In Sentenced Home, 1996 immigration law served as an agent for reducing the number of immigrants in United States: when a U.S. resident, either legal or illegal, is convicted to a crime, it doesn’t matter if the person served his/her sentence, he/she has to face the possible deportation. Deportation for these Cambodian Americans is a very harsh punishment by taking away one’s life completely with as little as a week forehand notice.

Most of the Cambodians are either refugee from the Cambodian Genocide from 1975~1979 or the descendants of the refugee. The society or the environment the immigrant kids were exposed to did not create a peaceful and studious atmosphere around these kids. Unfortunately, most of them have had little knowledge about the situation they were in and due to the environment they were exposed to, a large portion of them have criminal history.

I have to admit that I had teary eyes when I watched the video for the second time. In my point of view, deportation seems very unjust to me: for example, Many Uch has been checking in constantly with INS and haunted by the possible deportation for years because of his criminal history from his teenage hood; likewise, Leoun Lun, convicted a crime for about 8 years ago, even though he did his sentence, he was told to be deported back to Cambodia.
A better application for the immigration law needs to be fixed or rewritten because the deportation does not re-evaluate a person. The government just blindly pushes immigrants with criminal history away. The threat of deportation makes the possible deportees nervous and insecure. Imaging one day you are forced to leave your friends, your family, your work, and everything you have behind, you would feel the harshness these people are experiencing everyday.

The Golden Venture talks about the smuggling of Chinese immigrants to America. The people smugglers, known as the snakeheads, were exploiting these Chinese immigrants and taking advantages of them. Upon the unforeseen arrival of the ship, the New York police force had little time to react to the situation, and the crewmembers irresponsibly ran the ship onto Rockaway Beach. The immigrants were seeking for opportunities and freedom that were propagandized to many not-so-advanced places.

Sometimes, the government actions seem irrational when it is dealing with immigration issues. These Chinese immigrants came here for the “Land of Opportunities and Freedom.” I wonder why it always seems to be an idle process. To many people who aren’t entirely understood the politic, the reactions and the proposed resolutions for the problems are usually extreme but needed no time consuming or time stalling actions.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service changed the policy when they had to face these illegal immigrants. Instead of releasing these unfortunate immigrants, INS gave them two choices: asylum or deportation. In my point of view, choosing asylum does give these immigrants some hopes of staying, but giving them jail time seems to be a very wasteful solution. Much money and time that were spent dealing with the immigrants. I think even putting them to work in exchanging for decent detainment places is better than keeping them inside jail cells. Deportation might seem to be the choice what the people in America want them to pick but the Americans did not know what dangers were waiting for these immigrants once they entered their homeland.

This documentary makes us rethink about the difficult situations for these illegal immigrants, about the causes for their attempts, and about how poorly the government dealt with the issue.

Flushing

Bayside and Flushing, two neighborhoods that are fairly close to each other but differ in a lot of categories. Flushing is an area dominated by people from Asia. As you can see from the table below, 54.6% of the total population is foreign born. Since most of the people are foreign born, they might have trouble finding high paying jobs because of language barriers, cultural assimilation etc. The median household income is rough $52,000. Also about 50% of the people living in this area have gone to some sort of college, and 38% have at least one degree. Overall, Flushing is a very diverse neighborhood that is still developing into one of the major areas in the city.

PLACE OF BIRTH
Total population 251,278 +/-7,484 251,278 (X)
Foreign born 137,133 +/-5,499 54.6% +/-1.2

WORLD REGION OF BIRTH OF FOREIGN BORN
Foreign-born population, excluding population born at sea 137,117 +/-5,495 137,117 (X)
Europe 13,629 +/-1,449 9.9% +/-1.0
Asia 97,093 +/-4,709 70.8% +/-2.0
Africa 1,064 +/-419 0.8% +/-0.3
Oceania 28 +/-33 0.0% +/-0.1
Latin America 24,985 +/-2,627 18.2% +/-1.7
Northern America 318 +/-154 0.2% +/-0.1

Bayside

Bayside, a neighborhood to the east of Flushing, is dominated by whites unlike the majority of the population in Flushing. Approximately, 56% of the people in this region are whites and 35% are Asians. Unlike Flushing, only 40% of the population is foreign born and out of those, 85% came after the turn of the century. This means that the people in this area have assimilated with the American culture and hold high paying jobs. The median income of Bayside is roughly $72,000, about $20,000 higher than flushing. As a result, people in this area can take advantage of many resources that are not available in the Flushing area. 65% of the people have gone to college, and 48% of those have at least one degree. Bayside is one of the most prosperous neighborhoods in New York City.

PLACE OF BIRTH
Total population 118,499 +/-4,128 118,499 (X)
Foreign born 48,540 +/-2,707 41.0% +/-1.7

Screen Recording

Having visited the Tenement Museum in lower Manhattan, we were exposed to the life that many immigrant families, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, experienced when they first arrived in New York through Ellis Island. All these immigrant families shared a common idea: to take advantage in the “Land of Opportunities”. The immigrant families envisioned America to provide them with all the tools necessary to live a happy life. But was this assumption rational or just wistful thinking on part of the immigrants? A brief visual tour of one of the tenements on 97 Orchard Street gave us the answer. Noisy street vendors and non-stop pedestrians on the black and white pictures along with our guide’s story telling describe the neighborhood livelier than texts do.

The actual tenement museum was a few houses down the road from the visitor center. This clever arrangement took us back in time to the past Orchard Street where many ancestors of current New Yorkers lived in. The entrance to the building was very narrow, thus we had a hard time getting through. The first thing we noticed was the compact space and dim lighting. Another astute observation we made was that everything was made of wood — this was quite hazardous in the event of a fire. Moving up the creaking staircases, we encountered the first room where the apartment suite was not entirely restored. In this suite, the interior was left purposely untouched to give visitors the atmosphere of that time period. Jacob Riis, a muckraker, described the living conditions of immigrant families in tenements in hopes to bring about social reform. In his book, Where the Other Half Lives, he described that a single room contained 6-7 members of one family.

In particular, we noticed sweatshops in each of the apartments. The immigrants worked long, laborious hours trying to make as much clothing as possible because they were paid per piece and not per hour. Imagine the atmosphere of the room while they worked and the sweat pouring over their brows as they sewed the cloth together. They probably did not waste a single second of their working hours doing anything else besides concentrating on the clothes. It was shocking how wealthier people even detested the clothing because they considered the immigrants dregs of society and did not want these immigrants handling their clothes.

The entire family worked for countless hours everyday, slept in cramped spaces every night, lived with caution because of a vulnerability to fire, and dreamed of a better life for their children. Yet, their traditions lived on their culture thrived in their hearts throughout the hardships and tribulations. These people must be acknowledged for what they have been through and what they experienced. The heart of the immigrant lives on, even today.

The Irish faced a dire situation starting in 1845 called the Great Famine, also known as the Irish Potato Famine. One third of Ireland’s population was entirely dependent on the potato as the main source of sustenance, especially for the poor. This staple food made the agrarian economy grow rapidly. However, a common potato disease called potato blight decimated the potato livestock leaving the people with insufficient food supply and less will to remain in their homeland. Emigration skyrocketed at that point and social, political, and economic issues only encouraged people to leave the country.

In contrast to the trend in the 1900’s, the trend in the late 2000’s has been starkly opposite. The Immigration Explorer, a tool on the New York Times website, tells us the migration patterns of various groups to America during an extended time period. Looking at the population of Manhattan, NY in 1890, and 2000, we notice a drastic decrease in the population of foreign born Irish. The population of Manhattan was roughly 1.5 million in both these time periods. The difference is that in 1890, there were 190,418 foreign-born Irish to the 4,147 in 2000. That’s a 98% decrease in the Irish population in New York. Much of this can be attributed to Ireland’s recent economic upturn.

In 1996, Ireland reached its migration “turning point,” making it the last European Union Member State to become a country of net immigration. The main reason being that rapid economic growth created an unprecedented demand for labor across a wide range of sectors, including construction, financial, information technology, and health care. This had a direct impact on the unemployment rate as it fell from a 15% to 3.6% in no time. Ireland had turned from “being a country of emigration to a country of immigration.” The cause of a decrease in Irish immigrants to the US and an increase in emigrants to Ireland is because of this Irish economic prosperity, better known as the “Celtic Tiger” era. This change in the population flow of Ireland is significantly reflected in the Irish immigration trend in the Immigration Explorer. The economic boom in the late 20th century and early 21st century became a major attraction for immigration to Ireland and also helped keep the Irish natives. Thus, there is an apparent decline in the migration of Irish people to America.