Week 10; Jonathan H.

Week 10 – Jonathan H. – Summing Up

The experience at AMIS has been different from my other volunteer opportunities working with immigrants because of its focus on children. Children represent something to us—perhaps innocence, curiosity, helplessness, growth, blissfulness, and even mischievousness. Children are both our present and our future. What immigrant children say, do, and think capture the essence of the immigrant experience with its many ups and downs. Perhaps this is why it was so difficult for the entire class to answer the reflection question, “What is not important to know about immigrant children?” Everything matters.

Immigrant children are in a state of flux

Jadier, the Puerto Rican child I was tutoring, disappeared over a month ago with his sister. No one at the school seems to know what happened to him; his friends and teachers have no clue. I never learned his last name—or very much else about him, either. He was quiet, and although he smiled often, he was too shy (and perhaps to shell-shocked by his immigration experiences) to reveal much about himself. I can’t claim to have learned new anything about his culture from him, especially considering the amount of previous work I’d done on Puerto Rico already. He spoke too softly for me to find out if he had a typical Puerto Rican accent, turning “R’s” into “L’s” and so forth. He didn’t know what city he was born in. Sometimes, I wondered whether he might have just been told by his parents to say he was from Puerto Rico to avoid any issue about his legal status.  When he and his family left without notice—something that sometimes happens with immigrant families—I missed Jadier immensely, and felt awkward interacting with my peers in class. I felt less useful than before and wasn’t sure how I should occupy my class time. That “anchored” feeling evaporated. Considering how odd it felt to not be “anchored” (sure of who I was, where I was, and what I was doing) for just that forty-five minutes each week, I can’t imagine what it would feel like to have that feeling every day in a new country.

This is the feeling that I will “take with me” as I continue to work toward my goal of becoming an immigration lawyer: a sense of uncertainty, of living on the edge, of not always knowing exactly who you are, how you fit into your surroundings, and what you are doing. There is certainly the idea out there that a society as a whole should know where it is headed—the U.S. had its “Manifest Destiny,” the British and the French had their empires, Latin America has the Bolivarian Revolution and the “Order and Progress” of positivism. But what about the immigrants? For them, there may not be a well-defined vision with a strong base to stand on. The “American Dream” path (which includes assimilation, see “Berry’s Box” in Vaughn) for immigrants is becoming less common under the “new model.” This “new model” includes a strongly bifurcated labor market that makes it hard for immigrants to “move up” in their new society. Where are they headed? What are they doing? How do they fit in? These questions aren’t easily resolved for someone like Jadier, who—for the brief month that I knew him—was in a state of flux.