An Ode to Immigration
It’s a very strange feeling to be leaving Los Angeles at a time like this. Seeing my city terrorized by ICE raids, just months after the devastating fires that wiped out thousands of homes, has been horrifying. Moving away, even for a great reason like graduate school, now feels a little like a betrayal of some kind. To see the hardest working and most ambitious among us treated with such violent disregard for humanity has been awful, especially since the raids are being done with no regard for whether a person is here legally or not; U.S. citizens, children, college students, legal refugees, and those on green cards and work visas are being subjected to this. Los Angeles, like any great American city, is the remarkable place that it is because of its immigrant population – and at no time in the city’s existence has that fact been untrue.
Approximately one month from now, I will be an immigrant, too.
Or, to be technical, an expat with the potential to become an immigrant in the near future. Either way, I’m moving to a different country for a very simple reason: the U.K. has a specific opportunity that excites and amazes me. It’s giving me a chance to build something that I wouldn’t have at an American University – one that would charge me at least twice as much money to pursue an academic goal. Job prospects and academia aside, there’s another reason to live abroad: a simple love for the world we get to inhabit in this life. I want to explore this beautiful planet, meet different people, try different foods, and learn anything I can.
It’s not because I have the intention of “stealing” someone’s job. It’s not because I want to be a leech on another country’s health care system. It’s not because I want to start my own chapter of MS-13. I’m moving because this is the right opportunity for me at this stage in my life.
Given the current state of our country, I wonder how many people can read this and picture me being abducted by masked thugs with no identification, handcuffed, thrown into an unmarked car, and shoved into a rancid cage full of desperate people begging for scraps of maggot-infested food while guards brag about their enormous, taxpayer-funded bonuses and laugh at the idea of feeding me to hungry alligators.
I also wonder how much overlap there is between people who would love to see that happen to me and those who brag about their ancestors’ immigration stories. Anyone reading this who isn’t Native American certainly has one.
Since so many of us, especially those with a skin tone close to my own, love to tell the stories about how our families arrived in this country, here are a few brief anecdotes from my own lineage:
My mother’s side of the family is descended from a long line of Mennonite pacifists who were kicked out of more countries than I’ll bother listing here for their refusal to fight in wars. Empress Catherine the Great offered my ancestors a 100-year agreement that would exempt them from military service in exchange for farming terrain in modern-day Ukraine that was nearly uninhabitable, eventually developing a hearty winter wheat. When the agreement expired, my family brought the seeds to Kansas, plowed through god knows how many yards of deeply rooted prairie grass, and made the U.S. the “bread basket of the world”.
Dad’s side is full of English/Irish settlers who came in search of backbreaking work on railroads and construction as populations grew through the east coast and into Appalachia, eventually landing in Missouri. Another branch of my family immigrated from Corsica, a small island off the coast of Italy, which, let’s just say it, was a prison colony. They were offered a chance to move to the States during the Reconstruction era, subsequently building modern-day Louisiana with their bare hands.
None of these experiences came with citizenship tests, loyalty oaths, or $5,000,000 “gold card” visas. They only came with a desire to live safely, provide for a family, and hope that their descendants would have better choices than they did.
And here we are. I live in a time when pursuing an advanced degree in a niche topic (an MA in Magick and Occult Sciences is definitely a weird one) is celebrated, rather than dismissed as useless and trivial; when a top University in another country is just a plane ride away; and most importantly, when this field of study won’t get me burned at the stake.
I can’t wait to study such an incredible subject at this University, where international students make up nearly 25% of the student body, and to take day trips to Bath, Stonehenge, and various castles in the English countryside, or longer weekend trips to London, Edinburgh, Dublin, and other cities all over Europe.
Learning about the world is, frankly, the point of living. I deserve the chance to go on this adventure. We all do.
I’m proud of myself for taking this leap.
I’m proud of the many other who have taken it, too.