It was Thanksgiving at a relative's house, a few years ago. I had started chatting with an older man seated next to me. He was in his late 70s, grey hair, the rough hands of a farmer. He asked me what I did. I replied, "I teach English to immigrants." He responded, "I guess we'd have different views on immigration, wouldn't we?" I said, "I guess we would."
Immigrants are demonized in America. People claim they're out to do any number of things to our country - steal our jobs, terrorize us, sell us drugs - but what it really boils down to is fear of the differences between us. They don't speak our language. They don't wear our clothing. They don't have our religion. They are not like us.
I've been teaching English or tutoring students in English for many years now. I've listened to their stories and shared some of mine. We have a lot of the same views. We all want what's best for out families. We want security and comfort. We want good jobs with decent pay. We want education for our children.
"Why are Americans so cold?" asked one of the women I tutor. She's from Brazil, tall, with long dark hair.
This was last year, before COVID. At the time, her question struck me as odd. "We're not cold," I said, "we just like having a buffer between us and other people."
I started tutoring again in October because I needed to get out of my house. I needed to interact with other people (because if I'm going to get sick and die, I might as well do it for a good cause).
I meet this woman at the library every Thursday night. I bring a newspaper article about a pressing topic. We read it aloud. We review vocabulary. Sometimes we discuss the article, sometimes we don't. We spend two hours conversing. By now, we know about each other's families and backgrounds.
This past Thursday, we met as usual. We started talking about Christmas and New Year's - what we did, what we ate, whether or not our families were driving us crazy - when she started to cry. She explained she had hoped to go back to Brazil to visit her family but it had not happened. She expressed her loneliness at being so far from home and how even though she calls her family, they don't always have time to talk to her.
That's when I started crying, too. Like her, my family is thousands of miles away. I don't always talk to them regularly. I hear about activities they do together. And I feel so incredibly distant from them it makes my heart hurt.
We shared a moment, she and I, one in which encapsulated our similarities, not our differences. We felt each other's pain. She remarked that I "wasn't cold anymore" and I finally understood: Americans can't share stories with strangers, with immigrants, with people who are not like us.
Americans purposely avoid interacting with people different from us. We choose not to put ourselves in uncomfortable positions. We choose not to learn a little bit more about the immigrant family down the street because if we did, we would discover their wants are our wants. We would discover they are living the same story and there's nothing to fear.
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