two-Thirds of Americans Live in the ‘Constitution-Free Zone’,” Lornet Turnbull states, “In January, they stopped a man in Indio, California, as he was boarding a Los Angeles-bound bus. While questioning this man about his immigration status, agents told him his ‘shoes looked suspicious,’ like those of someone who had recently crossed the border.” They literally judged him by his shoes. They had no proof of anything. If a man is judged by his shoes, who else and what else are being judged in the world?

In the novel  To Kill a Mockingbird , a character named Atticus states, “You just hold your head high and keep those fists down. No matter what anybody says to you, don’t you let’em get your goat. Try fighting with your head for a change.” No matter how much you might try to change yourself, your hairstyle, and your clothes, people will always make assumptions about you. However, you never need to change yourself to make a point or to feel like you fit in. Be yourself. Don’t let those stereotypes turn into facts.

Tiara Lewis is in the eighth grade. Tiara plays the clarinet and is trying to change the world— one essay at a time. She is most often found curled up on her bed, “Divergent” in one hand and a cream-filled doughnut in the other.

Hailee Park

 Wielding My Swords

If I were a swordsman, my weapons would be my identities. I would wield one sword in my left hand and another in my right. People expect me to use both fluently, but I’m not naturally ambidextrous. Even though I am a right-handed swordsman, wielding my dominant sword with ease, I must also carry a sword in my left, the heirloom of my family heritage. Although I try to live up to others’ expectations by using both swords, I may appear inexperienced while attempting to use my left. In some instances, my heirloom is mistaken for representing different families’ since the embellishments look similar.

Many assumptions are made about my heirloom sword based on its appearance, just as many assumptions are made about me based on my physical looks. “Are you Chinese?” When I respond with ‘no,’ they stare at me blankly in confusion. There is a multitude of Asian cultures in the United States, of which I am one. Despite what many others may assume, I am not Chinese; I am an American-born Korean.

“Then… are you Japanese?” Instead of asking a broader question, like “What is your ethnicity?,” they choose to ask a direct question. I reply that I am Korean. I like to think that this answers their question sufficiently; however, they think otherwise. Instead, I take this as their invitation to a duel.

They attack me with another question: “Are you from North Korea or South Korea?” I don’t know how to respond because I’m not from either of those countries; I was born in America. I respond with “South Korea,” where my parents are from because I assume that they’re asking me about my ethnicity. I’m not offended by this situation because I get asked these questions frequently. From this experience, I realize that people don’t know how to politely ask questions about identity to those unlike them. Instead of asking “What is your family’s ethnicity?,” many people use rude alternatives, such as “Where are you from?,” or “What language do you speak?”

When people ask these questions, they make assumptions based on someone’s appearance. In my case, people make inferences like:

“She must be really good at speaking Korean.”

“She’s Asian; therefore, she must be born in Asia.”

“She’s probably Chinese.”

These thoughts may appear in their heads because making assumptions is natural. However, there are instances when assumptions can be taken too far. Some U.S. Border Patrol agents in the “Constitution-free zone” have made similar assumptions based on skin color and clothing. For example, agents marked someone as an undocumented immigrant because “his shoes looked suspicious, like those of someone who had recently crossed the border.”

Another instance was when a Jamaican grandmother was forced off a bus when she was visiting her granddaughter. The impetus was her accent and the color of her skin. Government officials chose to act on their assumptions, even though they had no solid proof that the grandmother was an undocumented immigrant. These situations just touch the surface of the issue of racial injustice in America.

When someone makes unfair assumptions about me, they are pointing their sword and challenging me to a duel; I cannot refuse because I am already involved. It is not appropriate for anyone, including Border Patrol agents, to make unjustified assumptions or to act on those assumptions. Border Patrol agents have no right to confiscate the swords of the innocent solely based on their conjectures. The next time I’m faced with a situation where racially ignorant assumptions are made about me, I will refuse to surrender my sword, point it back at them, and triumphantly fight their ignorance with my cultural pride.

Hailee Park is an eighth grader who enjoys reading many genres. While reading, Hailee recognized the racial injustices against immigrants in America, which inspired her essay. Hailee plays violin in her school’s orchestra and listens to and composes music. 

Aminata Toure

East Harlem School, New York City, N.Y.

We Are Still Dreaming

As a young Muslim American woman, I have been labeled things I am not: a terrorist, oppressed, and an ISIS supporter. I have been accused of planning 9/11, an event that happened before I was born. Lately, in the media, Muslims have been portrayed as supporters of a malevolent cause, terrorizing others just because they do not have the same beliefs. I often scoff at news reports that portray Muslims in such a light, just as I scoff at all names I’ve been labeled. They are words that do not define me. 

In a land where labels have stripped immigrants of their personalities, they are now being stripped of something that makes them human: their rights. The situation described in Lornet Turnbull’s article, “Two-Thirds of Americans are Living in the ‘Constitution-Free Zone’,” goes directly against the Constitution, the soul of this country, something that asserts that we are all equal before the law. If immigrants do not have protection from the Constitution, is there any way to feel safe?

Although most insults are easy to shrug off, they are still threatening. I am ashamed when I feel afraid to go to the mosque. Friday is an extremely special day when we gather together to pray, but lately, I haven’t been going to the mosque for Jummah prayers. I have realized that I can never feel safe when in a large group of Muslims because of the widespread hatred of Muslims in the United States, commonly referred to as Islamophobia. Police surround our mosque, and there are posters warning us about dangerous people who might attack our place of worship because we have been identified as terrorists.

I wish I could tune out every news report that blasts out the headline “Terrorist Attack!” because I know that I will be judged based on the actions of someone else. Despite this anti-Muslim racism, what I have learned from these insults is that I am proud of my faith. I am a Muslim, but being Muslim doesn’t define me. I am a writer, a student, a dreamer, a friend, a New Yorker, a helper, and an American. I am unapologetically me, a Muslim, and so much more. I definitely think everyone should get to know a Muslim. They would see that some of us are also Harry Potter fans, not just people planning to bomb the White House.

Labels are unjustly placed on us because of the way we speak, the color of our skin, and what we believe in—not for who we are as individuals. Instead, we should all take more time to get to know one another. As Martin Luther King Jr. said in his “I Have a Dream” speech, we should be judged by the content of our character and not the color of our skin. To me, it seems Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream is a dream that should be a reality. But, for now, we are dreaming.

Aminata Toure is a Guinean American Muslim student. Aminata loves spoken-word poetry and performs in front of hundreds of people at her school’s annual poetry slam. She loves writing, language, history, and West African food and culture. Aminata wants to work at the United Nations when she grows up.

From the Author 

Dear Alessandra, Cain, Daniel, Tiara, Emma, Hailee, Aminata and Ethan,

I am moved and inspired by the thought each of you put into your responses to my story about this so-called “Constitution-free zone.” Whether we realize it or not, immigration in this country impacts all of us— either because we are immigrants ourselves, have neighbors, friends, and family who are, or because we depend on immigrants for many aspects of our lives—from the food we put on our tables to the technology that bewitches us. It is true that immigrants enrich our society in so many important ways, as many of you point out.

And while the federal statute that permits U.S. Border Patrol officers to stop and search at will any of the 200 million of us in this 100-mile shadow border, immigrants have been their biggest targets. In your essays, you highlight how unjust the law is—nothing short of racial profiling. It is heartening to see each of you, in your own way, speaking out against the unfairness of this practice.

Alessandra, you are correct, the immigration system in this country is in shambles. You make a powerful argument about how profiling ostracizes entire communities and how the warrantless searches allowed by this statute impede trust-building between law enforcement and the people they are called on to serve.

And Cain, you point out how this 100-mile zone, along with other laws in the state of Texas where you attended school, make people feel like they’re “always under surveillance, and that, at any moment, you may be pulled over to be questioned and detained.” It seems unimaginable that people live their lives this way, yet millions in this country do.

You, Emma, for example, speak of living in a kind of silent fear since Donald Trump took office, even though you were born in this country and your parents are here legally. You are right, “We shouldn’t have to live in fear that our rights will be taken away.”

And Aminata, you write of being constantly judged and labeled because you’re a Muslim American. How unfortunate and sad that in a country that generations of people fled to search for religious freedom, you are ashamed at times to practice your own. The Constitution-free zone, you write, “goes directly against the Constitution, the soul of this country, something that asserts that we are all equal before the law.”

Tiara, I could personally relate to your gripping account of being racially profiled and humiliated in a store. You were appalled that the Greyhound passenger in California was targeted by Border Patrol because they claimed his shoes looked like those of someone who had walked across the border: “If a man is judged by his shoes,” you ask, “who else and what else are getting judged in the world?”

Hailee, you write about the incorrect assumptions people make about you, an American born of Korean descent, based solely on your appearance and compared it to the assumptions Border Patrol agents make about those they detain in this zone.

Daniel, you speak of the role of political fearmongering in immigration. It’s not new, but under the current administration, turning immigrants into boogiemen for political gain is currency. You write that “For some politicians, it is easier to sell a border wall to a scared population than it is to explain the need for reformed immigration policy.”

And Ethan, you recognize the contributions immigrants make to this country through the connections we all make with them and the strength they bring to our society.

Keep speaking your truth. Use your words and status to call out injustice wherever and whenever you see it. Untold numbers of people spoke out against this practice by Border Patrol and brought pressure on Greyhound to change. In December, the company began offering passengers written guidance—in both Spanish and English—so they understand what their rights are when officers board their bus. Small steps, yes, but progress nonetheless, brought about by people just like you, speaking up for those who sometimes lack a voice to speak up for themselves.

With sincere gratitude,

Lornet Turnbull

Lornet Turnbull is an editor for YES! and a Seattle-based freelance writer. Follow her on Twitter  @TurnbullL .

We received many outstanding essays for the Winter 2019 Student Writing Competition. Though not every participant can win the contest, we’d like to share some excerpts that caught our eye:

After my parents argued with the woman, they told me if you can fight with fists, you prove the other person’s point, but when you fight with the power of your words, you can have a much bigger impact. I also learned that I should never be ashamed of where I am from. —Fernando Flores, The East Harlem School, New York City, N.Y.

Just because we were born here and are privileged to the freedom of our country, we do not have the right to deprive others of a chance at success. —Avalyn Cox, Brier Terrace Middle School, Brier, Wash.

Maybe, rather than a wall, a better solution to our immigration problem would be a bridge. —Sean Dwyer, Lane Community College, Eugene, Ore.

If anything, what I’ve learned is that I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to change our world. I don’t know how to make a difference, how to make my voice heard. But I have learned the importance of one word, a simple two-letter word that’s taught to the youngest of us, a word we all know but never recognize: the significance of ‘we.’ —Enna Chiu, Highland Park High School, Highland Park, N.J.

Not to say the Border Patrol should not have authorization to search people within the border, but I am saying it should be near the border, more like one mile, not 100. —Cooper Tarbuck, Maranacook Middle School, Manchester, Maine.

My caramel color, my feminism, my Spanish and English language, my Mexican culture, and my young Latina self gives me the confidence to believe in myself, but it can also teach others that making wrong assumptions about someone because of their skin color, identity, culture, looks or gender can make them look and be weaker. —Ana Hernandez, The East Harlem School, New York City, N.Y.

We don’t need to change who we are to fit these stereotypes like someone going on a diet to fit into a new pair of pants. —Kaylee Meyers, Brier Terrace Middle School, Brier, Wash.

If a human being with no criminal background whatsoever has trouble entering the country because of the way he or she dresses or speaks, border protection degenerates into arbitrariness. —Jonas Schumacher, Heidelberg University of Education, Heidelberg, Germany

I believe that you should be able to travel freely throughout your own country without the constant fear of needing to prove that you belong here . —MacKenzie Morgan, Lincoln Middle School, Ypsilanti, Mich.

America is known as “the Land of Opportunity,” but this label is quickly disappearing. If we keep stopping those striving for a better life, then what will become of this country? —Ennyn Chiu, Highland Park Middle School, Highland Park, N.J.

The fact that two-thirds of the people in the U.S. are living in an area called the “Constitution-free zone” is appalling. Our Constitution was made to protect our rights as citizens, no matter where we are in the country. These systems that we are using to “secure” our country are failing, and we need to find a way to change them. —Isis Liaw, Brier Terrace Middle School, Brier, Wash.

I won’t let anyone, especially a man, tell me what I can do, because I am a strong Latina. I will represent where I come from, and I am proud to be Mexican. I will show others that looks can be deceiving. I will show others that even the weakest animal, a beautiful butterfly, is tough, and it will cross any border, no matter how challenging the journey may be. —Brittany Leal, The East Harlem School, New York City, N.Y.

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Understanding the U.S. Immigrant Experience: The 2023 KFF/LA Times Survey of Immigrants

Shannon Schumacher , Liz Hamel , Samantha Artiga , Drishti Pillai , Ashley Kirzinger , Audrey Kearney , Marley Presiado , Ana Gonzalez-Barrera , and Mollyann Brodie Published: Sep 17, 2023

• Methodology

Executive Summary

The Survey of Immigrants, conducted by KFF in partnership with the Los Angeles Times during Spring 2023, examines the diversity of the U.S. immigrant experience. It is the largest and most representative survey of immigrants living in the U.S. to date. With its sample size of 3,358 immigrant adults, the survey provides a deep understanding of immigrant experiences, reflecting their varied countries of origin and histories, citizenship and immigration statuses, racial and ethnic identities, and social and economic circumstances. KFF also conducted focus groups with immigrants from an array of backgrounds, which expand upon information from the survey (see Methodology for more details).

This report provides an overview of immigrants’ reasons for coming to the U.S.; their successes and challenges; their experiences at work, in their communities, in health care settings, and at home; as well as their outlook on the future. Recognizing the diversity within the immigrant population, the report examines variations in the experiences of different groups of immigrants, including by immigration status, income, race and ethnicity, English proficiency, and other factors. Given that this report includes a focus on experiences with discrimination and unfair treatment, data by race and ethnicity are often shown rather than by country of birth. A companion report provides information on immigrants’ health coverage, access to, and use of care, and further reports will provide additional details for other subgroups within the immigrant population, including more data by country of origin.

Key takeaways from this report include:

• Most immigrants – regardless of where they came from or how long they’ve been in the U.S. – say they came to the U.S. for more opportunities for themselves and their children. The predominant reasons immigrants say they came to the U.S. are for better work and educational opportunities, a better future for their children, and more rights and freedoms. Smaller but still sizeable shares cite other factors such as joining family members or escaping unsafe or violent conditions.
• Overall, a majority of immigrants say their financial situation (78%), educational opportunities (79%), employment situation (75%), and safety (65%) are better as a result of moving to the U.S. A large majority (77%) say their own standard of living is better than that of their parents, higher than the share of U.S.-born adults who say the same (51%) 1 ,and most (60%) believe their children’s standard of living will be better than theirs is now. Three in four immigrants say they would choose to come to the U.S. again if given the chance, and six in ten say they plan to stay in the U.S. However, about one in five (19%) say they want to move back to the country they were born in or to another country, while an additional one in five (21%) say they are not sure.
• Despite an improved situation relative to their countries of birth, many immigrants report facing serious challenges, including high levels of workplace and other discrimination, difficulties making ends meet, and confusion and fears related to U.S. immigration laws and policies. These challenges are more pronounced among some groups of immigrants, including those who live in lower-income households, Black and Hispanic immigrants, those who are likely undocumented, and those with limited English proficiency. Given the intersectional nature of these factors, some immigrants face compounding challenges across them.
• Most immigrants are employed, and about half of all working immigrants say they have experienced discrimination in the workplace, such as being given less pay or fewer opportunities for advancement than people born in the U.S., not being paid for all their hours worked, or being threatened or harassed . In addition, about a quarter of all immigrants, rising to three in ten of those with college degrees, say they are overqualified for their jobs, a potential indication that they had to take a step back in their careers when coming to the U.S. or lacked career advancement opportunities in the U.S.
• About a third (34%) of immigrants say they have been criticized or insulted for speaking a language other than English since moving to the U.S., and a similar share (33%) say they have been told they should “go back to where you came from.” About four in ten (38%) immigrants say they have ever received worse treatment than people born in the U.S. in a store or restaurant, in interactions with the police, or when buying or renting a home. Some immigrants also report being treated unfairly in health care settings. Among immigrants who have received health care in the U.S., one in four say they have been treated differently or unfairly by a doctor or other health care provider because of their racial or ethnic background, their accent or how well they speak English, or their insurance status or ability to pay for care.
• Immigrants who are Black or Hispanic report disproportionate levels of discrimination at work, in their communities, and in health care settings. Over half of employed Black (56%) and Hispanic (55%) immigrants say they have faced discrimination at work, and roughly half of college-educated Black (53%) and Hispanic (46%) immigrant workers say they are overqualified for their jobs. Nearly four in ten (38%) Black immigrants say they have been treated unfairly by the police and more than four in ten (45%) say they have been told to “go back to where you came from.” In addition, nearly four in ten (38%) Black immigrants say they have been treated differently or unfairly by a health care provider. Among Hispanic immigrants, four in ten (42%) say they have been criticized or insulted for speaking a language other than English.
• Even with high levels of employment, one third of immigrants report problems affording basic needs like food, housing, and health care. This share rises to four in ten among parents and about half of immigrants living in lower income households (those with annual incomes under $40,000). In addition, one in four lower income immigrants say they have difficulty paying their bills each month, while an additional 47% say they are “just able to pay their bills each month.”
• Among likely undocumented immigrants, seven in ten say they worry they or a family member may be detained or deported, and four in ten say they have avoided things such as talking to the police, applying for a job, or traveling because they didn’t want to draw attention to their or a family member’s immigration status . However, these concerns are not limited to those who are likely undocumented. Among all immigrants regardless of their own immigration status, nearly half (45%) say they don’t have enough information to understand how U.S. immigration laws affect them and their families, and one in four (26%) say they worry they or a family member could be detained or deported. Confusion and lack of information extend to public charge rules. About three quarters of all immigrants, rising to nine in ten among likely undocumented immigrants, say they are not sure whether use of public assistance for food, housing, or health care can affect an immigrant’s ability to get a green card or incorrectly believe that use of this assistance will negatively affect the ability to get a green card.
• About half of all immigrants have limited English proficiency, and about half among this group say they have faced language barriers in a variety of settings and interactions. About half (53%) of immigrants with limited English proficiency say that difficulty speaking or understanding English has ever made it hard for them to do at least one of the following: get health care services (31%); receive services in stores or restaurants (30%); get or keep a job (29%); apply for government financial help with food, housing, or health coverage (25%); report a crime or get help from the police (22%). In addition, one-quarter of parents with limited English proficiency say they have had difficulty communicating with their children’s school (24%). Working immigrants with limited English proficiency also are more likely to report workplace discrimination compared to those who speak English very well (55% vs. 41%).

Who Are U.S. Immigrants?

The KFF/LA Times Survey of Immigrants is a probability-based survey that is representative of the adult immigrant population in the U.S. based on known demographic data from federal surveys (see Methodology for more information on sampling and weighting). For the purposes of this project, immigrant adults are defined as individuals ages 18 and over who live in the U.S. but were born outside the U.S. or its territories.

According to 2021 federal data, immigrants make up 16% of the U.S. adult population (ages 18+). About four in ten immigrant adults identify as Hispanic (44%), over a quarter are Asian (27%), and smaller shares are White (17%), Black (8%), or report multiple races (3%). The top six countries of origin among adult immigrants in the U.S. are Mexico (24%), India (6%), China (5%), the Philippines (5%), El Salvador (3%), and Vietnam (3%) although immigrants hail from countries across the world.

The immigrant adult population largely mirrors the U.S.-born adult population in terms of gender. While similar shares of U.S.-born and immigrant adults have a college degree, immigrant adults are substantially more likely than U.S.-born adults to have less than a high school education. About four in ten (40%) immigrants are parents of a child under 18 living in their household, and a quarter (25%) of children in the U.S. have an immigrant parent.

Slightly less than half (47%) of immigrant adults report having limited English proficiency, meaning they speak English less than very well. Regardless of ability to speak English, a large majority (83%) of immigrants say they speak a language other than English at home, including about four in ten (43%) who speak Spanish at home.

A majority (55%) of U.S. adult immigrants are naturalized citizens. The remaining share are noncitizens, including lawfully present and undocumented immigrants. KFF analysis based on federal data estimates that 60% of noncitizens are lawfully present and 40% are undocumented. 2

See Appendix Table 1 for a table of key demographics about the U.S. adult immigrant population compared to the U.S.-born adult population.

Key Terms Used In This Report

Limited English Proficiency : Immigrants are classified as having Limited English Proficiency if they self-identify as speaking English less than “very well.”

Immigration Status: Immigrants are classified by their self-reported immigration status as follows:

• Naturalized Citizen : Immigrants who said they are a U.S. citizen.
• Green Card or Valid Visa : Immigrants who said they are not a U.S. citizen, but currently have a green card (lawful permanent status) or a valid work or student visa.
• Likely Undocumented Immigrant : Immigrants who said they are not a U.S. citizen and do not currently have a green card (lawful permanent status) or a valid work or student visa. These immigrants are classified as “likely undocumented” since they have not affirmatively identified themselves as undocumented.

Race and Ethnicity: Data are reported for four racial and ethnic categories: Hispanic, Black, Asian, and White based on respondents’ self-reported racial and ethnic identity. Persons of Hispanic origin may be of any race but are categorized as Hispanic for this analysis; other groups are non-Hispanic. Results for individuals in other groups are included in the total but not shown separately due to sample size restrictions. Given that this report includes a focus on experiences with discrimination and unfair treatment, we often show data by race and ethnicity rather than country of birth. Given variation of experiences within these broad racial and ethnic categories, further reports will provide additional details for subgroups within racial and ethnic groups, including more data by country of origin.

Educational Attainment: These data are based on the highest level of education completed in the U.S. and/or in other countries as self-reported by the respondent. The response categories offered were: did not graduate high school, high school graduate with a diploma, some college (including an associate degree), university degree (bachelor’s degree), and post-graduate degree (such as Master’s, PhD, MD, JD).

Country of Birth : “Country of birth” is classified based on respondents’ answer to the question “In what country were you born?” In some cases, countries are grouped into larger regions. See Appendix Table 2 for a list of regional groupings.

Why Do Immigrants Come to The U.S. And How Do They Feel About Their Life in the U.S.?

Immigrants cite both push and pull factors as reasons for coming to the U.S. For most immigrants, their major reasons for coming to the U.S. are aspirational, such as seeking better economic and job opportunities (75% say this is a major reason they came to the U.S.), a better future for their children (68%), and for better educational opportunities (62%). Half of immigrants say a major reason they or their family came to the U.S. was to have more rights and freedoms, including about three-quarters of immigrants from Central America (73%). Smaller but sizeable shares say other factors such as joining family members (42%) or escaping unsafe or violent conditions (31%) were major reasons they came. The share who cites escaping unsafe conditions as a major reason for coming to the U.S. rises to about half of likely undocumented immigrants (51%) and about six in ten (59%) immigrants from Central America.

In Their Own Words: Reasons for Coming to the U.S. from Focus Group Participants

Stories focus group participants told of why they came to the U.S. reflect the survey responses. While many pointed to economic and educational opportunities, some described leaving harsh economic and unsafe conditions in their home countries.

“I came to the U.S. hoping that my children will have better educational opportunity.” – 58-year-old Vietnamese immigrant woman in California

“[My husband] came here, and I followed him. So, he came, and I came with the kids afterwards…so we could have a better life. It’s not easy…we wanted to have…better opportunities for our children, for ourselves.” – 46-year-old Ghanian immigrant woman in New Jersey

“The thing is that there are more opportunities, and the standard of living is much better. We can make ends meet even through manual labor. That is not possible in Vietnam.” – 33-year-old Vietnamese immigrant man in Texas

“Then, my mom had to make a decision because the gangs took control of her place. They started asking for rent, extorting her life. If she didn’t pay the extortion, the rent, they were going to take me, or my siblings, or her. …since I was the oldest, she brought me, making the sacrifice of leaving behind my two siblings.” – 25-year-old Salvadorian immigrant man in California

“Actually, it wasn’t my decision to come. I left when I was 13 years old, fleeing from my country because I had a death threat, along with my eight-year-old sister. I didn’t want to come.” – 20-year-old Honduran immigrant woman in California

“Because of the earthquake, you know, I lost my house, and I wanted to go to a country with more opportunities and I came here.” – 30-year-old Haitian immigrant man in Florida

Most immigrants say moving to the U.S. has provided them more opportunities and improved their quality of life. When the survey asked immigrants to describe in their own words the best thing that has come from moving to the U.S., many similar themes arise: better opportunities, a better life in general, or a better future for their children are top mentions, as are education and work opportunities.

In Their Own Words: The Best Thing That Has Come From Moving To The U.S.

In a few words, what is the best thing that has come from you moving to the U.S.?

“Educational opportunities, economic opportunities, political and human rights, housing, food and basic needs, neighborhood safety, lower crime rates”- 28 year old Mexican immigrant woman in Nebraska

“Best education for my kids. Professional job. Healthy environment. Good system. The opportunities everywhere!” – 67-year-old Nepalese immigrant man in Maryland

“Better job, education, and economic opportunities” – 48-year-old Indian immigrant woman in North Carolina

“Education and improved quality of life in terms of obtaining basic needs” – 39-year-old Dominican immigrant woman in New Jersey

“Stability, freedom, better finance[s], having the opportunity to have a family” – 32-year-old Venezuelan immigrant man in New York

“Educational and employment opportunities for myself and my children” – 60-year-old Filipino immigrant woman in California

Most immigrants feel that moving to the U.S. has made them better off in terms of educational opportunities (79%), their financial situation (78%), their employment situation (75%), and their safety (65%). Safety stands out as an area where somewhat fewer –though still a majority–immigrants say they’re better off, particularly among White and Asian immigrants. A bare majority (54%) of Asian immigrants and fewer than half (42%) of White immigrants say their safety is better as a result of moving to the U.S., while about one in five in both groups (17% of Asian immigrants and 21% of White immigrants) say they are less safe as a result of coming to the U.S.

In Their Own Words: Safety Concerns In The U.S. From Focus Group Participants

In focus groups, some participants pointed to concerns about guns, drugs, and safety in the U.S., particularly in their children’s schools.

“Sometimes when you see on the television and they’re talking about shooting and these types of things. In Ghana we don’t have that—it’s safe, you walk around, you’re free.” – 38-year-old Ghanian immigrant woman in New Jersey

“I take my kids to school because, really, you have to go to school. But if I could have them at home and homeschool them, I’d do it. I wouldn’t let them go because I don’t feel safe anymore.” – 51-year-old Salvadorian immigrant man in California

“I’m from Mexico, and over there, you have to struggle to get a gun. Here, you can buy a gun like you’re buying candy at Walmart or somewhere.” – 37-year-old Mexican immigrant man in Texas

“Because in my children’s school, there are a lot of drugs found in its restrooms. …There is so much temptation for drugs here. It is not that safe.” – 49-year-old Vietnamese immigrant woman in Texas

Most immigrants say they are better off compared with their parents at their age, and most are optimistic about their children’s future. When asked about their standard of living, three quarters (77%) of immigrants say their standard of living is better than their parents’ was at their age. This is substantially higher than the share of U.S.-born adults who say the same (51%). Many expect an even better future for their children. Six in ten immigrants believe their children’s standard of living will be better than theirs is now, with much smaller shares saying they think it will be worse (13%) or about the same (17%). Most immigrant parents also have positive feelings about the education their children are receiving . About three in four (73%) immigrant parents rate their child’s school as either “excellent” (35%) or “good” (38%), with a further one-sixth (17%) saying the school is “fair,” and 3% give it a “poor” rating.

In Their Own Words: Hopes For Their Children’s Future From Focus Group Participants

In focus groups, many participants described hopes and dreams for their children’s futures, which often center on improved educational and job opportunities. Some pointed to sacrifices they were making in their own lives for the future benefit of the children.

“I am old, so I came here for my children. That is the thing– We must pay dearly for it when we first came here, but since then, we have seen that life here is wonderful.” – 59-year-old Vietnamese immigrant man in California

“I want my daughter to achieve what I couldn’t…I want her to be better, so she doesn’t have to go through what I went through” – 32-year-old Mexican immigrant woman in California

“…I will not change anything for my kids or for myself. I think it didn’t work out like I expected to do, but I don’t regret it because my kids have the better chance to have a better education system.” – 42-year-old Ghanian immigrant woman in California

“These children, they were born there; they have the opportunity; they get the opportunity, they go to school for free; they get food when they get food; they don’t have these problems. I can say yes, their lives are better than before the life I had.” – 48-year-old Haitian immigrant woman in Florida

How Are Immigrants Faring Economically?

Like many U.S. adults overall, immigrants’ biggest concerns relate to making ends meet: the economy, paying bills, and other financial concerns. When asked in the survey to name the biggest concern facing them and their families in their own words, about one-third of immigrants gave answers related to financial stability or other economic concerns. No other concern rose to the level of financial concerns, though other common concerns mentioned include health and medical issues, safety, work and employment issues, and immigration status.

In Their Own Words: Biggest Concerns Facing Immigrant Families Are Economic

In a few words, what is the biggest concern facing you and your family right now?

“Low income, hard to survive as day to day cost of living is going up” – 65 year old Colombian immigrant man in Texas

“There are a lot of expenses. Groceries and gas prices are at a high price. It gets overwhelming with all the bills and trying to save money in this economy right now.” – 50-year-old Pakistani immigrant man in California

“High prices for rents and new homes” – 55-year-old Congolese immigrant man in Florida

“Retirement– will I need to keep working until I die?” – 64-year-old Dutch immigrant man in Colorado

“Biggest concern is with the inflation. It’s hard to keep up with buying groceries, gas paying the bills paying the mortgage and trying to live paycheck to paycheck worrying about if you’re gonna be able to afford paying the next bill.” – 35-year-old Mexican immigrant man in Nevada

“The house payment. The interest. Everything is really expensive. The food and the university for my son.” – 51-year-old Mexican immigrant woman in California

One in three immigrants report difficulty paying for basic needs. About one in three immigrants (34%) say their household has fallen behind in paying for at least one of the following necessities in the past 12 months: utilities or other bills (22%), health care (20%), food (17%), or housing (17%). The share who reports problems paying for these necessities rises to about half among immigrants who have annual household incomes of less than $40,000 (47%). The shares who report facing these financial challenges are also larger among immigrants who are likely undocumented (51%), Black (50%), or Hispanic (43%), largely because they are more likely to be low income. Additionally, four in ten immigrant parents report problems paying for basic needs.

Beyond having trouble affording basic needs, a sizeable share of immigrants report they are just able to or have difficulties paying monthly bills. Nearly half (47%) of immigrants overall say they can pay their monthly bills and have money left over each month, while four in ten (37%) say they are just able to pay their bills and about one in six (15%) say they have difficulty paying their bills each month. Affordability of monthly bills varies widely by income as well as race and ethnicity. For example, only about a quarter (27%) of lower income immigrants say they have money left over after paying monthly bills compared with eight in ten (80%) of those with at least $90,000 in annual income. About six in ten immigrants who are White or Asian say they have money left over after paying their bills each month compared with four in ten Hispanic immigrants and one-third (32%) of Black immigrants, reflecting lower incomes among these groups.

Despite these financial struggles, close to half of immigrants say they send money to relatives or friends in their country of birth at least occasionally . Overall, about one in three (35%) immigrants say they send money occasionally or when they are able. Much smaller shares report sending either small (8%) or large (2%) shares of money on a regular basis, and overall, most immigrants (55%) do not send money to relatives or family outside the U.S.

Similar shares of immigrants report sending money to their birth country regardless of their own financial struggles. About half (49%) of those who have difficulty paying their bills each month say they send money at least occasionally, as do 44% of those who say they just pay their bills and the same share of those who have money left over after paying monthly bills. Two-thirds (65%) of Black immigrants say they send money to their birth country at least occasionally, while about half (52%) of Hispanic immigrants and four in ten Asian immigrants (42%) report sending money. A much smaller share (24%) of White immigrants say they send money to the country where they were born.

What Are Immigrants’ Experiences In The Workplace?

Two-thirds of immigrants say they are currently employed, including nearly seven in ten of those under age 30, about three quarters of those between the ages of 30-64, and a quarter of those ages 65 and over. The remaining third include a mix of students, retirees, homemakers, and few (6%) unemployed immigrants. A quarter of working immigrants say they are self-employed or the owner of a business, rising to one-third (34%) of White working immigrants and nearly three in ten (27%) Hispanic working immigrants. Jobs in construction, sales, health care, and production are the most commonly reported jobs among working immigrants. KFF analysis of federal data shows that immigrants are more likely to be employed in construction, agricultural, and service jobs than are U.S.-born citizen workers.

About a quarter of working immigrants feel they are overqualified for their job, rising to half of college-educated Black and Hispanic immigrants. A majority of working immigrants overall (68%) say they have the appropriate level of education and skills for their job, while about a quarter (27%) say they are overqualified, having more education and skills than the job requires. Just 4% say they are underqualified, having less education and skills than their job requires. In an indication that some immigrants are unable to obtain the same types of roles they were educated and trained for in the countries they came from, the share who feel overqualified for their current job rises to 31% among immigrants with college degrees. It is even higher among college-educated Black (53%) and Hispanic (46%) immigrants.

In Their Own Words: Work Experiences From Focus Group Participants

In focus groups, many immigrants expressed a desire to work and willingness to work in industries like construction, agriculture, and the service sector, which are often physically demanding. Some also described taking jobs that required less skills and education compared to those they held in their country of birth.

“We are the ones that work on the farms. We are the ones that cannot call out. We are the ones that even if our kids are sick, we can’t call our boss and say I can’t make it to work.” – 38-year-old Nigerian immigrant woman in New Jersey

“Yes, we have to put our effort in. It is more demanding. My hands and feet are sore. In exchange, I have a satisfactory level of income.” – 49-year-old Vietnamese immigrant woman in Texas

“…in Mexico, I was a preschool teacher. Being undocumented, obviously, you can’t work in the area you studied in, so now, I do cleaning.” – 36-year-old Mexican immigrant woman in Texas

“I used to work a white-collar job, now I do manual labor. My major used to hurt my mind, now it’s my arms and legs.” – 41-year-old Vietnamese immigrant woman in Texas

“My job entails picking up trash and cleaning toilets. I don’t like doing that. Who likes cleaning toilets? Who likes picking up other people’s trash, right? I don’t like it, but I’m in this job out of necessity.” – 20-year-old Honduran immigrant woman in California

“I only had [one] job back in Vietnam. Here I need to do four: a nanny, a maid, a house cleaner and a main job.” – 41-year-old Vietnamese immigrant woman in Texas

“The work in the field is hard. When it’s hot out, it gets up to 100 or 104. People work with grapes, so they pick the grapes. They work in the sun. There’s no air…. Snakes come out. Whatever comes out, you just keep picking with the machine. Snakes, mice, whatever. So, it’s hard. It’s hard.” – 32-year-old Mexican immigrant woman in California

Overall, about half of employed immigrants report working jobs that pay them by the hour (52%), one third say they are paid by salary (32%), and 15% report being paid by the job. However, these shares vary by income, immigration status, educational attainment, and race and ethnicity. Compared to immigrants with higher incomes, immigrants with lower incomes are more likely to be paid by the hour (63% of immigrants with annual household incomes of less than $40,000) or by the job (24%) than receive a salary (13%). Immigrants who are likely undocumented (30%) are about twice as likely as those with a green card or visa (14%) or naturalized citizens (12%) to report being paid by the job, and about half as likely to report being paid by salary (17%, 32%, and 36%, respectively). Immigrants with a college degree are more than three times as likely as those without a college degree to hold salaried jobs, (57% vs. 16%). Black and Hispanic immigrants are more likely to report working hourly jobs (69% and 60% respectively) than their White (42%) and Asian (40%) counterparts. Conversely, among those who are employed, almost half of Asian immigrants and more than four in ten White immigrants report being paid by salary compared with a quarter or fewer Black and Hispanic immigrants.

About half of working immigrants report experiencing discrimination at work. About half (47%) of all working immigrants say they have ever been treated differently or unfairly at work in at least one of five ways asked about on the survey, most commonly being given fewer opportunities for advancement (32%) and being paid less (29%) compared to people born in the U.S. About one in five working immigrants say they have not been paid for all their hours or overtime (22%) or have been given undesirable shifts or less control over their work hours than someone born in the U.S. doing the same job (17%). About one in ten (12%) say they have been harassed or threatened by someone in their workplace because they are an immigrant.

Highlighting the intersectional impacts of race, ethnicity, and immigration status, reports of workplace discrimination are higher among immigrant workers of color and likely undocumented immigrants. Majorities of Black (56%) and Hispanic (55%) immigrant workers report experiencing at least one form of workplace discrimination asked about. More than four in ten (44%) Asian immigrant workers also report experiencing workplace discrimination compared to three in ten (31%) White immigrant workers. About two-thirds (68%) of likely undocumented working immigrants report experiencing at least one form of unfair treatment in the workplace, with about half of this group saying they have been paid less or had fewer opportunities for advancement than people born in the U.S. for doing the same job. Undocumented immigrant workers often face even greater employment challenges due to lack of work authorization, which increases risk of potential workplace abuses, violations of wage and hour laws, and poor working as well as living conditions.

Limited English proficiency is also associated with higher levels of reported workplace discrimination. A majority (55%) of working immigrants who speak English less than very well (rising to 61% of Hispanic immigrants with limited English proficiency) report experiencing at least one form of workplace discrimination. In particular, immigrants with limited English proficiency are more likely than those who are English proficient to say they were given fewer opportunities for promotions or raises (38% vs. 27%) or were paid less than people born in the U.S. for doing the same job (34% vs. 24%).

Do Immigrants Feel Welcome In The U.S.?

Most immigrants feel welcome in their neighborhoods. Overall, two-thirds of immigrants say most people in their neighborhoods are welcoming to immigrants. Just 7% say people in their neighborhood are not welcoming, while one in four say they are “not sure” whether immigrants are welcome in their neighborhood. When it comes to the treatment of immigrants in the state in which they live, about six in ten immigrants say they feel people in their state are welcoming to immigrants, but 15% say their state is not welcoming and another one in four say they are “not sure.” When asked about whether they think most people are welcoming to immigrants outside of the state in which they live, about half (48%) of immigrants say they are “not sure” about this, which could reflect lack of experiences in other places.

Immigrants in Texas are much less likely than those in California to feel their state is welcoming to immigrants. Immigrants living in California and Texas, the two most populous states for immigrants, are about equally likely to say immigrants are welcome in their neighborhood. However, immigrants living in California are about 30 percentage points more likely than are immigrants living in Texas to say they feel people in their state are welcoming to immigrants (70% vs. 39%). Further, immigrants in Texas are more than three times as likely as those in California to say they feel their state is not welcoming to immigrants (31% vs. 8%).

What Are Immigrants’ Experiences With Discrimination And Unfair Treatment In The Community?

Despite feeling welcome in their neighborhoods, many immigrants report experiencing discrimination and unfair treatment in social and police interactions . About four in ten (38%) immigrants say they have ever received worse treatment than people born in the U.S. in at least one of the following places: in a store or restaurant (27%), in interactions with the police (21%), or when buying or renting a home (17%). In addition, about a third (34%) of immigrants say that since moving to the U.S., they have been criticized or insulted for speaking a language other than English, and a similar share (33%) say they have been told they should “go back to where you came from.”

Reports of discrimination and unfair treatment are more prevalent among people of color compared to White immigrants, illustrating the combined impacts of racism and anti-immigrant discrimination. For example, about one-third of immigrants who are Black (35%) or Hispanic (31%) and about a quarter (27%) of Asian immigrants say they have ever received worse treatment than people born in the U.S. in a store or restaurant, all higher than the share among White immigrants (16%). Notably, four in ten (38%) Black immigrants say they have ever received worse treatment than people born in the U.S. in interactions with the police, and almost half (45%) say they have been told they should “go back to where you came from.” Among Hispanic immigrants, about four in ten (42%) say they have been criticized or insulted for speaking a language other than English.

In Their Own Words: Experiences With Discrimination In The Community From Focus Group Participants

In focus groups, many immigrants shared their experiences with discrimination in the community.

“Sometimes, when you talk, the way some people will laugh. They’ll laugh at you, you say one word, they’ll be laughing, laughing, laughing. …I’m so very ashamed. I’m so ashamed, so you don’t want to talk.” – 46-year-old Ghanian immigrant woman in New Jersey

“I speak English, but obviously, I don’t speak it fluently. I have my accent, and you can tell that I’m Mexican. I’ve seen people make faces at me or whatnot.” – 37-year-old Mexican immigrant man in Texas

“We have our business around the corner. I left the house one day to go pick up my daughter, and my husband called me. There was a White guy yelling at my husband ‘Get out of my country.’ I said, ‘Tell him that it’s your country, too.’” – 36-year-old Mexican immigrant woman in California

“The guy was like…you guys should go back to your country. He used different words for us. Then he called the cops, and when the cops came, they didn’t listen to us. I was like, this is unfair. You could have listened to both sides.” – 38-year-old Nigerian immigrant woman in New Jersey

“But my son when he first came here, he did not know English. When he went to school, his classmates said, ‘You do not study well, you should go back to your country.’” – 54-year-old Vietnamese immigrant woman in California

One in four immigrants report being treated unfairly by a health care provider. In addition to discrimination at work and in community settings, a sizeable share of immigrants say they have been treated unfairly by a doctor or health care provider since coming to the U.S. Overall, among immigrants who have received health care in the U.S., one in four (rising to nearly four in ten Black immigrants) say they have been treated differently or unfairly by a doctor or other health care provider because of their racial or ethnic background, their accent or how well they speak English, or their insurance status or ability to pay for care. For more details about immigrants’ health and health care experiences, read the companion report here.

What Language Barriers Do Immigrants With Limited English Proficiency Face?

Over half of immigrants with limited English proficiency report language barriers in a variety of settings and interactions. Overall, about half of all immigrants have limited English proficiency, meaning they speak English less than very well. Among this group, about half (53%) say that difficulty speaking or understanding English has ever made it hard for them to do at least one of the following: receive services in stores or restaurants (30%); get health care services (31%); get or keep a job (29%); apply for government assistance with food, housing, or health coverage (25%); or get help from the police (22%).

Language barriers are amplified among those with lower levels of educational attainment as well as those with lower incomes. Among immigrants with limited English proficiency, those who do not have a college degree are more likely to report experiencing at least one of these difficulties than those who have a college degree (57% vs. 39%). Similarly, lower income immigrants (household incomes less than $40,000) with limited English proficiency are more likely to report facing language barriers compared to their counterparts with incomes of $90,000 or more (61% vs. 38%).

Immigrant parents with limited English proficiency also face challenges communicating with their children’s school or teacher. Among immigrant parents with limited English proficiency (52% of all immigrant parents), about one in four (24%) say difficulty speaking or understanding English has made it hard for them to communicate with their child’s school or teacher.

How Do Confusion And Worries About Immigration Laws And Status Affect Immigrants’ Daily Lives?

About seven in ten (69%) immigrants who are likely undocumented worry they or a family member may be detained or deported. However, worries about detention or deportation are not limited to those who are likely undocumented. About one in three immigrants who have a green card or other valid visa say they worry about this, as do about one in ten (12%) immigrants who are naturalized U.S. citizens.

Some immigrants report avoiding certain activities due to concerns about immigration status. Fourteen percent of immigrants overall, rising to 42% of those who are likely undocumented, say they have avoided things such as talking to the police, applying for a job, or traveling because they didn’t want to draw attention to their or a family member’s immigration status. In addition, 8% of all immigrants say they have avoided applying for a government program that helps pay for food, housing, or health care because of concerns about immigration status, including 27% of those who are likely undocumented.

More than four in ten (45%) immigrants overall say they don’t have enough information about U.S. immigration policy to understand how it affects them and their family. Lack of immigration-related knowledge is strongly related to one’s immigration status. Nearly seven in ten (69%) immigrants who are likely undocumented say they don’t have enough information, while immigrants with a valid green card or visa are split, with one half saying they have enough information and the other half saying they do not. Being a naturalized U.S. citizen doesn’t completely diminish immigrants’ confusion about U.S. immigration policy, as nearly four in ten (39%) immigrants who are naturalized citizens also say they don’t have enough information. Beyond immigration status, the groups who are more likely to say they do not have enough information to understand how immigration policy affects them and their families include immigrants with limited English proficiency, those who have been in the U.S. for fewer than five years, have lower household incomes, and/or have lower levels of education.

Across immigrants, there is a general lack of knowledge about public charge rules. Under longstanding U.S. policy, federal officials can deny an individual entry to the U.S. or adjustment to lawful permanent status (a green card) if they determine the individual is a “ public charge ” based on their likelihood of becoming primarily dependent on the government for subsistence. In 2019, the Trump Administration made changes to public charge policy that newly considered the use of previously excluded noncash assistance programs for health care, food, and housing in public charge determinations. This policy was rescinded by the Biden Administration in 2021, meaning that the use of noncash benefits, including assistance for health care, food, and housing, is not considered for public charge tests, except for long-term institutionalization at government expense. The survey suggests that many immigrants remain confused about public charge rules. Six in ten immigrants say they are “not sure” whether use of public programs that help pay for health care, housing or food can decrease one’s chances for green card approval and another 16% incorrectly believe this to be the case. Among immigrants who are likely undocumented, nine in ten are either unsure (68%) or incorrectly believe use of these types of public programs will decrease their chances for green card approval (22%).

What Are Immigrants Plans And Hopes For The Future?

Six in ten immigrants say they plan to stay in the U.S. However, about one in five immigrants say they want to move back to the country they were born in (12%) or to another country (7%), and about one in five (21%) say they are not sure. The desire to stay in the U.S. varies by immigration status as well as by race and ethnicity. Nearly two in three immigrants who are naturalized citizens say they plan to stay in the country, compared to about half of immigrants who have a green card or valid visa (54%) or immigrants who are likely undocumented (52%). Black immigrants are somewhat more likely than immigrants from other racial or ethnic backgrounds to say they plan to leave the U.S. (28%). This includes 17% who say they want to move back to their country of birth and 11% who say they want to move to a different country.

Three in four immigrants say they would choose to come to the U.S. again. Asked what they would do if given the chance to go back in time knowing what they know now, three in four immigrants (75%) say they would choose to come to the U.S. again, including large shares across ages, educational attainment, income, immigration status, and race and ethnicity. While most immigrants share this sentiment, overall, about one in ten (8%) immigrants say they would not choose to move to the U.S. and about one in five (17%) say they are not sure whether they would choose to move to the U.S.

In Their Own Words: Focus Group Participants Say They Would Choose To Come To The U.S. Again

In focus groups, many participants said that despite the challenges they face in the U.S., life is better here than in their country of birth. When asked whether they would choose to come again, many said yes and pointed to how they have more opportunities for themselves and their children to have a better standard of living.

“So I will not change anything for my kids or for myself. I think it didn’t work out like I expected to do but I don’t regret it because my kids have the better chance to have a better education system”-42-year-old Ghanian immigrant woman in California

“I can say from my experience, it was really hard. God made everything right now because I have my papers. But I agreed to stay here for my children, so that they have a better life tomorrow. Because home is worse.” – 48-year-old Haitian immigrant woman in Florida

“Of course, I would still come to America. When I compare my current state with that of my old neighbors, who are my age as well, this place is a far cry from it.” – 40-year-old Vietnamese immigrant man in Texas

“We’re happy because we have a better life, even though we always miss our homeland. But it’s better.” – 35-year-old Mexican immigrant man in California

“I can say that America gives me many options, many opportunities, so far I like it. The only thing I don’t like is how the bills are here, they come fast when you make a small amount of money many times it goes through the bill.” – 30-year-old Haitian immigrant man in Florida

Immigrants represent a significant and growing share of the U.S. population, contributing to their communities and to the nation’s culture and economy. Immigrants come to the U.S. largely seeking better opportunities and lives for themselves and their children, often leaving impoverished and sometimes dangerous conditions in their country of birth. For many, this dream has been realized despite ongoing challenges they face in the U.S.

Many immigrants recognize work as a key element to achieving their goals and are willing to fill physically demanding, lower paid jobs, for which some feel they are overqualified. Immigrants are disproportionately employed in agricultural, construction, and service jobs that are often essential for our nation’s infrastructure and operations.

Despite high rates of employment and, for many, an improved situation relative to their county of birth, many immigrants face serious challenges in the U.S. Finances are a top challenge and concern, with many having difficulty making ends meet and paying for basic needs. Moreover, although most immigrants feel welcome in their neighborhood, many face discrimination and unfair treatment on the job, in their communities, and while seeking health care. Fears of detention and deportation are a concern for immigrants across immigration statuses, sometimes affecting daily lives and interactions, particularly among those who are likely undocumented.

Some immigrants face more challenges than others, reflecting the diversity of the immigrant experience and the compounding impacts of intersectional factors such as immigration status, race and ethnicity, and income. Black and Hispanic immigrants, likely undocumented immigrants, immigrants with limited English proficiency, and lower income immigrants face disproportionate challenges given the impacts of racism, fears and uncertainties related to immigration status, language barriers, and financial challenges. Many immigrants lack sufficient information to understand how U.S. immigration laws and policies impact them and their families. This confusion and lack of certainty contributes to some immigrants avoiding accessing assistance programs that could ease financial challenges and facilitate access to health care for themselves and their children, who are often U.S.-born.

As the immigrant population in the U.S. continues to grow, recognizing their contributions and challenges of immigrants and addressing their diverse needs will be important for improving the nation’s overall health and economic prosperity.

• Racial Equity and Health Policy
• Race/Ethnicity
• Quality of Life
• TOPLINE & METHODOLOGY
• U.S.-BORN ADULT COMPARISON

Also of Interest

• Understanding the Diversity in the Asian Immigrant Experience in the U.S.: The 2023 KFF/LA Times Survey of Immigrants
• Health and Health Care Experiences of Immigrants: The 2023 KFF/LA Times Survey of Immigrants
• Political Preferences and Views on U.S. Immigration Policy Among Immigrants in the U.S.: A Snapshot from the 2023 KFF/LA Times Survey of Immigrants

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Studying the Challenges of Immigrant and Refugee Students

by Tom Hanlon / Jun 12, 2020

The research of Dr. Liv Thorstensson Davila, whose promotion to associate professor in the College of Education becomes official later this summer, uncovers the challenges immigrants face and the factors that can lead to a successful transition to their new country.

Liv Davila’s passion for language learning and immigrant identity began long before she became a professor.

“I was born into this in a way,” says Davila, part of the Education Policy, Organization & Leadership Department in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . “My dad is an immigrant and my mom is not. I was immersed in cultural differences not just in terms of my family, but in terms of who my parents interacted with and the traveling we did when I was a kid.”  

One of Davila’s degrees is an MEd in Teaching English as a Second Language. Attaining and using that degree sparked even greater interest in language and language learning experiences of refugees and immigrants. “Not just in the language, but in the different levels of integration and adaptation in schools, the community, and the workforce,” she says.

Studying Non-native Learners

Davila, who earned her PhD in Education from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010, has spent the last 20 years studying immigrant groups in the US, in Sweden, and in other locales around the globe.

“What kids all over the world right now are experiencing because of COVID-19—like not being able to go to school, or being home with parents who can’t help them with remote learning—these are the kinds of things that most of the kids in my research have always faced,” Davila says. She argues that COVID-19 presents unique new challenges, however, including social isolation, concerns around access to health care, and parental job insecurity.

Davila conducted a study from 2016 through 2018, funded by the Spencer Foundation, on adolescent English learners from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The study focused on learners’ identities and learning within linguistically diverse high school classrooms in the US.

“A lot was going on politically at the time,” she says, referring to the US presidential election and the increased negative rhetoric and action regarding immigrants. “I saw these kids negotiate the discourse that was lobbed against them. They would try to save face or keep a low profile. But sometimes they would say really candid things to each other about how immigrants should be treated.” Since Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, the topic of immigration has been much more on the surface, Davila says. “It makes this kind of research even more important, because the groups I’ve been working with over the last 20 or so years feel stigmatized and will always feel stigmatized, but are stigmatized in more direct ways now,” she adds. “So as a researcher, I’ve definitely become more politicized in my thinking about my findings—about language, race, citizenship, and legal status—and even to some degree the questions I ask in my research. The topic is very sensitive, so I don’t ask without paying close attention to whether it’s appropriate to ask.”

Challenges Being Faced

Among the challenges immigrants and their families face, Davila says, are learning a new language; speaking with accented English (“If it’s accented, they’re more likely to be discriminated against”); having skills that don’t transfer and that lead to lower-paying jobs (“If you were trained as a doctor in your country, you more than likely would be a skilled doctor in the US, but your license won’t transfer, so you can’t practice here”); and differences in the way subject matter is taught (“That can be an obstacle, at least initially”).

“Many kids rely on public schools for two meals a day that they might not get at home,” Davila says. “So the importance of my research is not just about what kids are learning in school, but the role of schools in general, as places where they learn, of course, but where many other things are going on.

“How can the knowledge that I have about the populations I work with be applied in situations that most kids around the world are facing right now? At the core of all my research is this process of taking what’s happening at the micro level and widening the lens to see what it means for the larger community.” She believes that much can be learned from listening to people—the words they use, how they use them (in speaking and writing), and in the interactional contexts in which they are used.

One takeaway for teachers, Davila says, “is to, as much as possible, be linguistically responsive.” That means taking the time to understand each learner’s academic history and the language demands of the tasks they are asked to perform. “And,” she adds, “try to gain a bigger understanding of the complexity of family dynamics.” For example, she says, maybe some children are here in the States with their dad, but their mom is back in the Congo. Such a separation can have a strong ripple effect emotionally, physically, and academically on kids who are already facing challenges as immigrants.

These barriers can be overcome when children have the family and community stability, the access to learning resources at home and in the community, and the academic support they need to further their learning, Davila says.

Unique Experiences, but Common Needs

Davila works primarily with high school-aged immigrant students but cautions against categorizing people. “You can’t really lump groups together: ‘English learners’ or ‘immigrants’ or ‘US citizens,’” she says. “There’s such diversity within those categories; we need to understand the nuanced experiences of immigrants or refugees as individuals and as groups.

“People come from different places with their own histories. They come here, or wherever, to settle, and their experience will be different from other immigrants. But there are some common threads that come out of that. Regardless of a person’s language, background, or immigration history, that person will still have basic needs in school—language support, caring adults, that kind of thing.”

During her research, Davila has discovered an increased understanding of the importance of immigrants maintaining their first language, even as they learn a second. “You see more dual language or bilingual programs now than you did 10 years ago,” she says. “Society is beginning to see linguistic diversity as a resource rather than a hindrance.”

Current Research

In her current work with immigrants, she is looking at the role of family with regard to learning, family interactions with teachers, and parent beliefs about school.

“Parents are really invested in their kids’ education,” Davila says. “They want them to succeed here in the US. But there’s often a lot of conflict around how to do that. Many families face complications around income and job loss and legal status and family separation. All of this impacts a child’s experience in school.

“I’m looking into a variety of things that factor into kids’ experiences in school, and also looking at the community health side of things as well—health literacy, health practices in the home or community, and teaching kids how to be healthy in ways that are meaningful to them.”

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Pressures of being a first generation American-born citizen

Everyone deals with struggles when coming across certain obstacles at some point in their lives. However, there are people that are constantly feeling a weight on their shoulders due to the pressure of their parents. Not just any parents, but immigrant parents.

Many of our university’s students, including myself, are first generation American- born citizens. A great part of the reason why children of immigrant parents attend school is for their parents. There is a sort of duty first generation children have in regards to what their parents may think. For example, our parents travel hundreds of thousands of miles from their homeland to a foreign country in hopes that they will have a better future.

I feel that I have no other choice but to continue going to school and getting my degrees, and having a successful life in order to make my parents proud. My father always mentions my future in education and plans out where he seems my life going. I always feel a pressure to please my parents because they gave up so much to come to America.

Accounting major Manvel Dilovyan says, “Being the oldest son of immigrant parents who moved to America 24 years ago, I have always tried to make my parents proud and live up to their expectations. The reason why they moved here was so their children can have a better future and education. An experience I encountered was constantly filling out applications or calling vendors, for example, and speaking on their behalf.”

He explains that he is constantly seeking approval and hopes to make his parents proud. This is something most first generation children experience, they go to school and work hard in order to live out the “American Dream.”

The struggles that come with having immigrant parents may include constant seeking of approval, always having to be responsible, as well as immigrant parents discussing the future that they may have already planned for their child. More often than not, immigrant parents constantly remind their child, or children, that they expect big and great things from them in the future, which is part of why they came to this country.

Aside from having immigrant parents, there are students that also migrated to this country with their parents, or family, at a young age. Not only do they come to a new and foreign country, but there is also a huge language barrier.

CSUN alumna and former Communication Studies Lecturer, Nina H. Kotelyan says, “Struggles are amplified when you’re an immigrant. My family and I moved from Armenia to the United States in the mid ’90s with high hopes. We escaped war. When you have a background like that, you are taught to value and respect your cultural traditions, values, beliefs and attitudes. You’re taught these things because you’re under the constant threat of forgetting them as you acculturate to the American culture. I love my family history and the history of my Armenian people. Growing up, I was also taught to make my family proud. How could I not? My sweet mother left her entire family in a warzone for a better future for her children. How could I not make her move worthwhile?”

Those of us who have immigrant parents know what it is like to feel the pressure. There are times when the child may feel like giving up because the pressure to succeed and make his or her parents proud might be too much to handle.

Kotelyan says, “My biggest struggle was finishing graduate school & learning to truly live in this highly competitive & individualistic American culture. With the idea of making my parents proud at the forefront of my path, I learned to juggle multiple roles and identities,” she continues,”When you’re young, the culture shock doesn’t feel real. The culture shock felt real when I entered the real world as an adult. For the record, the culture shock is omnipresent. It never goes away. But, we learn to manage it every day of our lives to make our parents proud. My parents gave up their home in exchange for a future for their children, as did many immigrant parents. My heart, of course, goes out to them.”

There is no secret that CSUN has an immensely diverse student population and various services the university provides for them. One worth mentioning assists “historically low-income, historically educationally disadvantaged, first-generation college students; a population that not only reflects the diversity of CSUN’s feeder communities but also the diversity of the University itself,” as stated on the Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) website. The program provides mentoring, application assistance, as well as financial support through the EOP Grant for those who are eligible.

Living the life of a child with immigrant parents can be difficult and full of obstacles; however, the outcome of the journey will hopefully lead to making parents proud.

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Kids Count: Immigrants and Their Children Face Challenges on Path to Opportunity

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Children of immigrants are more likely to struggle in school and more likely to live in poverty, a new Annie E. Casey Foundation report concludes.

The report, Race for Results: Building a Path to Opportunity for All Children , examines the disparities in opportunities for children of immigrants and explores the toll the threat of losing their parents to deportation or detention can take on those children.

Nationally, there are 18 million children who live with immigrant parents. The vast majority of these children, 88 percent, are U.S. citizens; at least 5 million of them have at least one parent who is undocumented.

The report concludes that limited opportunities available to immigrants and their children can complicate their lives—and argues that addressing their needs simultaneously can improve the educational and economic well-being of both generations.

“We need all children to reach their full potential if we are to reach ours as a nation,” the report authors wrote. “Children in immigrant families, like their predecessors in previous centuries, will end up contributing to the nation’s prosperity if given a chance.”

Children of immigrants often face roadblocks—such as poverty and lack of access to early-childhood education—along their path to reaching that potential. They represent less than a quarter of the nation’s population of children, but account for nearly a third of those from low-income families, the report found.

On average, children of immigrants are also more likely to struggle in school and on standardized tests. The Casey Foundation report found that a smaller percentage of English-language-learner students from immigrant families score at or above proficient on state reading and math tests when compared to students from non-immigrant families.

To complicate matters, past research and analysis has found that many schools are unprepared to address the needs of immigrant students . A 2016 report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a research and policy analysis group at the University of Washington, found that new student populations often tax districts’ funding sources, highlight the need for a more diverse teaching corps, and reveal divisive community sentiment about immigrants.

To address these issues, the report recommends that local, state, and federal governments work to:

• Pass immigration policies that help keep families together when making decisions about deporting or detaining parents.
• Knock down the language and cultural barriers that can keep immigrant families from enrolling their children in Head Start programs or using child-care subsidies to access quality early-childhood education programs that can help narrow achievement gaps.
• Link more immigrant parents with workforce development and basic adult education programs, and help them understand what public programs, such as food and housing assistance, are available to them.

The “Race for Results” report details the disparity in opportunities that exist for different groups of children in every state across the country. Over the six years that the Casey Foundation has tracked data, disparities between racial groups have persisted despite improvements in overall child well-being.

Here’s a look at the report .

For Further Reading and Viewing

Refugee Students Don’t Negatively Affect the Education of Peers, Study Finds

How Should Schools Respond to the Concerns of Undocumented Families?

Election’s Intolerant Tone Stoke Fears for Latino Students

In U.S. Schools, Undocumented Youths Strive to Adjust

For Schools With Child Immigrants, What Resources Are Available?

Suburban Schools Unprepared for Influx of Immigrant Students

To Help Language-Learners, Extend Aid to Their Families Too, Study Argues

Image: Annie E. Casey Foundation 2017 Race for Results: Building a Path to Opportunity For All Children

A version of this news article first appeared in the Learning the Language blog.

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7 Migrants Share Their Stories of Struggle and Resilience

Author: Joe McCarthy

Oct. 29, 2019

There are more than 258 million migrants in the world. A growing proportion of them are migrating by irregular means, secretly crossing borders, scaling fences, or contacting smugglers who ship them across bodies of water, deserts, and conflict zones. They risk violence, detention, exploitation, enslavement, and death. They often leave their families and friends behind. Their journeys usually burden them with debt.

When they arrive in a new country, these migrants often live in the shadows, unable to get identification paperwork, legal protections, and other safeguards of citizenship. As a result, they often work in low-paying, exploitative jobs and have trouble finding shelter, support networks, and accessing other basic human rights. 

To make matters worse, they’re regularly vilified and face routine discrimination.

“You abandon everything you’ve ever known, and come to a foreign land, only to be subjected to all types of discrimination and violations,” Yerima, a migrant from Togo who traveled to Spain , told the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The UNDP recently surveyed 1,970 migrants from 39 African countries who traveled to 12 European countries. Their voices are included in a sweeping new report on irregular migration, its causes and consequences, its geopolitical ramifications, and how it can be humanely addressed. 

The report, Scaling Fences: Voices of Irregular African Migrants to Europe , relied on migrants sharing their experiences. Here are some of their stories, as told to the UNDP  and provided to Global Citizen for publication.

Aziz Abdoul, Senegal to France

I had a decent life back home in Senegal and ran two businesses. But in 2008, I made the decision to travel.

Not because I was facing difficulties or had financial troubles. I wanted to travel because I wanted to experience other cultures. I wanted to live and work in a country that wasn’t my own. I always saw foreigners come to visit Senegal, but I had no idea what their part of their world was like.

I am an artist at heart, and I yearned to experience artistic expressions that were different from my own.

I wanted to see more, explore more, and learn more. That was the main motivation behind me leaving. Now that I am here in Europe, I am making the best of my situation. Faith and hope keep me going. Faith kept me alive during the difficult journey here, and hope allows me to look forward to a brighter future.

Fortunately, I’ve been able to make a reputation for myself here, performing and showcasing my artwork to large audiences. This is what I have always wanted to do — share my culture with the world.

Music is my escape. When I play, I am transported into a different realm. I want people who listen to my music to forget their earthly worries. There is so much suffering in the world.

Ultimately, we all want the same things in life: good health, decent jobs, liberty, and freedom to pursue opportunities for our families and ourselves. And because many people don’t feel they have that in Africa, they come to Europe. If I had one thing to say to our African leaders, it is that the population does not belong to you. You belong to the people. You have to respect them and create opportunities for them so they are not risking their lives.

Carole, Cameroon to France

I never attended school. My father believed there was no value in girls attending school. He said I should focus instead on tending the house and preparing for marriage. And yet, I always knew my father was wrong. I longed to get educated. I knew that if you could not read or write, your place in life would be meaningless. In my community, women and girls who attended school were much better off than those who didn’t.

The thought of leaving my country had never crossed my mind. But then, I met some friends who encouraged me to consider leaving. They said if I left, I could have a better life. They said I would make a lot of money styling hair in Europe and even learn other skills.

And so I left Cameroon and eventually ended up in Algeria, where I spent two years. Algeria is a challenging country for blacks because of the level of racism there. While in Algeria, I had a baby boy.

When he was just 3 months old, I embarked on the journey to Europe. We spent three days traveling by sea. It was extremely cold and we had no vests, no blankets, no protection, and very little food. I would not advise even my worst enemy to take this journey.

I landed in Italy and spent six very difficult months in a camp. We were mistreated, fed spoiled food, and received inadequate healthcare when we were sick. The conditions were inhumane.

In the end, I made it to France. I like it here. My wish is to get my work papers and get training in something other than styling hair. No matter what, I know that my son will have a better future than I did.

Helen, Nigeria to Italy

Staying in Africa meant one of two things: getting married at a young age, or getting pregnant at a young age. Both would have shattered my dreams. I did not want to waste my potential.

I made my way to Europe via Libya. I spent a year working in Libya as a cleaner and maid for a wonderful Spanish family. They treated me well and saw me as their daughter. A conflict erupted in Libya and the family had to leave for Spain. They asked me to go with them, but I was unable to leave because I did not have enough time to get a passport. They left and promised to file for me to join them in Spain.

I did not wait for the family to send me an invitation to Spain. I took it upon myself and found my way to Italy. I arrived in 2014 and am still trying to navigate my way through. I don’t have many complaints about being here. Sometimes I feel accepted and other times I feel like a foreigner. The main issues I have are the barriers to fully integrate into Italian society, especially the language barriers if you want to study or apply for job. Fortunately, I was able to find a job working as a secretary at a government agency. I also sing and write, so I volunteer at the refugee center as a choir director, and style hair on the side to earn extra money.

But these are all temporary situations. I want to further my studies and build my professional career. I have thought about exploring other countries like Germany, Sweden, or Canada that may have better opportunities. I am destined for far greater things in life. And I know I will accomplish my goals.

Kone, Ivory Coast to France

I wanted a life where I could earn a living and support my mother and siblings. I felt sad that my country did not provide young people like me the promise of a brighter future, and I was determined to take matters into my own hands.

I have been in France for two years now. I have a small community of friends, mostly from various parts of Africa, but I also have French friends. It can get very lonely here. I did not expect how hard it would be to settle into French society.

When you hear about Europe, you think it is filled with endless opportunities. And there are opportunities, but they are not immediately available when you come into the country the way I did. You’re not treated like a citizen. There are many hurdles before you can start to lead a normal life.

When I first arrived, I spent time in a shelter. I got into trouble and was arrested and spent time in prison, and I had a hard time finding my way. But eventually, I was able to get my residence permit. I miss my mother a lot. I call her often. I tell her about my life here in France. I tell her that everything is OK even when it’s not.

I have always dreamt of becoming a footballer like Yaya Toure. He’s Ivorian too. I admire his life story, how he became a footballer. But I know that becoming a football star is hard, so I’m putting my energy into something more attainable. I’m training at a restaurant because I like to cook. My wish is to open a restaurant one day. I’m not sure what I would call it — maybe Chez Kone. But one thing I do know is that African food will be served.

Miguel, Cameroon to France

My life back in Cameroon was not a great one. I grew up very poor and life in the village was hard. I couldn’t afford school. If I had work, I would not have left my country. But when things are not going well and you feel stuck, you are forced to leave for better opportunities elsewhere, no matter the cost. It’s not a matter of choice, it’s a matter of survival.

I am happy with my new life in France. I have all the things that I used to dream of: a job, a house, a car, access to public and social services — I am comfortable. I may not be at home, but I feel at home here. I spend most of my time working because for me, work is a luxury and something I take seriously. I don’t take for granted that I came here and found a way to gain employment and earn a living.

It’s a shame that one has to travel thousands of kilometers to someone else’s land to create a better life. I blame our leaders for most of these problems and if I had the chance to exchange words with African leaders, I would probably need an eternity.

It’s actually very simple: create opportunities for young people. Make sure our young children are in school and not out selling in the streets. Empower our girls and women. Provide access to services like health care. We should take these basic issues as human rights.

I tell my family and friends at home the truth about life here. I tell them about the difficulties of integrating and succeeding in this society. I feel it is my responsibility to be honest about the conditions, so they can make informed decisions. At the same time, I have been where they are now, and I know how trapped one can feel.

Vivian, Nigeria to Spain

My parents decided to send me to my aunt in Spain to find work. I arrived in Spain and spent one month in a refugee camp before being granted residence and a work permit.

My aunt and her husband picked me up from the train station in Madrid and I was asked me to hand them over all my documents. I soon learned the truth: my aunt and her husband were running a sex trafficking ring and tricked vulnerable young girls from Africa into sex work.

Never did I imagine that someone my parents trusted would be involved in trafficking.

I rejected customers and earned almost no money. My aunt decided she could not afford to keep me. We agreed that I would go to Valencia and find work to pay back the money for the journey to Spain — $20,000.

In Valencia, I went to a home that she had recommended — only to discover that the girls living there were all sex workers working for my aunt. I knew this was not a life for me, but I had no choice: without my papers, I couldn’t apply for formal jobs. After a few months, I met a man who wanted to help me.

He helped pay down my debt to my aunt until we paid it off entirely. After that, I cut off all ties with her.

I had my first daughter in 2003, and my second seven years later. My partner and I separated.

It has been almost 20 years since I came to Europe, and I've been through hell. There were days we were homeless with nothing to eat. But my daughters are my greatest blessings.

These days, I am taking classes to further my education. I want to protect girls that are at risk of trafficking.

I also want to fight for migrant rights.

Yerima, Togo to Spain

I lived with my parents until I was 18 years old. I worked as a driver but earned very little. So, I decided to leave for Europe. I went to Dakar where I spent six months, then to Mauritania. From there, I entered Europe via the Mediterranean.

A man is supposed to eat three times a day. If you have a family, you have to ensure they have food, shelter, medicine, and education. If you cannot provide those basic necessities for your family because of lack of opportunities in your country, then you have to try and find a way somewhere else.

I have a young daughter. When I left Togo, my daughter was just 2 months old. People may ask what kind of father I am, to leave behind my wife and infant daughter. But what kind of a father would I be, if I stayed and couldn’t provide them a decent life?

So, you abandon everything you’ve ever known, and come to a foreign land, only to be subjected to all types of discrimination and violations. The very rights that international organizations are meant to protect. But there is nothing you can do about it, because you’re not in your own land.

Many of our brothers and sisters died trying to come here. For what? We are losing our best and brightest to the Mediterranean Sea; to slavery and exploitation; and to European countries where their talents are being wasted. How can we say that Africa is a continent of young people, and that young people are the future, when we are losing so many?

Here’s why immigrant students perform poorly

Ph.D. Student in Educational Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin

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Molly McManus does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Immigrant students in the United States consistently perform worse academically than nonimmigrant students. This achievement gap is evident as early as preschool and only grows as immigrant students advance through high school.

But, what causes the achievement gap?

One notion that fuels anti-immigrant attitudes is the belief that immigrant students perform poorly because of their immigrant backgrounds.

This is misguided.

As a former teacher and now researcher of immigrant families, I am familiar with concerns about low academic achievement among immigrant students. However, as my work shows, immigrant students face barriers beyond their immigrant backgrounds, including restrictive learning environments in their classrooms.

A multitude of barriers

Research has also shown that immigrant students tend to be concentrated in poor neighborhoods , speak a language other than English at home and enter school later than nonimmigrant students .

We know that poverty , language barriers and low levels of preschool enrollment contribute to poor academic performance.

There is also another, lesser known, factor at work here: school and teacher attitudes toward immigrant students. Immigrant students have been shown to perform worse when their schools or teachers harbor negative attitudes about their presence and abilities.

A recent report on immigration and education from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows the extent of the immigrant achievement gap.

According to the report, in 2012, students in the U.S. with an immigrant background performed worse than nonimmigrant students on the Programme for International Student Assessments (PISA), a test administered to 15-year-olds in 65 countries, including the U.S. Immigrant students in the U.S. scored about 20 points lower in reading and 15 points lower in math.

Many people are also concerned that immigrant students negatively impact the education systems that they enter.

Current research, however, shows the opposite.

The presence of immigrant students does not negatively affect overall school performance. Rather, schools that serve poor families tend to underperform and immigrant families are often poor.

Poverty affects over half of immigrant families. In 2013, 54 percent of immigrant families in the US qualified as low-income.

In fact, when family income is taken into account, the difference between scores from immigrant students and nonimmigrant students on the PISA disappears.

Language and preschool

Immigrant students also struggle when they do not have mastery of the dominant language in their new country.

In 2015, nearly 10 percent of students in K-12 in the U.S. were classified as English Language Learners. These language barriers explain a larger portion of the achievement gap than immigrant backgrounds.

Also, low levels of enrollment in early childhood programs have a huge impact. Early entrance into the school system increases students chances for success in later grades. However, many immigrant families do not enroll their children in preschool programs because of families’ legal status, language barriers and cultural sensitivities .

Discrimination and racism

There is actually more evidence to show that schools in the U.S. are negatively impacting immigrant students and their families , not the other way around.

Many immigrant students face discrimination and racism in the form of segregation and hostile attitudes at their schools. Also, many schools don’t offer essential resources , like family liaisons or other social services, that would support immigrant families as well as the larger school community.

Immigrant students are also affected by a rarely acknowledged but equally important factor: the receptiveness of their host country’s education system, also known as the “ context of reception .”

When teachers and staff have negative views of immigrant children and their families, it has a negative impact on the academic performance of immigrant students.

Negative views are particularly harmful when they involve deficit thinking , or the belief that immigrant students perform poorly because their families have less or know less.

Alternatively, immigrant students who enter a welcoming environment benefit from positive school outcomes. Research in education shows that students who enter positive contexts of reception are more motivated, better adjusted and more engaged in curriculum.

The OECD report also found that immigrant students who said they felt supported and cared for by their teachers scored higher on the PISA.

Value in diversity

Research shows that despite barriers, immigrant students often hold high aspirations for themselves. These high aspirations make them more likely to put in greater effort to take advantage of educational opportunities and succeed academically. This is part of a phenomenon known as the immigrant paradox .

Just consider this fact. Among low-income students who took the PISA, immigrants make up a larger share of high-performing students than nonimmigrants.

At a time when presidential candidates are threatening to build a wall along the US-Mexican border and governors are attempting to close their states to Syrian refugees , it is important to understand that immigrant students do not harm our education system or our communities. Instead, they bring valuable diversity.

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College Essay: My Parents’ Sacrifice Makes Me Strong

After living in Texas briefly, my mom moved in with my aunt in Minnesota, where she helped raise my cousins while my aunt and uncle worked. My mom still glances to the building where she first lived. I think it’s amazing how she first moved here, she lived in a small apartment and now owns a house. 

My dad’s family was poor. He dropped out of elementary school to work. My dad was the only son my grandpa had. My dad thought he was responsible to help his family out, so he decided to leave for Minnesota   because  of  many  work opportunities .   

My parents met working in cleaning at the IDS  C enter during night shifts. I am their only child, and their main priority was not leaving me alone while they worked. My mom left her cleaning job to work mornings at a warehouse. My dad continued his job in cleaning at night.   

My dad would get me ready for school and walked me to the bus stop while waiting in the cold. When I arrived home from school, my dad had dinner prepared and the house cleaned. I would eat with him at the table while watching TV, but he left after to pick up my mom from work.   

My mom would get home in the afternoon. Most memories of my mom are watching her lying down on the couch watching her  n ovelas  –  S panish soap operas  – a nd falling asleep in the living room. I knew her job was physically tiring, so I didn’t bother her.  

Seeing my parents work hard and challenge Mexican customs influence my values today as a person. As a child, my dad cooked and cleaned, to help out my mom, which is rare in Mexican culture. Conservative Mexicans believe men are superior to women; women are seen as housewives who cook, clean and obey their husbands. My parents constantly tell me I should get an education to never depend on a man. My family challenged  machismo , Mexican sexism, by creating their own values and future.  

My parents encouraged me to, “ ponte  las  pilas ” in school, which translates to “put on your batteries” in English. It means that I should put in effort and work into achieving my goal. I was taught that school is the key object in life. I stay up late to complete all my homework assignments, because of this I miss a good amount of sleep, but I’m willing to put in effort to have good grades that will benefit me. I have softball practice right after school, so I try to do nearly all of my homework ahead of time, so I won’t end up behind.  

My parents taught me to set high standards for myself. My school operates on a 4.0-scale. During lunch, my friends talked joyfully about earning a 3.25 on a test. When I earn less than a 4.25, I feel disappointed. My friends reacted with, “You should be happy. You’re extra . ” Hearing that phrase flashbacks to my parents seeing my grades. My mom would pressure me to do better when I don’t earn all 4.0s  

Every once in  awhile , I struggled with following their value of education. It can be difficult to balance school, sports and life. My parents think I’m too young to complain about life. They don’t think I’m tired, because I don’t physically work, but don’t understand that I’m mentally tired and stressed out. It’s hard for them to understand this because they didn’t have the experience of going to school.   

The way I could thank my parents for their sacrifice is accomplishing their American dream by going to college and graduating to have a professional career. I visualize the day I graduate college with my degree, so my  family  celebrates by having a carne  asada (BBQ) in the yard. All my friends, relatives, and family friends would be there to congratulate me on my accomplishments.  

As teenagers, my parents worked hard manual labor jobs to be able to provide for themselves and their family. Both of them woke up early in the morning to head to work. Staying up late to earn extra cash. As teenagers, my parents tried going to school here in the U.S .  but weren’t able to, so they continued to work. Early in the morning now, my dad arrives home from work at 2:30 a.m .,  wakes up to drop me off at school around 7:30 a.m . , so I can focus on studying hard to earn good grades. My parents want me to stay in school and not prefer work to  head on their  same path as them. Their struggle influences me to have a good work ethic in school and go against the odds.  

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8 Challenges of Growing Up as a Second-Generation Immigrant

Things about having immigrant parents that no one talks about..

Posted January 10, 2023 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

• Find a Codependency Therapist
• As a child to immigrant parents, you might have automatically blamed yourself for their struggles.
• If you were born to immigrant parents, you might have lived "between" two cultures all your life.
• Overcoming the trauma of being the second generation of immigrants is not only possible but essential.

Second-generation immigrants often wish their parents had been different. You may long for parents who share your intellectual level, values, and political or spiritual beliefs. In this post, we will discuss some of the challenges of having immigrant parents, including the ones that are often tabooed.

1. The Heaviness of Unspoken Guilt . Children naturally blame themselves for their parents' pain. Your unwarranted guilt is worse as a second-generation immigrant when you know that your immigrant parents came to a new country to "give you a better life.” As a child, you might have automatically blamed yourself for your parents' struggles because you thought you did something wrong or did not help enough. So you studied harder, did more housework, counseled them, and may even have become their emotional punching bag.

Unconscious guilt can manifest itself in unexpected ways. Even now, you may have trouble taking care of yourself and managing money. You may work too much and feel guilty when you relax or have fun. Despite your success, you feel like an imposter. You are wary of being vulnerable even in close friendships and romantic relationships .

2. Rootless Without Home. If you were born to immigrant parents, you might have lived "between" two cultures all your life. Unlike your parents, your sense of self does not revolve around your heritage from the old country. But neither is it a purely Eurocentric integration into the new country.

You may have been conditioned to behave a certain way toward your relatives but a very different way toward your friends. You have not had the opportunity to explore and solidify your identity if you constantly hide one or more aspects of your personality to fit in, like a chameleon. Even now, you could be struggling with identity confusion, having difficulty deciding on important life goals such as a career or a romantic partner.

3. The Intellectual Divide. You may find that while other families may have stimulating discussions about current events, your parents seem rooted in the past and unable to see beyond their narrow perspective. Your parents may have shown no understanding of diversity, feminism, the dark side of capitalism, etc., and so there are no intellectual or political discussions about these issues at home. The intellectual distance between you and your parents can make even the most mundane conversations tedious, if not painful.

You may feel compelled to challenge your parents when they say or do things against your values. However, if you try to correct them, they may become defensive and either avoid you or become combative.

Although you respect and love your parents very much, you may find it difficult to relax and be yourself around them. You feel existentially alone in your own home, but you have no one to talk to about it because it is such a taboo.

4. Not Seen for Who You Are. Your immigrant parents may not have been exposed to global perspectives that would help them understand your place in the world. They think you are "good" because you have good grades or a steady job, but that misses the point. They do not know how to appreciate your ability to think independently, your willingness to stand up for what you believe in, your commitment to social justice, or your courage to defend the truth.

When it comes to our own family, it can be exceedingly hurtful to hear that we are "too much" (too emotional, too dramatic, too demanding, too intense, too sensitive). The pain of not being recognized by, or even being rejected by, our own family can cause immeasurable suffering that lasts a lifetime, even if we try to rationalize it by saying that we are materially well provided for.

5. Trapped in Codependency. It is sadly common for parents and children in immigrant families to develop an unhealthy level of codependency. You may feel obligated to put your parent's needs before your own, blame yourself for their problems, worry about them constantly, feel responsible for their happiness , and neglect your own needs. Part of you wants to rescue or help your parents, but you're also angry and resentful because their needs stunted you.

6. Constant Disapproval. Your immigrant parents may judge who you're with, what you do, whether you're single, married, polyamorous , etc. Worse, you know that many of your so-called "choices" in fact just represent who you are. Parents may reject you because this new information contradicts what they are sure they know. Their unconscious bias hurts you, even if they don't mean to. Their casual comments, facial expressions, or punitive silences may reveal prejudices even when they say nothing.

7. Navigating Life with " Learned Helplessness ." If you were born into an immigrant family, you might have witnessed or experienced institutional discrimination , microaggressions , and racism too early, too soon, perhaps even as a child. Psychologists use the term "learned helplessness" to describe the effects of being regularly exposed to systemic oppression and injustice without being able to do anything about it. You may have internalized the idea that no matter how hard you try, you will ultimately get nowhere. This can affect your self-esteem and your ability to pursue goals as an adult. You may also feel powerless in the face of injustice or corruption. You cannot just dismiss them or pretend they do not exist, but you're paralyzed by an overwhelming sense that it is impossible to change the world.

8. Unmet Emotional Needs. Your immigrant parents may have struggled, but they never modeled what it was like to show or express feelings. What if grief kept them from working? What if they let out all their emotions and cannot control them, leading to a depressive breakdown? Because of these fears, they felt they had to suppress any burgeoning emotions. So, when you show vulnerable feelings such as shame or sadness, they do not know what to do. They may try to silence your feelings, so they do not have to face their own. They may tell you it's "bad" to show emotion , or punish or silence you to keep you from being expressive and spontaneous.

Furthermore, with a general lack of mental health awareness, your immigrant parents may misunderstand your depression as laziness, your eating disorder as defiance, your ADHD as a character flaw, etc. They may be unfamiliar with the idea of seeing a therapist or psychiatrist, let alone paying for such services.

Internalized beliefs that it is unacceptable to express feelings, have emotional needs, or be vulnerable can prevent you from developing meaningful relationships or finding fulfillment in life.

Discovering Strength and Peace as a Second-Generation Immigrant

You wish you had parents with whom you could have open, honest conversations about life and the world. But you are silenced for your loneliness because it feels wrong to be ungrateful. Transgenerational trauma can have devastating effects. But since we can't blame our parents forever, we must heal ourselves. Consider these questions: How do you approach authorities? What's your money mindset? Do you feel guilty when you outshine your siblings or parents? How well can you express vulnerabilities with intimate partners?

You may feel guilty or fearful when it's time to separate yourself from your parents' values, even if you logically know your feelings have no logical basis. If you follow your heart, you are afraid to break theirs. But if you ignore the existential call to be yourself, you may become physically or emotionally ill.

As you enter your second half of life, overcoming the trauma of being the second generation of immigrants is not only possible but essential. You can thrive by embracing repressed emotions and gifts. By acknowledging your history and struggles, sharing your true feelings, and overcoming generational trauma , you can build bridges between yourself and your family and contribute to your community.

Liem, R. (1997). Shame and guilt among first-and second-generation Asian Americans and European Americans. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 28(4), 365-392.

M Rothe, E., J Pumariega, A., & Sabagh, D. (2011). Identity and acculturation in immigrant and second generation adolescents. Adolescent psychiatry, 1(1), 72-81.

Phipps, R. M., & Degges‐White, S. (2014). A new look at transgenerational trauma transmission: Second‐generation Latino immigrant youth. Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, 42(3), 174-187.

Pumariega, A. J., Rothe, E., & Pumariega, J. B. (2005). Mental health of immigrants and refugees. Community mental health journal, 41(5), 581-597.

Imi Lo Imi Lo works with highly sensitive and emotionally intense people. She has two masters, one in mental health and one in Buddhist studies. Her books include Emotional Sensitivity and Intensity, and The Gift of Intensity.

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At any moment, someone’s aggravating behavior or our own bad luck can set us off on an emotional spiral that threatens to derail our entire day. Here’s how we can face our triggers with less reactivity so that we can get on with our lives.

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Struggles that immigrants face

It's hard coming into the U.S with no one to depend on. You face a lot of struggles when you have no one to depend on. Being a single mother is very hard when you're alone.

  It is hard for immigrants that come to America for a better life. They face many struggles like not knowing any English, leaving their families behind, and not knowing any one. A lot of people face these struggles and it’s not fair to them nor anyone.

If you don’t know English it’s very hard to find a job. Everyone in America speaks English and it’s a requirement to know English in most every job. You’re very lucky if you find a good job if you don’t speak English. When people come to America immigrants usually work on construction or work in farms. It is very dangerous because you could fall or hurt yourself. They should be able to work wherever they want, they shouldn’t feel the need to come to another place in order to have a “better life”.

A lot of people have to leave their families to have a “better life”. It’s usually the men that come and work in the U.S, but it can also be women. My mom had to leave her family to have a “better life”. She came into the U.S without knowing anyone. She did it all for me, so I wouldn’t have to worry about getting deported, not having any struggles. It was hard for her because she had no family to support her. She had me here in the U.S it was hard having a baby because she never had anywhere to leave me until she found a babysitter for me.

Going to a new place without knowing anyone is very hard. You have no one to help you out nor someone to count on. Not everyone has it easy. My mom always to me “don’t depend on anyone but yourself”. I never understood why she told me that until now.

Everyone should be grateful for where they are now because other people have it rough.

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Raised By Immigrant Parents: First Generation Mental Health

What's your struggle?

Immigrant parents often teach only what they’re taught. So how can their first generation children feel seen and supported in their mental health struggles?

Being raised by immigrant parents can come with numerous advantages. Our families are tight-knit; we’re connected to our roots; and we receive exposure to multiple cultural perspectives. This kind of background enriches kids’ lives.

In some circumstances, however, being first generation creates mental health hurdles. Our parents have high expectations of success for us. But many of our parents simply haven’t engaged with their own emotions, and don’t see why we have to address them. We can’t ignore the mental health challenges specific to being a child of immigrants–many of which come from avoiding emotional talk altogether. 

What’s it like to be raised by immigrant parents? 

Immigrant households tend to emphasize the importance of family, cultural connectivity, and religious heritage–all of which can bolster mental health. Having a clear cultural background helps define your identity, and helps you connect with others who share the same heritage. Being raised by immigrants, in some ways, helps you to stand out in a world of conformity, bringing important differences to the table. 

But while all of these qualities are positive, some traditional values can negatively impact a young adult’s mind. Some emotionally straining traditions include strict discipline, limited autonomy, and academic or financial pressure. The increased expectations of first generation kids, combined with our parents’ reluctance to address mental health, can set us up for major emotional struggle.

Controlling behavior

Controllingness is a negative trait common to immigrant parents that hurts a child’s development. Take a couple examples from my own childhood: I wasn’t allowed to have a sleepover with anyone as a child. I also never attended anyone’s birthday party because my parents didn’t know the other child’s family, and didn’t want to interact. I understand that my parents were being protective, but I know I missed out on key childhood experiences. 

This type of controlling behavior can extend past childhood, into young adulthood, too. Traditionally, young adults in a first generation immigrant household only leave the house to get married. However, a new generation of college students has been pushing the limits on autonomy and independent living. We’ve begun to set our own path, which, in a way, threatens tradition. 

When I moved away for college, my parents wanted me to come home every weekend. I understood that I was the first to leave home for reasons other than marriage, but to come home every single weekend was a major demand on my newfound freedom.

Limited autonomy

Limiting autonomy is another normalized negative value common within immigrant communities. Control and limited autonomy go hand in hand. For example, when I turned 16 and got my license, my mom started tracking my phone. Sure, I got a little bit more freedom, but it soon turned to paranoia because I felt my parents watching my every move. Loss of autonomy like this can lead to to depression and loss of identity.

Academic pressure

Academic pressures include pushing success onto the children of the family. As the daughter of immigrants, I understand the sacrifices behind my parents’ story; perhaps a little too well, in a way that induces guilt and pressure.

They have told me repeatedly that my education and success is the only way out of poverty–the same poverty they escaped from in their home country. Their wellbeing is on my back since their sacrifice, in theory, laid the foundation for my success. 

The education systems in our parents’ home countries are often not the best in the world, at least in my family’s experience. Instead of receiving a proper education, immigrant parents often began work at a young age in order to survive. 

Therefore, education is seen as the way out for the children of immigrants. My parents never directly pressured me, but I understood their expectations. The dependence on our success leads to a strain on first-generation American students. Due to our parents’ hard work, we have the privilege to be able to attend higher education institutions. Even if it doesn’t feel like the right path, we feel pressured to get the education our immigrant parents always imagined for us.

High expectations and fear of failure

My parents look to me to succeed, which adds an additional pressure on top of maintaining mental health and having a healthy social lifestyle.

As we children of immigrants grow older, we begin to fear our parents’ disappointment. We begin to fear failure. You might have the intrinsic motivation to succeed, but knowing that your parents’ future relies on your success has can send you into a depressive episode or worse. 

As first-generation Americans and first-generation students, there is no room for error. We cannot afford to fail. Our parents’ stories, their struggles, their sacrifices have given us incredible opportunities, and immense expectations to live up to.

Clashing expectations from family and mainstream culture

Many immigrants’ backstories consist of having to work from a young age in order to make a sustainable living in their new country. Thus, generational differences between immigrant parents and their children are significant. First-generation Americans grow up in a completely different environment and society than their parents did. There are different norms which immigrant parents aren’t aware of, or don’t care about. 

For example: the normal American teenage experience is something our immigrant parents were never introduced to. Immigrant parents tend to lack familiarity with the typical experiences of a high-schooler here. American standards can even clash with traditional norms, especially when it comes to the treatment of daughters versus sons. 

Gender-based double standards

First generation hispanic households tend to be more strict with the daughters of the household in contrast with the sons. Treatment of daughters tends to be more protective, strict, and controlling. The difference between this reality at home and mainstream assumptions underlie deep emotional struggle for daughters of immigrants. We don’t always have the same freedom as our peers, and comparison highlights the pain in that difference. 

Living in the constant clash between cultures is an exhausting experience. From academic pressures to dissonant cultural values, the mental strain on first-generation Americans and students is a significant one.

How do immigrant parents see mental health? 

Many people who come from an immigrant family recognize that parents tend to turn a blind eye to the negative values embedded in their culture. We tend to highlight the positives and hide the negatives, even behind closed doors, within our families. But when it comes to mental health, we desperately need openness. 

Due to the lack of awareness among immigrant parents, they may see depressive symptoms and mislabel them. They may call your symptoms “laziness” and dismiss the struggle. In their eyes, there’s no room for depression. The values they grew up with never let them consider what “mental health” really means. 

That brings up another unnamed pressure put on the first-generation Americans: to educate our immigrant parents on what our unimagined struggles consist of.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: immigrant edition

One concept I’ve personally thought about and have connected to my immigrant parents is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs . This concept depicts the different levels of human needs, and the idea is that you can’t address higher-level needs before meeting the more basic ones. 

When immigrant parents arrive in a new country, their struggle revolves around meeting the most basic of needs. They work hard, deny themselves comforts, to put food on the table and pay rent. In trying to secure these foundational survival needs, their emotional needs became low-priority. All of their hard work and sacrifice was needed secure the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid. 

Parenting style

Where do we, children, fall into this picture? Our parents covered an important level of basic needs for us, and now, we have the ability to grow and strive for self-actualization and self-awareness. Since they could not satisfy this level of emotional need, themselves, the lack of emotional fulfillment translates into their parenting styles. 

They may experience depression symptoms, but they probably aren’t cognizant enough to realize their own mental health struggles. They won’t make a bridge towards an actual solution. They’ll only teach what they have been taught. Repression and moving on without healing is an example of the way that immigrant parents react to mental health struggles. 

This cycle of generational repression is another negative emotional value within the Hispanic/Latinx community. Families don’t seem to have a way to communicate emotional needs. We don’t talk about it. We let it happen until the need to talk it out is gone. This cycle can lead to serious problems in a family’s dynamic; parents get involved once it is too late and the child’s mental state has worsened.

How do I start the conversation with my immigrant parents about mental health? 

First, you have to work up the courage and patience to gain their understanding. This is a serious topic, even though immigrant parents seem to dismiss it often.

After working yourself up to start the conversation… 

Lay out points about what depression is and the symptoms that accompany it. 

What is depression? 

Depression varies from person to person. Different symptoms may arise differently. You might experience a single depressive episode or suffer from chronic, clinical depression. One person’s depression may leave them fatigued and hopeless, while another’s drives them to keep busy to ignore the pain. Again, symptoms vary.

Signs of depression include but are not limited to: 

• Changes in sleep 
• Changes in appetite 
• Lack of concentration 
• Loss of energy 
• Hopelessness or guilty thoughts 
• Lack of interest in activities 

Tell them how depression has affected your life… 

Talk about which symptoms have been prominent in your experience. Some examples can include: 

• Not wanting to go to school 
• Not wanting to eat regularly 
• Struggling to maintain a daily routine 
• Struggling to get out of bed 

Show them you’re not alone in your struggle… 

Although the focus should be about your own struggles, it is sometimes easier to understand a new concept when it’s related to a larger population. For example… 

• List statistics relating to your community’s mental health 
• Do a little bit of research about your community’s mental health 
• For example: In a study, it was found that U.S. born Latinos were at a higher risk of depressive episodes than those who immigrated to the U.S

Introduce the differences brought on by culture and society… 

There is an obvious difference in societal upbringing from your parents generation to yours. 

• There are different expectations. 
• Although you are from a cultured household, American society has different norms that you experience no matter how traditional you may be 
• Different norms bring up identity issues, which may lead to a larger problem 

Are there any potential ways your family contributes to your mental health? 

The pressure to succeed is a huge weight to carry, but think about the other causes. What have your parents gone through that blurs their way of seeing the importance of mental health? What behaviors of theirs contribute most to your wellbeing (or lack thereof)?

Ask for what you want and need 

Think about solutions to what you’re going through…

• Family support and understanding
• Greater freedom and autonomy
• Professional help including therapy 

If you can’t make them see your struggle….

Seek help. Help doesn’t always have to be therapy. Finding someone who understands your struggle can be a useful way to air grievances. Whether it be a friend, a mentor or a sibling, it’s important to find someone who can help ease emotions.

Slip in statements about your feelings. Depression and mental health in general can be a very hard topic to speak about. If over time, parents begin to see a negative pattern, they’ll be sure to bring it up because it should concern them.

Understand their struggles. Immigrants have often had a difficult childhood of their own. They might not be able to understand your struggles if they never had theirs addressed either. 

This article is part of Supportiv’s Amplify article collection .

Read more on, similar articles, i hate myself: beat low self esteem + feeling broken, when model minority asian stereotypes define your identity, scorned for seeking help as a filipino american, mixed race mental health: thinking in brown and white, let's start the conversation.

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Trump start

Fear of uncontrolled immigration is upsetting the political landscape in the run-up to the presidential election.

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At a rally in December, former president Donald Trump went as far as to say that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

TURN ON SOUND

Americans’ mistrust of new immigrants is hardly new. In fact, it exhibits a striking resemblance to the prevailing fears 100 years ago.

The country might soon need to “station a soldier every hundred yards on our borders to keep out the hordes,” argued an article in Wisconsin in April of 1924.

Treating Japan in the same way as “ white nations, ” an Illinois newspaper cautioned in May of 1924, could allow Japanese immigrants to own land and seek the “ rights given white immigrants. ”

“ America, ” wrote James J. Davis, the secretary of labor, in the New York Times in February of 1924, should not be “ a conglomeration of racial groups, each advocating a different set of ideas and ideals according to their bringing up, but a homogeneous race. ”

How America tried and failed to stay White

100 years ago the u.s. tried to limit immigration to white europeans. instead, diversity triumphed., “i think that we have sufficient stock in america now for us to shut the door.”.

That sounds like Donald Trump, right? Maybe on one of his campaign stops? It certainly fits the mood of the country. This year, immigration became voters’ “ most important problem ” in Gallup polling for the first time since Central Americans flocked to the border in 2019. More than half of Americans perceive immigrants crossing the border illegally as a “ critical threat .”

Yet the sentiment expressed above is almost exactly 100 years old. It was uttered by Sen. Ellison DuRant Smith , a South Carolina Democrat, on April 9, 1924. And it helped set the stage for a historic change in U.S. immigration law, which imposed strict national quotas for newcomers that would shape the United States’ ethnic makeup for decades to come.

Immigration was perceived as a problem a century ago, too. Large numbers of migrants from Eastern and Southern Europe flocked to the United States during the first two decades of the 20th century, sparking a public outcry over unfamiliar intruders who lacked the Northern and Western European blood of previous migrant cohorts.

On May 15, 1924, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act , which would constrain immigration into the United States to preserve, in Smith’s words, America’s “pure, unadulterated Anglo-Saxon stock.”

“It is for the preservation of that splendid stock that has characterized us that I would make this not an asylum for the oppressed of all countries,” Smith continued , speaking of America not 40 years after the Statue of Liberty was erected in New York Harbor, with its open arms for all humankind. Immigration, Smith noted, should be shaped “to assimilate and perfect that splendid type of manhood that has made America the foremost Nation in her progress and in her power.”

The act set the rules of who’s in and who’s out. Here is what happened:

In the 1800s, most immigrants arriving in the United States came from Western and Northern Europe . By the early 1900s, that flow changed to Eastern and Southern European countries , such as Italy, Russia and Hungary.

The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act established narrow national quotas. Immigration from Asia and Eastern and Southern Europe was slashed to a trickle.

Western and Northern European countries such as Germany, Britain and Ireland were given the largest allowances.

The act did not set quotas for immigrants from the Western Hemisphere, including Canada, Mexico, and countries in the Caribbean and South America .

The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 undid the national quotas, and immigration surged afterward.

Despite continued attempts to preserve the nation’s White European identity, immigrants today come from a diverse range of nations, mostly in the Global South.

Fast-forward 100 years and the United States no longer has quotas. But it still has not landed on an immigration policy it can live with. Trump asks why the United States can’t take in immigrants only from “ nice countries, you know, like Denmark, Switzerland ,” instead of “countries that are a disaster.” President Biden, who not even four years ago wanted to grant citizenship to millions of unauthorized immigrants, today wants to “ shut down the border right now .”

All the while, desperate immigrants from around the world keep fleeing poverty, repression and violence, launching themselves into the most perilous journey of their lives to reach the United States.

The public conversation over immigration that has raged at least since the days of the 1924 Johnson-Reed law can explain Washington’s policy failure: There is no way America can reconcile the sentiments embodied by the Statue of Liberty — “Give me your tired, your poor,” etc. — with its deep-seated fear that immigrants will reshape its ethnic makeup, its identity and the balance of political power.

Try as they might, policymakers have always been unable to protect the White America they wanted to preserve. Today’s “melting pot” was built largely with policies that didn’t work. Millions upon millions of migrants have overcome what obstacles the United States has tried to put in their way.

Israel Zangwill’s play “The Melting Pot” — which opened at the Columbia Theatre in D.C. on Oct. 5, 1908 — has a narrow understanding of diversity by current standards. The play was an ersatz “Romeo and Juliet,” featuring a Jewish Russian immigrant and a Christian Russian immigrant. But it carried a lofty message. “Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians — into the crucible with you all!” trumpets David Quixano, the main character. “God is making the American.”

Americans, however, were already uncomfortable with that fluid sense of identity. In 1910, two years after the debut of Zangwill’s play, geneticist Charles Davenport founded the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. It provided the intellectual grounding for America’s increasingly overt xenophobia.

In “Heredity in Relation to Eugenics,” Davenport wrote that Italians had a “tendency to crimes of personal violence,” that Jews were prone to “intense individualism and ideals of gain at the cost of any interest,” and that letting more of them in would make the American population “darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial,” as well as “more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape, and sex-immorality.”

Harry Laughlin, another Cold Spring Harbor researcher, told members of the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee in 1922 that these new immigrants brought “inferior mental and social qualities” that couldn’t be expected “to raise above, or even to approximate,” those of Americans descended from earlier, Northern and Western European stock.

The Johnson-Reed Act wasn’t the first piece of legislation to protect the bloodstream from the outside world. That would have been the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which kept Chinese migrants out for six decades. In general, though, immigration law before World War I excluded people based on income and education, as well as physical and moral qualities — not on ethnicity and its proxy, nation of origin.

In 1907, “imbeciles, feeble minded persons, unaccompanied children under 17 years of age” and those “mentally or physically defective” were put on the excluded list, alongside women coming for “prostitution or for any other immoral purpose.” The Immigration Act of 1917 tried to limit immigration to the literate.

But the large number of migrants arriving from Eastern and Southern Europe since the turn of the 20th century refocused the national debate. In 1907, Congress established the Dillingham Commission , which would reach for arguments from eugenics to recommend choosing migrants to maintain existing American bloodlines via “the limitation of the number of each race arriving each year” to a percentage of those living in the United States years before. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 did just that, establishing the first specific national quotas.

In 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act completed the project, reshaping the nation’s identity over the next four decades. It set an overall ceiling of 165,000 immigrants per year, about 20 percent of the average before World War I, carefully allotting quotas for preferred bloodstreams. Japanese people were completely excluded , as were Chinese people. Elsewhere, the act established national quotas equivalent to 2 percent of citizens from each country recorded in the 1890 U.S. Census. Germans received 51,227 slots; Greeks just 100. Nearly 160,000 Italians had entered the United States every year in the first two decades of the century. Their quota was set at less than 4,000.

And, so, the melting pot was purified — and emptied: Two years after the Johnson-Reed Act, sociologist Henry Pratt Fairchild published “The Melting-Pot Mistake,” a reiteration of the racial logic that undergirded all the new restrictions. By 1970, immigrants made up less than 5 percent of the population, down from nearly 15 percent in 1910.

There can be “no doubt that if America is to remain a stable nation it must continue to be a white man’s country for an indefinite period to come,” Fairchild wrote . “An exclusion policy toward all non-white groups is wholly defensible in theory and practice, however questionable may have been the immediate means by which this policy has been put into effect at successive periods in our history.”

And yet perhaps the most important lesson to flow from this moment is that the levee didn’t hold. Today, immigrants are back at 14 percent of the population. And despite the repeated efforts over the decades to preserve the ethnic purity proposed in Johnson-Reed, the pot filled up with undesirables again. Migrants from Europe accounted for three-quarters of the foreign-born in 1960 but only 10 percent in 2022 .

The Statue of Liberty is arguably the nation’s most prominent symbol, representing America as a land of opportunity and refuge. But the nation’s tolerance of outsiders has mostly been shaped by baser instincts, a tug of war between the hunger for foreign labor to feed a galloping economy and the fear of how the newcomers might change what it means to be American.

Immigration restrictions relax when the immigrant population is comparatively small and jobs plentiful, and they tighten when the foreign footprint increases and jobs get relatively scarce. Muzaffar Chishti of the Migration Policy Institute points out that even recent migrants turn against newer cohorts, fearful that they may take their jobs and transform their communities.

Fifteen percent, Chishti suggests, might be the point when the uneasy equilibrium tips decidedly against newcomers. Foreign-born people amounted to about 15 percent of the population when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, and again when the Johnson-Reed Act was signed into law.

Restrictive immigration laws

were passed after the foreign-born

population reached 15 percent.

Share of the population born outside the United States

Celler Act,

Ultimately, policies

meant to preserve

a White America failed.

Share of the population that is not White

Source: Analysis of U.S. Census and American

Community Survey data through IPMUS

Restrictive immigration laws were passed

after the foreign-born population

reached 15 percent.

Ultimately, policies meant to preserve

Source: Analysis of U.S. Census and American Community Survey

data through IPMUS

Source: Analysis of U.S. Census and American Community Survey data through IPMUS

39% in 2022

15% in 2022

In the 1960s, when the foreign-born share was dropping to about 5 percent of the population, however, other considerations became more important. In 1965, the quotas established four decades earlier were finally disowned.

Their demise was, in part, a barefaced attempt to woo the politically influential voting bloc of Italian Americans, who had a hard time bringing their relatives to the United States under the 1924 limits. There was a foreign policy motivation, too: The quotas arguably undermined the international position of the United States, emerging then as a leader of the postwar order in a decolonizing world.

The story Americans most like to hear is that the end of the quotas was a natural outcome of the civil rights movement, in tension with the race-based preferences implicit in the immigration law. “Everywhere else in our national life, we have eliminated discrimination based on one’s place of birth,” Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy said in 1964. “Yet this system is still the foundation of our immigration law.”

But the most interesting aspect of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, which did away with the quotas, lies in what it did not try to change. Though the new immigration law removed quotas by nationality, it did not abandon the project of protecting the predominant European bloodstream from inferior new strains. It just changed the instrument: It replaced national quotas with family ties .

Rep. Michael Feighan, an Ohio Democrat who chaired the House subcommittee on immigration, ditched the original idea of replacing the nationality quotas with preferences for immigrants with valuable skills. In their place, he wrote in preferences for the family members of current residents, which ensured new arrivals remained European and White.

It was paramount to preserve America as it was. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who managed the passage of Hart-Celler through the Senate, promised his fellow Americans that the new legislation “will not upset the ethnic mix of our society.”

“This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions,” President Lyndon B. Johnson claimed on Oct. 3, 1965, as he signed the Hart-Celler Act into law at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. “It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power.”

That didn’t quite work out as planned. Migrants allowed in under Hart-Celler have ushered in an America that looks very different from the one Johnson addressed. Half of the foreign born today come from Latin America; about 3 in 10 from Asia. Fewer than 6 in 10 Americans today are White and not of Hispanic origin, down from nearly 9 in 10 in 1965. Hispanics account for about one-fifth of the population. African Americans make up nearly 14 percent; Asian Americans just over 6 percent.

Share of the population that

is not White or is Hispanic

Race-specific population includes Hispanics.

Other non-White

Native American

Multiple races

W hite Hispanic

Source: U.S. Census and American Community

Survey through IPUMS. Data through 2019,

the most recent comparable numbers.

White Hispanic

Source: U.S. Census and American Community Survey

through IPUMS. Data through 2019, the most recent

comparable numbers.

Share of the population that is

not White or is Hispanic

Source: U.S. Census and American Community Survey through IPUMS. Data through 2019, the most recent

And some of the old arguments are back. In 2017, the Harvard economist George J. Borjas published a tome about foreigners’ impact on the United States, in which he updated the debate over migrant quality to the post-1965 era: Newer cohorts, mostly from Latin America and other countries in the Global South were, he said, worse than earlier migrants of European stock. “Imagine that immigrants do carry some baggage with them,” he wrote. “That baggage, when unloaded in the new environment, dilutes some of the North’s productive edge.”

That the Hart-Celler law did, in fact, drastically change the nature of the United States is arguably the single most powerful reason that U.S. immigration politics have again taken a dark, xenophobic turn. But even as arguments from eugenics are getting a new moment in the sun to justify new rounds of draconian immigration restrictions, the six decades since 1965 suggest the project to preserve a White European America has already lost.

What went wrong? Much of Europe got rich, and this dramatically reduced its citizens’ incentive to move to the United States. Instead, immigrants from poorer reaches of the planet — from Asia but predominantly from Latin America — took the opportunity to invite their relatives into the land of opportunity.

As usual, the U.S. economy’s appetite for foreign labor played a large role. Mexicans, like people from across the Americas, had been mostly ignored by immigration law. They were not subject to the 1924 quotas, perhaps because there weren’t that many of them coming into the United States or perhaps because their labor was needed in the Southwest — especially during the world wars.

Mexicans suffered periodic backlashes, such as when the Hoover administration figured that kicking out millions of Mexicans and Mexican-looking Americans was a smart political move in response to the Great Depression, or when President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched “ Operation Wetback ,” a mass deportation effort created ostensibly to raise wages in the South.

In any event, the first quota for immigrants from the Western Hemisphere as a whole came with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Nonetheless, the story of immigration after that was largely a Mexican affair. By 2000, Mexicans accounted for 30 percent of the foreign-born population, up from 6 percent 40 years earlier.

Unsurprisingly, the zeitgeist again took to worrying about the pollution of the American spirit. Political scientist Samuel P. Huntington fretted that “the persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages.”

And still, the U.S. political system proved powerless to stem the tide. U.S. economic interests — and the draw they exerted on immigrants from Mexico and other unstable economies south of the border — overpowered the ancestral fears.

The last major shot at immigration reform passed in Congress, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 , was based on a supposed grand bargain, which included offering legal status to several million unauthorized immigrants, bigger guest-worker programs to sate employers’ demands for labor and a clampdown on illegal work that came with a penalty on employers who hired unauthorized workers.

Employers, of course, quickly found a workaround. Unauthorized migration from Mexico surged, and the mass legalization opened the door to family-based chain migration on a large scale, as millions of newly legalized Mexican immigrants brought their family members into the country. In 1980, there were 2.2 million Mexican immigrants in the United States. By 2022, there were 11 million .

Migration today, again, has taken a new turn. Migrants are no longer mostly single Mexicans crossing the border surreptitiously to melt into the U.S. labor force. They are families, and they come from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba and Ecuador, China and India. Mexicans accounted for fewer than a quarter of migrant encounters with U.S. agents along the border in the first half of fiscal 2024.

The most explosive difference is that immigration today is much more visible than it has possibly ever been. Immigrants don’t try to squeeze across the border undetected. They cross it without permission, turn themselves in and ask for asylum, overwhelming immigration courts and perpetuating the image of a border out of control.

Americans’ sense of threat might have more to do with the chaos at the border than with immigration itself. Still, the sense of foreboding draws from that same old well of fear. That fear is today arguably more acute than when ethnic quotas were written into U.S. immigration law in 1924. Because today, the White, Anglo-Saxon Americans who believe this nation to be their birthright are truly under demographic siege.

Twenty years from now, White, non-Hispanic Americans will slip below 50 percent of the population and become just another, albeit big, minority. For Trump’s electoral base of older, White rural voters, the prospect of non-Whites acquiring power to challenge their status as embodiments of American identity amounts to an existential menace that may justify radical action.

Immigration has reengineered U.S. politics. Non-White voters account for some 40 percent of Democrats . Eighty-one percent of Republican voters, by contrast, are both White and not Hispanic. The nation’s polarized politics have become, in some nontrivial sense, a proxy for a conflict between different interpretations of what it means to be American.

The renewed backlash against immigration has little to offer the American project, though. Closing the door to new Americans would be hardly desirable, a blow to one of the nation’s greatest sources of dynamism. Raw data confirms how immigrants are adding to the nation’s economic growth , even while helping keep a lid on inflation .

Anyway, that horse left the stable. The United States is full of immigrants from, in Trump’s memorable words, “s---hole countries.” The project to set this in reverse is a fool’s errand. The 1924 Johnson-Reed immigration law might have succeeded in curtailing immigration. But the restrictions did not hold. From Presidents Johnson to Trump, efforts to circle the wagons around some ancestral White American identity failed.

We are extremely lucky it did. Contra Sen. Ellison DuRant Smith’s 100-year old prescriptions, the nation owes what greatness it has to the many different women and men it has drawn from around the world to build their futures. This requires a different conversation — one that doesn’t feature mass expulsions and concentration camps but focuses on constructing a new shared American identity that fits everyone, including the many more immigrants who will arrive from the Global South for years to come.