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Immigration and Discrimination - by Jacqueline Portugal

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  • Page ID
    186605

    • Jacqueline Portugal at Pima Community College
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    As a twenty one year old Mexican American, I have a few experiences and stories to tell that might change the way you see and treat immigrants. This essay hopefully might influence the younger generations the same way I was influenced with my great grandparent’s stories and their life experiences. A phrase that always comes out of the older generations is “ Times have really changed”. I do not doubt one bit that times have changed from when they were kids to now.

    Comparing the stories they told us and the experiences I am now experiencing are different in many perspectives. For example, one of my great great grandparents from my mother’s side of the family was born and raised in the area that is now Bisbee, Arizona. When he was a young boy they moved to the south less than a hundred miles away to what is now Agua Prieta, Sonora. And if you were born in that little town of Bisbee, Arizona in the 1800’s like my great great grandparent did, you would be a Mexican citizen and not a United States of America citizen like how you would be today! A little insight is that Arizona did not become a state until the year 1912. Taking that example and comparing it, it does make sense and makes you realize how much things can change over the years pretty quickly.

    A few reasons people all over the world decide to move and migrate to other cities, states and even other countries are due to the inhuman situations their country are in and how badly their government treats their own people, the war between narcs and the government, the poverty state some people live in, and lastly they even migrate to reunite with a family member that maybe chose to have a better life a few years back. I can relate to a few of these reasons and have experienced having family members go through these situations on a daily basis. Mexico is really known for the wars that break out with the Mexican government and the drug cartel every few years when there is conflict within them, and for those violent reasons people sometimes to bring themselves or their family to safety across the border, to the United States of America for the American dream.

    There are multiple options people have, to be able to come to the U.S. some being legal and other options not so legally. The requirements and the wait time people have to wait for just a result and the amount of papers and evidence they have to submit to the U.S. custom and border protection for them to wait and see if they get approved or denied makes people impatient and sometimes it is not worth the wait for some, and those people decide to cross the border illegally, another really known cause on why people decide to cross by foot or any other way illegally and do not apply for Visa is sometimes people do not have the money to submit the application needed and the only option is saving enough money to have someone help them cross the border to the U.S., and nowadays there is a known gossip that goes around that people say, sometimes a couple agrees to marry each other for the reason that the one of them is a citizen of the United States of America and they are getting paid a lot of money to marry the other person with no papers and that way the process is way faster and more likely to get approved.

    Once people get here from Mexico no matter how they get here exactly, they are more probable to face discrimination from others in a unknown country they are unfamiliar with. As someone who was born and raised here in the U.S. you can still experience discrimination, and your world changes in an instant and your view of life changes and not for the better, being told to speak English right when you have an accent can be quite traumatizing, well at least for me it was when I was 12 years old. A few discrimination categories that awful people like to target other people are for their ethnicity, sex, and religious beliefs. The world would be such a better and happier place if we all just got along and helped one another. My suggestion to everyone is to be a little more respectful and kind to others. You never know what they have gone through and what they are going through, maybe one day you will need the kindness of a stranger. Like they say you will get back, what one day you put out into the universe.

    This page titled Immigration and Discrimination - by Jacqueline Portugal is shared under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Jacqueline Portugal at Pima Community College.