A Different Perspective of Refugees

Figure 1: Depicting A Scared child GIF, to portray that children or adults were scared to come to a country they did not know about at all.

When I was in elementary school, some of my friends would tell me how their parents just moved to the United States, and they just moved into their apartment in the apartment complex near school, and I wouldn’t think anything of it. Obviously, I was six years old just listening to their fascinating stories, sitting there, wishing I moved, so I could experience the feeling of moving. Little did I know the obstacles and the costs of their moving took them. They probably had to wait five to six years to get papers for a green card, and they probably waited and waited patiently at their house, wondering if it will ever indeed come. I did not know at six years old, that when they got here, they did not know the language, or the area, or anything at all. They literally were lost, but at six years old, I did not know that at all. 

And when I was reading, “Refugees or Economic Immigrants? Immigration from Latin America and the Politics of US Refugee Policy” written by Maria Cristina Garcia, it occurred to me that all this is an accumulation of eras and generations of people migrating. Either migrating through the troubles of their own country, or their hardships or anything of that sort. The term, “refugees” is handled so lightly, yet these are immigrants which have fought strong and hard to get where they are, and they are not able to explain their gratitude when they arrive here.

Figure 2: Refugees sleeping, in a foreign country, picture used to describe the circumstances of refugees.

In the article, it proves how much these people have suffered to get where they are today, and how much all of this means to them and how much they are thankful for it. And in the recent years, especially since the “The New Immigration and Nationality Act”, there were many regulations, rules, and acts drawn upon it. And since the countries in the South America such as Chile, Peru, and Puerto Rico, had some regulations of how many people can come to the United States. And within these regulations, the ideas of sneaking into America and staying in America without papers and without the green card started to evolve, and started to come up and depict their faces in all this. However, no matter what, these are still human beings which needed to survive and had to come find a better life. Another idea is that they were trying to fight for the asylum and that can be utterly dangerous which can potentially harm whoever is trying to fight for their lives. Asylum is usually someone who is in actual danger and needs to be deported to America, but then this arises questions and different obstacles or problems which were not planned necessarily. Throughout all this, the main ideas which surround all this are that, immigration has not changed and has changed in everyone’s different perspectives, and by the way which someone looks at it all makes it different for everyone. However, as Garcia explains, “By 2004, the United States had admitted over a million refugees from Latin America” (Garcia), and that is a huge amount of people. Besides, the term was being played around in many different ways, and not just one way only. Therefore, making it seem it was any different made everyone look at this entire point of view very differently. La Respuesta, the blog website told us so many of these stories, of the immigrants or refugees which came here, and they are nothing but heart-felt stories, and the different obstacles shown. Rodriguez, one of the interviewees explained, “We’re all here for the same thing, a better life” (Rodriguez), and they just kept fighting. They put on their strong hat, and they just fought strong and hard. It was what they wanted and what they believed in, so they had to fight. They knew if they fought and failed, they at least fought hard, but if they never fought for staying here and adapting, while creating a new life, then they never would have known the outcome of anything. And that made them so much stronger, and they made it, they made their life here, and succeeded in doing that. However, bringing it back to my main point, when I was in elementary school, I never thought about the mere struggles everyone went through to do all of this, and to come here, because of poverty, danger or curiosity.

“Los Que Se Fueron: Interviews Exploring the New MigrationLa Respuesta.” La Respuesta, 16 Feb. 2016, larespuestamedia.com/los-que-se-fueron/.
A Companion to Latina/O Studies, edited by Juan Flores, and Renato Rosaldo, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=320058.