Immigration in the United States

This week in Rome went by so incredibly fast! With learning about the United States immigration policy, horrid by the way, a presentation detailing the story board of our video project for 284, and our 381 group presentation on a specific topic regarding refugees, every day was quite "go go go". The anxiety definitely came back this week but honestly that was very much expected, probably inevitable. All I could have asked for is normal, healthy, amounts of stress and I think that’s what I got.

First off with our video project, I think my group’s presentation went great! As did everyone else’s :) It was actually really awesome being able to sit down with my group and think about the organization and smaller details of how our video would hopefully flow. At first a tad frustrating because we ended up having to change up our original idea and put me in a very confused state trying to navigate in my head the best possible way to maneuver the topics of agriculture we’re covering. But, after about an hour of brainstorming I ended up loving what we came up with and really hope we’re able to follow through with the theme and mood of the video we’re trying to achieve.

In service learning this week, I talked to our supervisor some more about getting some of those interview questions out on paper for people to answer. Unfortunately,, we didn’t have enough time to do it this week, but Francesco (supervisor) said we would be able to do it next week! Very excited to see if it works and hopefully get some good insight from the refugees and homeless individuals themselves.

The 381 project on the other hand, while I think it went alright, I was already very nervous to present and then with a 12 minute timer and me being the last person to talk in my group, my heart was pounding throughout the entire presentation. We had originally discussed and practiced our parts as a group as well, but some parts of information were added that we had not discussed and it cost us a lot of time. We probably would have gone over time no matter what, but when I was left with zero time on the timer before I even started talking, my main focus switched from telling the class about the information that I had learned about violence against women in refugee camps, to getting through my slides as quickly as possible. At times I did kind of zoom back into the topic and try to slow down on the pieces of information that I found especially surreal and shocking. Like everyone’s topic, the topic we discussed: violence against women as a tactic in war, is vastly important. A topic that has a lot to it, and I feel for every women, the millions that there are, that have been exploited for their body, sex, and as a result of gender. It’s a trauma that can follow a person and their family for their whole life.

Discussing immigration in the United States this week I noticed left me having very bitter thoughts towards the U.S. With my parents being immigrants from Mexico, it is a topic I am passionate about. That is that my parents experienced the best possible scenario coming to the United States for work, from a company that seeked my dad's expertise in engineering, and him and my mom later traveled to the U.S with green cards and later (much later) became citizens. Even then, it was an incredibly complex, thorough process. Without the perfect conditions that the U.S requires for an individual or family to come to the U.S, even to seek asylum, it turns into an almost impossible process that keeps families waiting for decades. Even if that wait can mean dangerous, or deadly, conditions. During the presentation from Maggie Cheng, there are two things that caught my attention the most. First the fact that there is no right to an appointed attorney in immigration court if the person cannot afford a private attorney . This honestly just feels like it should be illegal. Who are we (the U.S) to deny someone the right to a lawyer, to properly defend themselves. It all feels so mean, like a show of superiority from the United States. The next was covering some of the policies that Trump implemented and remembering the thousands of families that got separated during his presidency. I remember sitting in the car with my mom listening to a woman being interviewed by npr. I remember her screams and cries as her son had just been taken from her. I remember the hideous conditions of the camps children were kept in, as if they were animals kept in cages. With no family at that. Again, real lives being destroyed, it’s quite simply inhumane. How can a person have so little empathy.