Personal Immigration Stories: Home Is Where You Don’t Belong

Not exclusively inclusive in your own home country; barely even accepted as a member of the new country – welcome to the life of an immigrant. My personal immigration stories are no different than the others. Immigration life is where your whole life is spent filing paperwork to make sure you are legal in the new country (no matter how long you have lived there), paying taxes, explaining what part of the world you originally came from, repeating yourself over and over because of your “accent”, and convincing yourself that this will all be over someday.

Personal Immigration Stories:

About 6 years ago I packed my bags and flew halfway across the world with the hopes and dreams of living a well educated and better life. Being renowned for being “the land of the opportunities” I moved over to create some for myself. Never in my life did I regret that decision until this week. All thanks to Mr. Trump.

Few days into taking on to his new role to run this country, Mr. Trump decided to make some bizarre executive orders and sadly enough a good chunk of the population seems to be agreeing with him. Every social media I visit, everyone is talking about his ban that caused thousands of immigrants from seven countries to not be allowed to return to the USA. I have no idea and do not care about the status of those people in the USA.

Trump vs. Wonder Woman

It doesn’t matter whether or not they are green card holders, students, workers, or hell illegally living immigrants. What matters to me is the fact that they are not allowed to come back to the country they have been residing in for so long. WHY? To make America great again!! Sure, Mr. Trump, I bet these people are the only reason the USA is not as great as it should have been.

I don’t even know how this whole thing is justified? I mean those innocent people went to their home countries to visit their families, or for business, or family emergencies, or something else. I can’t even begin to imagine what must have gone through their mind when they got to the airport to fly over to their second home, only to find out they were no longer welcome there. These people I bet have spent their life serving the country in one way or another, obeying rules, paying taxes and living their own life.

While those people are being held for no crime they committed, a racist bigot is giving orders about immigration bans and building walls. People always ask you where you are from and “Minnesota” is not a good enough answer because you are too brown and have the thick accent to be from America. I bet there are people who have lived in this country over half of their life and still deal with the same problem.

I wish Mr. Trump could see the bigger picture here. While he thinks all of us immigrants are taking away jobs and planning schemes to terrorize America, we are spending each day fighting our own individual battles. You have to get health insurance because you are living in America, but if you miss a deadline and would like to apply for health insurance two days late you are not allowed to do it because you are not a US citizen.

Don’t misuse your power just because you can!

You can only work 20 hours while you are in school but you don’t get any student loans. You can apply for a financial loan, but a US citizen has to sign off on it. You are required to pay taxes, but you have to fill out 50 more forms than normal Americans to get unemployment benefits (if you qualify). While rich people are getting richer and poor people are getting poorer, immigrants are dealing with their own crisis being immigrants.

I know we all knew what we signed up for when we left the country. It has its pros and cons but at the end of the day, we all have a life here. We left our own home country to build everything from scratch. We spend every day trying to lead a normal life.

So to Mr. Trump and all his supporters, being immigrant is hard enough, please don’t make it worse by coming up with absurd ways to humiliate us. No matter what race, country, religion we belong to we are all human beings after all and nobody is fully entitled to any part of the world. So please don’t misuse your power just because you can.

Please don’t shatter dreams of young men and women who leave their country carrying the weight of big dreams of themselves and their families. Please don’t make every immigrant living in this country question their self-worth!