Immigration Struggles

The vast majority of citizens in the United States have an ancestor or ancestors who traveled to this country as an immigrant.  Some of us have ancestors that traveled to the U.S. one hundred years ago while others have parents that immigrated and became U.S. citizens.  Have you ever thought what it life is like for an immigrant?  Not just in the U.S. but anywhere in the world.  Have you considered what struggles they may be going through in order to decide to become an immigrant and leave everything behind to travel to a new foreign land?

In the novel “Jasmine,” by Bharati Mukherjee, the main character Jasmine is an immigrant from India.  Jasmine narrates the story while she lives in the U.S. and on chapter fifteen she flashes back to when she traveled to the United States as an illegal immigrant.

Jasmine describes these moments in her past with extreme detail, explaining that every type of person imaginable is an immigrant.  Christians, Muslims, Buddhists… White, Filipina, African.  The description given by Jasmine makes me feel and agree that the immigrant community is as diverse as the World itself.  In addition Jasmine explains that these immigrants are at every airport in the “roped-off corners of waiting rooms,” wearing “shreds of national costumes, out of season, the wilted plumage of intercontinental vagabondage” (pg.101).

Jasmine explains the struggles that these immigrants go through.  How they are roughly handled and what they are forced to do to get away from where ever they came from.  How they travel from one small air stripe to another, on “old army trucks,” and trains.  During this flashback Jasmine is asked to show her documents and is let go.  She then says while narrating herself, “I weep at the beauty of the visa stamps Hari-prar has bought me. I feel renewed, the recipient of an organ transplant” (pg. 103).  She feels extremely lucky and fortunate like the recipient of an organ transplant.

After everything she had been going through as an immigrant she felt relieved to know that her illegal documents past the test and that she was now on her way to the States.  Before I read this book I never thought much of illegal immigrants, whether they were just troublemakers disobeying laws, or whether their lives were misfortunate and they ended up as illegal immigrants.  I have started to have greater respect for a person that has left the comfort or unpleasantness of their home to create a new home in a place that is very foreign to them.