The Outsiders Within

Dona Acharya / PA, USA

The United States of America is the only country built on immigrants. Be it people who wanted to come to the country on their own or those who were forcefully brought into the country as slaves and laborers, the United States of America has been built on their toils. The stories of those immigrants and their first generation children are very inspiring. Be it Albert Einstein who fled his home to prevent persecution from the Nazis or Madeline Albright who rose to become the first female secretary of state, they were immigrants. Imagine that you were to live in a part of India where no body speaks English, for all your life. How tough would it be for you? At one time, everyone in this country was an immigrant. This reality seems to have become a myth.

In a country where immigrants make up most of the workforce from menial jobs to intellectual rather sophisticated jobs, immigrants don’t get the respect, they deserve. They are stigmatized and stereotyped that makes their lives difficult. Although, discrimination based on color, race and ethnicity is illegal most of the time, it is widely prevalent. Immigrants from Western Europe and most of Eastern Europe easily integrate into mainstream American society. A newcomer from France may not be identified as an immigrant while one from China is. It is all right to be identified as an immigrant, but to be stereotyped and treated differently makes it much tougher. Immigrants like to be who they are but they also deserve equal respect as human beings as constituted in the constitution of the United States of America.

My family immigrated to this land of opportunities, having lived in refugee camps for almost two decades. I don’t really like to identify myself as an odd man out- an alien. People have a set of identifiers-parameters, which they use to distinctly categorize me. When I realize that I have been identified as such, I feel like I am alienated. This doesn’t affect my performance, rather it should not. Everybody who comes to this country feels that way in the beginning.

One day, in the first week of my arrival I was staying under a shade to prevent rain from soaking me up. You know the weather of Erie, how it changes. I was too new to the locality to know that. A lanky middle aged man saw me at the shade and came over. I greeted him. “Hi! How are you sir?”

“Are you from India?” He said. I nodded no. “You look Indian, where are you from?”

“I am from nearby India, Bhutan to be precise.” We talked for a while and he asked for my address. I wrote him my email address. He said, “Is this where you live?” I non-hesitantly gave my complete mailing address. In my culture, it’s unethical to be rude to any stranger, and the address is not private. He said, “I will be there, within an hour.” I was glad. I had made an American friend the first week I was here. I was so elated.
He seemed to be nice and caring and helpful. He would come to our apartment without appointments and would dine with us. He talked about helping to find jobs and different lucrative things. After few days, other motives started to unfold. He was interested in me as more than a friend. Moreover, he started talking about my sister who was in her teens. We had to stop him from coming to us with the help of police. He was told not to even come around where we lived.

I was walking to library, the next week when he spotted me. He said, “The police don’t want me to come to your house,” in a gasp, piercing me with his eyes.

I exclaimed, “Really, why? We miss you at my house.” He bypassed the question. We didn’t really. He walked to library pushing his bike.

Do some people think that new immigrants are gullible and can be exploited easily? I don’t know whether it’s due to self-consciousness, but I don’t feel welcome here many times. Had I studied Han, the Chinese philosopher who talks about hidden motives and the proper use of persuasive techniques to handle them too, there was no way I could have avoided this situation. I have met many people from many backgrounds. But they generally try to first identify by color/ethnicity and country of origin and stereotype.

With that early bitter experience, I became reluctant to socialize before observing people for a while. Many students and people from a variety of backgrounds come to the International Institute as volunteers. They help newcomers in various ways. There are wonderful, supportive people there, who care to help by going an extra mile. I met one of those Godsends, who not only helped me understand different aspects of American life but also to advance in it. Suggestions on job search, presenting me in interviews and ways to utilize available public resources was very useful. Besides, motivation for improvements and respect for my culture made a great difference to my life.I was happy again. Americans don’t just want to exploit newcomers; they support and help make difference in life too.

It was a beautiful summer in Erie. We, the newcomers, would walk all around the city, in groups. This was an opportunity for us to be together and share our perspectives on what we would be beholding. Are we alienated as a group- a little community? This thought would also dwell on our minds. Obviously, we are. We would often feel uneasy when people would stop to look at us. But we continued to do that. It was fun and it was not fun. Beautiful landscapes, lake, planned city, bay were new to us. The amazing network of roads, around the city and beyond, was incredibly big. The underpasses and the bridges over no river were uniquely interesting to us. The same time we came, people from other countries were coming too. But we were on the streets more than anybody.

Admitted as a refugee, I had only eight months of support from the Department of Public Welfare in benefits including health insurance. Having knowledge of the insurmountable costs involved in medical expenses for poor Americans and the prospect of them becoming bankrupt due to health costs was triggering a wave of fear in me. Now, I was one of those poor people. I had to start to support myself, moreover my siblings and parents, too. A full-time job would make me self-sufficient. I would not have to rely on public benefits. As soon as we were ready to look for jobs, someone told us that jobs in the plastic factory were not for ‘us.’ They said that those jobs were like quicksand, very tough to progress through. We did not want to get jammed into the quicksand, so we accepted it. Now, the possibility of finding a fulltime job became close to nil. I got signed up as an interpreter, thanks to some trivial knowledge of English I had. But I used to get few assignments for interpretation that I would fetch fairly less than a hundred dollars a month. It was time to find a more involving job, with some more possibilities of becoming self-sufficient.

Along with the job as an interpreter, I took up a job as a helping hand to a truck-driver who collected donations from the public for the refugee resettlement agency. With interpretation, helper-mover job and English as a Second Language (ESL) classes, I became a busy new American. I now had fairly more hours but becoming a helper-mover was not easy. It was a very physical job- lifting couches, cabinets, beds, TVs, and all that would be obtained as donations. I was an ant trying to topple an elephant by pushing it. It was fun and it was not fun. The collections that I was involved in would ultimately make the initial stage of immigrants’ life easier and this knowledge made the job more enjoyable. Also, I had a chance to socialize with newer arrivals while setting up their apartments. Besides, the driver was a very intelligent person; we would talk about life in America and life in refugee camps, the American and world politics. One day he said, “Americans want their prospective employees to make their statements strong, you better use ‘I will’ instead of ‘I shall’.” This was a very important lesson for me. In my culture, one has to speak softly to win someone else’s heart, but here I would have to tell my opinions in strong words.

When there would be no assignments for interpretation or the other job, I would wander the city looking for job openings. There were not many openings and, if there were, they would ask for work experience in America, duration of stay and references-Americans I had known for at least one year, so that they could confirm that I am a good worker. I had none. I had just come into the country. Should I wait one year to have somebody know me? But they want me to have someone know me in the workforce for one year. ‘How am I going to have a reference if I don’t get a job to begin with?’ I applied in nearly all stores, whether they had openings or not, most of the applications were dismissed, so I supposed, because I would not be called most of the times. If called for an interview, I would not be called for the job. It was terrible. ‘Am I totally unemployable?’ ‘Am I a loser?’ I could feel pessimism taking root in me.

As the influx of people of my ethnicity continued, a refugee social service agency announced an opening for a refugee case manager. Although, I had my own case unmanaged, I applied for it. Most of the refugees from my ethnicity did. We were tested in English through standardized test and were interviewed. If I could claim to meet the agencies expectations, I would land there, I thought. I had volunteered in a children’s forum in different capacities. Referring to my previous experience in social setting, the children’s forum, I said, “I am very sociable, detail oriented, and object oriented. I am patient and able to handle stressful situations properly.” The interviewer asked me if I would be interested in a part-time position, I nodded yes. To have a regular part time job would be a great achievement in the current job market. Now my job was to find jobs for people like me, without job references and work history, among others.

While Bhutanese refugees were coming and continue to come, Burmese, Iraqi, Somali, Burundi and other refugee groups are coming too. The refugee groups that have been in Erie for some years and who have had communities easily integrate into society. The forerunners help newcomers to find jobs and work as references. For totally new groups like Burmese and Bhutanese, it is very difficult to advance. Burmese have special difficulties as they had fewer chances to learn English back home or in exile. Besides, as they have difficulty in pronouncing many sounds, they are fairly unintelligible even if they have good command of English language and vocabulary. When these refugee groups feel discriminated amid problems facing culture shock, language barriers, and unavailability of jobs, their American dream is shattered. Their hope of finding a safe haven where they could be happy and their children could have safety is disillusioned.

Immigrants are ‘marked’. According to Deborah Tannen, a linguist if people have a set of identifiers-parameters that define them, they become marked (Tannen 403). Immigrants have special characteristics that clearly identify them. Their color, creed, accent, language, culture, all give them a different identity, and these form the basis for discrimination. It is difficult for them to avoid many difficult things, harsh words (Fadiman 83), discrimination on the basis of color and creed, ridicule. No immigrants want to completely forget their language, culture and traditions. “Deep in [their] hearts [immigrants] believe that being [immigrants] has nothing to do with where one lives in (Anzaldua 612).” Where ever they live, however far away from their native land, immigrants have attachment to their culture and traditions. They want to preserve their culture, language and traditions. These create differences in a new society but those differences can be the basis for diversity. Prosperous, peaceful society can be built by understanding and valuing diversity while identifying ways for amity. Instead of ridiculing the cultures of immigrants, they need to be admitted as constituents of our diverse society. This glorifies our cultural heritage. “Two [peoples] may be identified in terms of some principle they share in common, an “identification” that does not deny their distinctness (Burke 586).” Being residents of the United States of America is common for both citizens and for new immigrants; amity, understanding and support are imperative. Hard work and diligence that immigrants bring has enabled the United States of America to prosper and assume the role of a global leader.

November 5, 2009

Works Cited:
Azaldua, Gloria. “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” Reading the World: Ideas that Matter.
Ed. Michael Austin. New York: WW Norton and Company, 2007.604-14.
Burke, Kenneth. “From A Rhetoric of Motives” Reading the World: Ideas that Matter.
Ed. Michael Austin. New York: WW Norton and Company, 2007. 585-90.
Tannen, Deborah. “Marked Women, Unmarked Men” The World is a Text: Writing, Reading,
and Thinking About Culture and its Contexts. Ed. Jonathon Silverman and Dean Rader. Upper Saddle River: Pearson-Prentice Hall, NJ. 2006. 402-06.

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