To whom it may concern,
My name is Doaa. I am an immigrant and I want to share my experience with you.
When you decide to immigrate, it means you exhausted all the options in your own country to create a better future, and you saw more hope in the new one.
Being an immigrant is one of the toughest decisions anyone could make. You leave your family and your friends, and you don’t know when or if you’ll see them again. All your connections with them becomes virtual. You realize that you miss out on lots of things that you once took for granted, like your mother’s homemade cooking.
Sometimes, it means that you have to leave your prominent job to start from scratch in a new land where you’re treated as an outsider. These are jobs that you most probably won’t do in your own country, but you don’t care because you want a better life. In some cases, your family will sell some of their belongings to help you get a plane ticket and follow your dreams.
This new land doesn’t welcome you with open arms. You face all kinds of xenophobia and racism, but you reach a point where you get used to all that and move on. You face a cultural shock for a very long time and you have to force yourself to adapt as fast as you can. You feel lonely, and on those rough days, you don’t have a family or a friend that speaks your same language to cry on their shoulder.
I consider myself to be a privileged immigrant because I had all the means that allowed me to go through the procedures to apply for different types of visas in my travels. I feel privileged because I never had to worry about being deported to a war-torn country or to a place where I felt my life was threatened.
I don’t believe anyone is illegal; but, colonialism and stealing land are illegal. Separating families is illegal. Putting children in concentration camps is illegal. The immigration policies that separate families were created on stolen lands. Going through immigration the “legal” way requires financial privilege. So, if you decide to risk yours and your families’ lives on a boat, or whatever risky methods to enter a country, it means that you’ve been through so much struggle in your life that you saw this step as your only escape. Economically, so many countries would fall without the contribution of the immigrants because immigrants do the jobs that locals wouldn’t.
When we witness people begging authorities to stay in jail rather than be deported, or when we hear the heartbreaking voices of children crying and asking about their families, humanity is in question, and we reached a stage where love and empathy don’t exist anymore. Creating a world based on hate and fear is never the answer. Investing our energy on love and compassion would make the world a much better place to live in.
And trust me, no one wants to leave their homeland and be an immigrant elsewhere; but circumstances force us to choose between our homeland and our future.
Doaa, an immigrant on the Unceded Coast Salish Territories