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Of the City University of New York’s five hundred sixteen thousand students, about one out of three were not born in the United States. With this ratio, CUNY’s community mirrors that of the city it serves, as one third of New York’s residents are immigrants.
We spoke to four immigrant students at CUNY’s Hunter College.
The details of their stories vary. They arrived at different ages, settled in different neighborhoods, and handled (or struggled with) documentation in different ways. Most arrived with at least one family member; one came alone. The economic or political stresses that prompted their immigration run the gamut.
They include DREAMers from Panama and Mexico, and political asylees from Albania and Iran.
But in some respects, their trajectories parallel each other’s: each narrative begins with entropic origins abroad, but gravitates towards the stability of a life built from the ground up—towards a personal identity actualized through work and study here in the States. These students are American matriculants.
