Pros and Cons of Being an Immigrant – Adam Wolfson Final Essay
At its heart, the risks, rewards, and challenges that come with immigration anywhere are those that come with any major change. That’s what immigration is, a fresh start in a new nation. It is also a huge gamble. In this essay I will examine what people hope to find in America, as well of some of the consequences they may encounter in doing so.
Why would anyone want to come here? America has plenty of problems. Well, one answer is that the rest of the world has its own problems too, and if theirs are worse than ours, then coming here might be a good idea. This answer isn’t particularly helpful. What problems are we talking about here? The problem is, what a prospective immigrant might hope to improve by moving depends on where they started. A facet of American life that one immigrant might see as a godsend might simply be the status quo for another from a different place.
Nonetheless, there are some reasons for coming to America that recur through history. A single person is unlikely to have all of these reasons, but it’s likely that they might have at least one. These reasons for coming are the manifestation of forces that drive entire waves of people across ocean to roll the dice on a new life in a new country.
Possibly the most common reason for immigration to America is money. This is the idea behind the concept of the American Dream: come to America to seek your fortune. However, this concept is more complex than the American Dream narrative implies. For starters, not everyone who emigrates here manages to ascend economically. Nor does everyone manage to secure a better life for their children. Does that mean that those people were wrong to immigrate? Not necessarily. The transition from being poor overseas to being poor in America can be an end in itself. America is a first world country with (usually) a functioning economy. While being forced to take exploitative jobs involving backbreaking labor just to afford food is horrible, at least those jobs and food exist. For some people, that can be a major improvement. This is one of the driving forces behind the wave of immigration (legal and illegal) from Mexico today. People aren’t coming to America because the jobs here are easier or pay more; they come come here because there are jobs, period.
Of course, there are other benefits to coming to a financially and politically successful country like America. Healthcare and education are two big reasons. Both American healthcare and the American educational system are widely regarded as being terrible, but that’s in America. American education has big problems, but it’s also free up to high school. That’s not the case everywhere, and could be very attractive to, say, a family trying to secure a better future for their children. Likewise, medical technology exists here that simply isn’t available elsewhere. Regardless of how difficult to afford it is, that could be a huge draw to someone with a dangerous illness, or their loved ones.
Some people, however, immigrate not because of what America has, but what it doesn’t. A significant portion of immigrants are refugees of some sort. The original Thirteen Colonies were built by people fleeing religious persecution, and America accepted a large portion of the Jews displaced by WWII. Violence and warfare have brought many people to America as well. Refuges from the Middle East and Central America fill that role today.
In summary, America has a good enough economic system that even if you’re very poor you’re unlikely to starve to death, has public services that at least exist, usually isn’t fighting a war on its own soil, and won’t persecute you for your religion. Those are good reasons to immigrate, but not unique to America. There are plenty of countries that have these qualifications, yet America has historically been one of the top destinations for immigration. This is, in part, because of its culture. America can be xenophobic and intolerant, but it considers immigration part of it’s culture in a way other countries don’t. Certainly, no other country has an equivalent to the American Dream. This difference can be seen in the way that many European countries have struggled to deal with the recent influx of immigrants from the Middle East culturally, despite ample goodwill.
Of course, immigration is not without its trial and tribulations. For every benefit America can potentially bestow upon the immigrant, it can and will extract its pound of flesh. Happily for the student of immigration, however, the human costs of immigration have been far more consistent across time and space than its rewards.
To start off with, the majority of immigrants are poor. So, on top of other indignities that result from their immigrant status, they have to deal with those that come with poverty. In fact, many of the hurdles that immigrants face have economic origins. Arriving immigrants typically lacked housing and employment, and lack the money and education to shop around.
Immigrant housing has always been terrible. When a lot of people need to live somewhere and can’t pay for very much, it provides a strong economic motive for someone to take advantage by offering really, really terrible cheap housing. After all, it’s not like they can afford to live elsewhere. The most spectacular examples` of this activity were the lower East side tenement complexes. These were built with a design philosophy similar to that used in factory farms: fit as many living sources of revenue into as small a space as possible. They were eventually made illegal, but similar practices still exist, such as a landlord refusing to pay for maintenance because he know his tenants can’t afford to live anywhere better.
Abuses by employers follow the same basic logic. Immigrants, who usually lack the skills or connections to find a good job, are called upon to do the jobs that are too difficult, dangerous, or unpleasant for anyone else. Currently, this mostly consists of agricultural work and domestic services like cleaning. Before America’s economy became service based, these jobs would mostly involve work on assembly lines.
Not all difficulties immigrants face are economic. One of the oldest and biggest is racism. It seems on the surface like racism ought to be relatively new for immigrants, since the vast majority of immigrants used to be white Europeans. Surely they must have been welcomed with open arms? While this line of thought makes sense, it misses the fact that the concept of ‘white’ as an ethnic identity only goes back as far as the Second World War, when most of Western civilisation was forced to work together against a common enemy. Before that, Irish, Italian, French, etc. were considered different races, no less different from each other than we would consider blacks, whites, hispanics, asians, etc. to be today. There was huge amounts of discrimination between these European ‘races’ prior to WWII.
Finally, one of the biggest trials immigrants have to face is culture shock. Changing between cultures means giving up things normally taken for granted. It means giving up the ability to communicate with all but a minority of the people around you. It means losing the unconscious understanding of cultural norms by which we judge others. It means becoming an outsider. Some of these can be overcome by circumstance or time, but they are still a huge part of the immigrant experience.
Of course, the process of immigration continues to change. On the positive side, as hyphenated identities become more accepted and technology continues to shrink the world, the various Old Countries of the world seem less and less far away. On the other hand, the risk of deportation is higher than it’s ever been. Nonetheless, there are some things about immigration that I doubt will ever change. At its heart, imigration, like any change, is about exchanging the familiar for something unknown, hoping to get the better end of the deal. Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t. But that’s life, in any country.
