While reading Peter Kwong’s piece, What’s wrong with the U.S. Immigration Debate, a concept that was totally lost on me was the lack of human compassion that many people feel when discussing the immigrant issue. But even before that, the fact that immigration is viewed as “issue” is unsettling to me. Is America not a land of immigrants? Did the colonists not fight the Revolutionary War to ensure their freedom from uncomfortable and unfair circumstances? The British did more or less rightfully claim the United States which the colonists then took over. But that is rightfully glossed over because the circumstances allowed for it: humanity allowed for it. So why is the situation different now? Kwong addresses the topic of illegal immigration, especially the immigrants migrating from Mexico. He highlights the fact that Republicans wanted to push through legislation that would not only punish the immigrants but also those who aided them.

“…which, if it had been passes by the Senate, would have turned all illegal immigrants into felon subject to deportation. It would also have criminalized all those who aided them, including welfare organizations and church workers.”

What I fail to understand why legalities would outweigh humanitarianism. Why the urge to help someone desperately in need would not measure up to laws void of any human emotion or attachment. And the lack of care given to the adversity stricken lives that these immigrants live as described in the article is really surprising. The “you made your bed, now lie in it” mentality as described isn’t something that sits well with me. Someone coming to the United States in search of a better life does not deserve to be exposed to horrible working and living conditions, those of which are not even legal. People migrate to this country in order to live under circumstances influenced by liberty and equality. But as the reading demonstrates, oftentimes this is not the case.

In Robert G. Lee’s piece, Making The Model Minority Myth, there is a personal anecdote included in the beginning titled, Seeing Race, Seeing Disability, where the speaker talks about his own experiences of being an immigrant in the Unites States and one part in his account that really stood out to me was when he talked about how different race was thought of here here then in his native country of Ghana. Something that had meant so little to him before, had taken on a whole different form in the U.S. And it was strikingly similar to something we read in the other weeks reading where a man from Africa talked about how he felt as though his race was an identifying factor for him in New York, when back home it wasn’t even something that he thought twice about. The fact that in our society race is such a dominant factor as opposed to other places where it isn’t even addressed is extremely hard to digest. Immigrants who come over not knowing this are treated differently than other groups of people and I can only assume that this is confusing and difficult for them. Here in America we have grown used to using something like race as identification. It is ingrained into us, and for immigrants this may be a tough pill to swallow.