Immigration – Page 3 – As It Ought To Be

This is National Coming Out of the Shadows Week for undocumented youth, modeled on the LGBT strategy to raise awareness through disclosure of status. If you are inspired by the DREAMers’ courage in coming out, you can help by supporting the DREAM Act. Visit DreamActivist.org to learn more.

My Name is Rohit and I am American

What does it take to be an American? It doesn’t seem to be how long someone’s been in the country, or what they relate to, the way they talk or act, or even the values they hold most dear. These days, it seems being American is all about holding a piece of paper.

I’m Rohit and I am American. Even though I’m Indian by decent, and born in Germany, I’m American. I’ve lived in New Jersey since I was 5 (I’m 23 now). I have a Bachelors of Science in Biomedical Engineering from Rutgers University. I like writing stories and poems, and do semi-professional photography. I run a web design firm. I am proud of this country, my country, and what it represents. And while I entered the country legally, I’ve been in the country illegally for 13 years.

I went through the public school system, with regular aspirations to be an astronaut and president. I grew up a science nerd, being picked on through elementary and middle school. I can still remember how mad my parents were the first time I got a bad grade, and the first time I cursed.

In eighth grade, I got a unique opportunity to attend a magnet high school focusing on the sciences and engineering. My class was the first of the school, and got the rare chance to establish the school. I helped found the school paper, serving as the de-facto editor for two years. I was part of the first National Honors Society, and was the soccer team’s statistician for a year. It was also in high school that I got into photography after being volunteered to be the school photographer. In high school, I took a particular interest in programming and web design. I even went as far as to make my first girlfriend a website for Valentine’s Day (in addition to the usual flowers and a teddy bear).

After graduating high school, I applied to a variety of engineering universities. I got waitlisted at Carnegie Mellon, but got accepted into the Rutgers School of Engineering. College was a drastic change. I went from a high school of 120 people to a University where some of my lectures had 120 people in it on an off day. Fortunately, the honors program was small enough to give me a personal feel in a giant university.

Right from the start, my University experience was different. In high school, I was the closed-off, quiet geek. I was a worker, relatively intelligent, but I was never very social. My first day of college was orientation. At Rutgers, New Student Orientation used to be a three day series of events with both information and fun. Being the geek, I went to the informational stuff, but the energy and helpfulness of the orientation volunteers got me enthused and pushed me to volunteer work all though college.

Even until then, I didn’t know I was in the country illegally. Through high school, my parents shooed off my getting a drivers license by saying the insurance rates were too high. I knew we were tight on money, so I went with it. In college, I didn’t have a car, so it didn’t matter. My parents had managed to avoid the topic, with my never having gotten a job and really never having needed ID. So college was pretty normal.

I entered Rutgers intending on going into electrical engineering, but my early experience at college changed my mind, driving me to biomedical engineering. Through BME, I could use electrical and computer engineering and apply it to medicine, to help people. I also joined a number of clubs, and for better or worse, they became my focus in college. I joined a cultural organization, the Association of Indians at Rutgers, to help get in touch with my cultural heritage as well as to get into volunteer work. I also joined the engineering student government, the Engineering Governing Council, to help make a difference at Rutgers. I wound up on the board for AIR, helping revive a cultural aspect of the club, along with pushing more volunteer activities. Through student government, I became an expert on student legislation at Rutgers, and even helped shape the new student government when Rutgers underwent a merger of its campuses. Through the years, these two clubs became my main clubs, though I also started a religious organization, the Anekantavada Jain Association. While I was attentive to my studies, my college life seemed to revolve around my clubs.

Still, I was pretty into the programming aspects of my degree. I did a project on bone fracture recognition and did my senior design project on a therapy device for people who have suffered a stroke. These classes finalized my intentions of wanting to help people by developing devices to make their lives easier. Unfortunately, senior year is when my life took a turn for the worst. In my final semester, as I started to look around for a job, I inquired with my parents about our immigration status. It was the hardest news I’ve ever received, when my dad informed me that our visas expired in the mid nineties. Instantly my hopes of a job vanished, my dreams of a future went up in smoke. In seconds, I went from just another person to being a pariah. Fortunately, I had been seeing a therapist for other depression issues, and managed to make sense of the situation without going insane.

I have now had a degree for nearly two years, with no use for it. I’ve had ambitions and desires placed on the back burner because of a sheet of paper. I can’t contribute to the society I grew up in, or donate back to the clubs and college that gave me so much. I’m also now in removal proceedings. While I wait to see if I get to stay or leave, I’m stuck at home, not having a car or other effective mode of travel, any semblance of a social life limited to when friends are available and can give me a ride. I feel like through this process, I’ve become a mooch on my friends, who’ve given me nothing but support. Along with my mother, father, and younger brother in his third year of college, we face our final hearing in a few months, and will be forced to leave the US by mid summer without some sort of immigration reform. I’ll be sent off to a country I don’t know, to a culture I’m not a part of, to a language I barely speak. It will be, for all intents and purposes, an exile. If I’m sent off, I have no intention of moving back… Why be a part of a country that doesn’t want me because of the mistakes my parents made? I learned that who you are has nothing to do with being American…in the end, it’s what other people think you are.

~Rohit, DREAMer from New Jersey

Montreal_stopsign

IN DEFENSE OF BABEL

by Okla Elliott

During Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, he once discussed immigration by saying that we ought to be less worried about immigrants learning English and more worried about whether our children are learning Spanish. He must have known he’d wandered into unsafe territory, because he immediately began enumerating the business advantages your children would have if they were bilingual. (It is always safe in American discourse to return to how something might make money.) Obama was attacked by Democrats and Republicans alike for daring to utter the unthinkable—that Americans need to be learning foreign languages.

As I write this, I am in Montréal, a city that has achieved nearly seamless bilingualism. Depending on the neighborhood, most signs, menus, etc are written in both French and English, and you can order at most places of business in either language. I don’t mean to suggest there aren’t tensions between those who consider their mother tongue French and those who consider it English. There are. Famously so. And one of my instructors, Jessy, at the language institute where I’m studying admitted to being reluctant to read Canadian literature in English (though she also happens to be nearly fluent in English, which indicates her resistance to the language isn’t total, and she seemed embarrassed to admit to reading only francophone literature). And Jessy isn’t alone in her ambivalence. There’s a referendum every few years for Québec to secede from the rest of Canada, but it is always defeated, and largely because of the huge population in Montréal which always votes en masse to remain part of the larger country.

But there’s the brighter, almost ideal side. You walk up Rue St Laurent, lined with hipster bars and nice restaurants, and you’ll hear the people at one table speaking in French while those at the adjacent table speak English. My favorite scene, which I’ve seen play out several times in my few weeks here, is when a group of people is speaking one language, then someone shows up who is less proficient in that language (usually an English speaker, sadly), and the group simply shifts to the new person’s language of comfort. It’s a seamless transition, and no one is put out by it. For lack of a better word, I always think how civilized this is.

Those people in the US who are worried that English will disappear are either willfully ignorant or just insane. English enjoys not only the 4^th largest native speaker population on the planet but is also by far the most common 2^nd language learned. I’m sorry, but every time I hear someone bemoan the rise of Spanish as a second language in the US, I hear laziness or mindless nationalism. There is absolutely no downside to learning another language, while there are numerous upsides.

But the paranoiac fear isn’t abating. Nowhere is this made more visible than on the US-Mexico border with the fervor for fence-building and of volunteers toting shotguns, excessive in their eagerness to “defend our borders” (from what, I always wonder, hard workers with a drive for self-improvement?). William T Vollmann’s new book, Imperial, which will be released next month, is a 1,300-page nonfiction exploration of Imperial County, California, where many immigrants who have died in the journey across the border are buried. There’s an excellent New York Times article about Vollmann and his new book here.

But instead of seeing the ugliness nationalism can cause and instead of embracing the positive aspects of bi- and multilingualism, many Americans are doing just the opposite. Arizona, Idaho, and Iowa have all recently passed English-only laws, and Oklahoma is poised to vote on an English-only referendum on the 2010 ballot, one which is expected to pass by a large margin.

But what are the advantages of multilingualism?, one might ask. Aside from Obama’s aforementioned job opportunities, which certainly exist, there are the joys other languages bring. There is nothing like being in a foreign country and speaking the language. The experience is so much richer, I have basically foregone visiting countries whose languages in which I don’t at least have some proficiency. Language is so often the vehicle for culture, and there is simply no way to appreciate another culture without understanding its language.

But there are more immediate ones as well. The CIA has recently been running ads in an attempt to recruit Americans with foreign language skills. Apparently less than 20% of the CIA staff has proficiency in a foreign language. Pause for a moment and take that in. Less than 20% of our international intelligence gathering organ speaks a foreign language. Mama Elliott didn’t raise no geniuses, but I see how this might be a problem. Now, I tend to think that most of what the CIA does adds to the misery in the world, so its being hindered in any way might be good in the long run, but there is an old Polish saying: “Know the languages of your friends well, but know the languages of your enemies better.” Here, even the security-crazed people of this country have to admit that learning Arabic, Farsi, Korean, etc might prove useful.

But I’m less interested in talk of enemies, and I would like to rephrase that Polish saying to: “Learn the languages of your enemies in order to make them your friends.” I remember when I was an undergrad and preparing for my first academic study abroad to Germany, I was required to attend several information sessions. At one of them, the goals of the program were laid out, and one of them was world peace. I thought, “Huh? How can my improving my understanding of the dative case in German alter international relations?” The counselor explained that people are less likely to support a war against a country if they’ve lived there or speak the language, and that the kinds of cultural misunderstandings that can lead to less than diplomatic solutions can be obviated if we have enough people here who know firsthand how to navigate those cultural waters.

The advantages, both large and small, are legion.

There are many jobs in legal, technological, governmental, and medical fields that require knowledge of foreign languages. Studies show that studying a foreign language can reduce the chances of dementia in old age, can improve children’s comprehension of their native language, and even increase a person’s IQ. There are the interpersonal benefits. I can’t help but notice the tens of millions of Spanish speakers in world and can’t help but be happy that I have the means to communicate with them. Likewise with French; when I look at a linguistic map of Africa, my heart fairly flutters with possibility. There are advantages for the activist-minded, such as Habitat for Humanity, Peace Corps, Doctors without Borders, etc.

And on, and on . . .

If being in Montréal has taught me anything, it’s that bi- and multilingualism can work and can have a hugely positive effect on a culture and business community. It’s not a perfect model, but those tend not to exist in the real world. It is, however, a hopeful example of what certain US cities could become or already are becoming, if only we embrace it fully and encourage it with the proper institutions and attitude.

Share this:

IN DEFENSE OF BABEL

by Okla Elliott

Share this: