The history of the United States is not a clean one, with many mistakes still effecting people and policy today. Countless men and women have died at the hands of the government with many more unjustly arrested, and with these issues coming back into the spotlight recently, illegal immigration has been a discussion for those not only in office, but all around the country as well. An illegal immigrant is someone who is a foreign-born non-citizen that is not a legal resident in the country that they are living in, but there are a lot of reasons behind why someone may do this not only for themselves, but for those that they care about. Oftentimes in discussion surrounding this topic, people are dehumanized and referred to with terms such as ‘illegal aliens’, or just ‘illegals’ and are exposed to many stigmas that will make their time in the country they are illegally living more difficult. With this, the topic often forgets that these immigrants are people, and have reasons for what they do, usually fleeing to another country because they feel they need to for their own safety or for the safety of their family and friends.
The facts show a different story than the one being portrayed by the government however, with one of the biggest arguments for closed borders being that illegal immigrants are dangerous. In reality, as immigration increases, the crime rates go down. The reason behind this is simple, as sociologist Robert J. Sampson puts it.
First-generation economic immigrants are self-selected risk takers who leave their homes, families, and languages to move to a new country to improve their and their children’s lives
These people have no reason to commit a crime, they are working hard to make their families lives, and committing crimes would do nothing but hurt this cause. Communities are also formed by these people, where a sense of belonging can be found. This in turn is aided by the mindset that America has been put in, where the immigrants are outsiders attempting to enter the United States. This is a big piece of the stigma that hurts immigrants’ chances of ever feeling like they belong, and fuels politics that try to divide people by making such bold statements as the last president of the United States, Donald Trump did.
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best… They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists
Words such as this only aim to harm those who are moving from one country to another for their own wellbeing, as well as for the sake of their loved ones. Often immigrants will look for ways to share their experiences, and one such way is through the use of the arts.
Through the use of art, literature, and other mediums, people who have needed to flee their countries can express themselves and at the same time, show the public the truths behind illegal immigrants and refugees. One such artist is named Warsan Shire, a poet who was born and grew up in Somalia, where war was a common sight, forcing her to leave her country. An excerpt from one of her poems is added below.
Home
no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as wellyour neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.
A powerful poem that effectively expresses the feelings of needing to leave behind the only life that someone has ever known. It works to show the difference between a want and a need to do something, with this being one of the most important needs that a person could have — to survive.
This is an extremely important point to reminder can be easily lost in the heat of a debate over the ethics and beliefs shared when discussing illegal immigration. Many times, the people who are participating in a type of illegal immigration are only doing so because they believe that it is what is absolutely necessary and not something that they want to do, because immigrating illegally is not something that is enjoyable.
A good example of this can be found in a collection of stories in the form of a novel named Refugee Tales. In one of the stories talked about a man escapes human trafficking in the Britain, where he was kept in a dark warehouse for years. Once this man escapes, he is pulled in and out of detention centers for years because he is not a legal resident. This man is in constant fear that he will be put into one of these detention centers at any point in time, and cannot do anything about it. Without a doubt his life now is better than his life when he was a literal slave, being forced to work for more than 12 hours a day, but he would only be suffering in Britain in the way he is if it were necessary.
Many people are placed in this situation and ones similar to it daily. In an anonymous interview with people who fled into the U.S. illegally, many described the reasons for them to involve family or instability in the environment they’re moving away from, making the necessary choices needed for their survival.
One thing is for certain however, a change in the way we view illegal immigration could be beneficial to not only us, but to the people who are coming to our country for refuge without our permission. Stigmas only work to hold back the conversation when discussing the causes and dangers of illegal immigrants, and reflecting on the background that these people have could help shed light on the reasons for doing something as bolding as running into a country that doesn’t want them. Unfortunately this topic has been deeply politicized, but with hard work and a focus on the ways that laws involving immigration can effect people’s whole lives, the right decisions can certainly be made.
References
Herd, David, and Anne Pincus. Refugee Tales. Comma Press, 2016.
Scott, Eugene. “Analysis | Trump’s Most Insulting — and Violent — Language Is Often Reserved for Immigrants.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 2 Oct. 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/02/trumps-most-insulting-violent-language-is-often-reserved-immigrants/.
Valdez, Carmen R, et al. “‘Why We Stay’: Immigrants’ Motivations for Remaining in Communities Impacted by Anti-Immigration Policy.” Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology, U.S. National Library of Medicine, July 2013, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3721425/.
Ewing, Walter A., et al. “The Criminalization of Immigration in the United States.” SSRN, 17 July 2015, poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=252085073120027098125000078013121086116042064082020028029003101121070084111072030028034036040047022047027072068023112068083080050076003080012030103007123110088065081047094070104090119023070005107088026124098007072070090091104084087123093118123123&EXT=pdf&INDEX=TRUE.
“Immigration Data and Statistics.” Department of Homeland Security, 11 Mar. 2021, www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics.
“‘Home’ by Warsan Shire.” Facing History and Ourselves, www.facinghistory.org/standing-up-hatred-intolerance/warsan-shire-home.
Reflection
When going about making this blog post, I honestly didn’t know where to start. This is my first time using a website like this and the formatting was a little confusing to me. Once I got a decent understanding of how it works, I wanted to focus on how I could use the tools provided to me to express what I was trying to convey, posting images at certain parts, highlighting quotes with one of the tools on the website to add to the shock for some like that by Donald Trump, and for others, it helped with the formatting of how it was really suppose to look, like with the spacing in the poem by Warshan Shire. In the actual direction I took the post, I formatting this a little different than the essay this is based off of, with the discussions of how the anonymous man in the Refugee Tales coming a little later in this post than it did in the original essay. I also cut out a few statistics to shorten the length and left out a lot of quotes, as this is suppose to be a shorter version that is easier to follow. I enjoyed writing like this and it helped me to articulate my thoughts in a way that was effective, with the quotes really standing out rather than just being lost in the sea of words that was my essay. The larger font and more decisive cuts in paragraphs also aided in reminding me that I needed to keep this short, and not to drone on. The mixture of a few images with the text helps to keep me entertained when I’m reading things like this and to cement it in my mind. As far as I’m aware, there isn’t a ton that can be done with text and color on here, I looked at a few other posts and didn’t see much variation in themes, but I enjoy the look of medium.com regardless.