A Migration Story from the Philippines
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Anna’s experience of immigrating to the U.S. from the Philippines is not entirely what one would view as the stereotypical immigrant experience. Anna was able to come with her entire immediate family to the U.S. with little difficulty, she was able to get a good education and she has a professional career. Of course even with the differences, aspects of Anna’s story are not entirely unknown to other immigrants. According to the article “The New Immigrants,” by Charles S. Clark, Anna is part of the changing face of U.S. immigration. Over the last 30 years, “…Asians, Latinos and Caribbean immigrants have outpaced the numbers of Irish, Italian and Eastern European immigrants…” (Clark 51). This shift in homelands of immigrants is largely due to the Immigration and Reform Act of 1965, which changed country quotas to open up doors for countries that traditionally had very low immigration quotas to the U.S. This change also stressed family unification, which is how Anna’s family was petitioned into the U.S. from the Philippines (Clark 56). Anna’s initial difficulty with integrating into her new school and understanding the norms and language of her fellow students was not an atypical experience. In “Crossing the Boulevard,” by Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan, the authors interviewed immigrants from all over the world who were living in Queens. One of these interviews was with a Bosnian teenager named Adis. Adis ran into some difficulty with another boy at the school when he seemingly threatened to kill him over the internet. Adis didn’t truly mean he would kill him, just that he wanted to fight the boy. However, Adis got into a lot of trouble because he found out that, “…in America people take things really seriously,” (Lehrer & Sloan 361). Although Anna’s issues with language never became as severe a problem for her as it did for Adis, she still struggled with slang and how people in the U.S. attach different meanings to words that Anna herself would not normally have attached. It’s not all been bad for Anna though. As mentioned previously she was able to pursue her degree and now holds a professional position at the university. Journalist Marc Cooper of The Nation profiled America’s meat packing plants and how they’re creating a new underclass of immigrants in “The Heartland’s Raw Deal.”. Meat packing plants in the Midwest have been aggressively recruiting Mexican and Laotian immigrants, for a lowly $6.00 per hour with no benefits and no recourse for on the job injuries (Cooper 12). Anna has been lucky enough that she’s been able to avoid this common, exploitative pitfall that many immigrants in the U.S. are not able to avoid. Another major difference between Anna and your typical immigrant to the U.S. is that she doesn’t send remittances to her homeland. Anthropologist Cathy A. Small ventured to the tiny South Pacific island nation of Tonga in the early 1980’s to do research for her book “Voyages.” She discovered that remittances were an integral part to Tonga’s economy and that it was one of the primary reasons for migration on the island. According to Dr. Small, 100 of the 188 nations of the world have an economic dependence on remittances (Small 8). This number indicates how important it is that immigrants send remittances to their families back home, as it is often the driving factor that encourages them to migrate. Anna’s situation was different. Her family migrated for an opportunity at a better life and has not had to send remittances like the typical immigrant would. Anna's expectations of eating all the chocolate she wanted obviously changed and matured as she grew older. Anna's journey to and through the “land of milk and honey” allowed her to realize that there are great things about both countries. Opportunities and perspectives she would never have had, had she not immigrated to the U.S. Through good and bad, Anna's tale of immigration and immersion in a new culture has overall been a successful one, one that more immigrants to the U.S. should have the chance of experiencing. Anna has stopped mainlining chocolate by the way.
Work Completed by: Stephanie Cleland |
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Anna
has also had to face issues with being an immigrant in a society
that doesn’t entirely accept her because she is an immigrant.
Anna told me that people often ask her where she’s from, more
often than not intending to find out if she is here legally or
not. In 1997, the Chandler, Arizona police department made a
joint effort with federal agents to “round up” undocumented, or
illegal immigrants (“Short Memories”). During this operation,
many legal citizens were questioned and harassed simply because
they were Hispanic. Though Anna has not had this degree of
harassment occur to her, the general idea is the same. People
respond to the fact that she does not look Anglo and that she
has a slight Filipino accent, if they can even determine the
origin. They use these physical clues and get suspicious as to
whether she’s here legally and ask her veiled questions as to
her status. Anna is being racially profiled by other Americans
because of the same sort of hysteria that caused the Chandler
fiasco in 1997.