Immigration & Dreams

Last Friday Tracy Huang, Mike Honda Fellow at the Japanese American Citizens League engaged the LIA interns on the topic of immigration. She made a very good point that immigration is often looked at through the lens of the Hispanic & Latino populations, but that the API community is often overlooked. I really appreciated hearing the immigration stories of my fellow interns. Seyron and I were both born in Malaysia, but definitely got to the US in very different ways and yet both were legal options. Only in recent years have I learned of just how blessed I was to have that opportunity, in the sense that so many of our undocumented brothers and sisters have risked their lives seeking the same opportunities so freely given to the rest of us. It's illegal, but I can't blame the perpetrators when the system makes it so that even legal immigration takes at least six years but more typically will take anywhere between 12-28 years.

What's heartbreaking to me is that even after the momentous journey to the land of "the American dream" has been made, whether legal or not, our brethren are still on the streets struggling, their skin more tan and weathered than their brothers and sisters at home. I want to cry a little every time I see an old brown man waving one of those giant signs, weary and yet often still with a glimmer of resilience and hope in his eyes. It's the same way when I see an old man or woman pushing around a little ice cream cart. It took me back to the streets of El Salvador, when I was out and about in San Salvador in January, and where I asked myself how it must feel to be barely making enough to get by as I observed the saturated informal markets.

San Salvador

Have you ever thought about some of the less-obvious consequences of being poor? The people I spoke to in San Salvador, when asked about what their vision or goal was, many of them simply gave us a blank look. It was an alien concept to them--they were just living day to day, a long-term goal was unrealistic and the idea of one had long been pushed out of their minds. My take-away from that experience was realizing that I had the intangible privilege of a long-term goal and vision. Dreams were not really dreams but possible realities.

View from Pajaro Flor, our language school in Suchitoto, El Salvador
(I think I just wanted an excuse to show off the view)

If I leave any sort of legacy behind when I leave this earth, I'd like for others to be able to say that I helped them believe in the reality of their dreams.

Shalom,
Vi