In the society we live in now, racist comments and jokes have become a norm in people’s everyday life. However, jokes about Hispanic people are the ones that hit close to home for me. People take one good look at you and just because you look Hispanic, you are automatically labeled an illegal immigrant.
Everyone’s so quick to judge based on your looks, and they end up hating you because of political advertisements that say immigrants take jobs away from American citizens. More specifically, illegal Mexican immigrants, are the targets of these comments. People judge them based on what politicians say about them, but no one ever bothered to ask an immigrant how bad their life was back in their home country, that they risked everything, including their own lives to come to the United States. Last year, I had the luxury to travel to Mexico. Once I got there, I witnessed the poverty at first hand.
It was to my amazement that bathrooms in Mexico aren’t free. You have to PAY to use a public bathroom. We take public restrooms here for granted, and we even have the audacity to vandalize them for our own amusement. In Mexico, if you’re poor, you basically can’t use the bathroom in public. You could wait until you get home and use your own bathroom, but when you gotta go, you gotta go. To a Mexican immigrant who is new to the United States, using a public restroom without having to pay for them is a privilege they, unfortunately, don’t have.
Everyone hates going to school. Most kids today try to cut school and would rather be out with their friends. However, in the United States, going to school is part of the law. If you don’t go to school, the school calls child services and next thing you know you have a social worker on your doorstep looking for the child who’s been missing from school. In Mexico, no one cares if you go to school. While that may sound great to some people, the reality is that it isn’t great at all. Going to school is for privileged rich people in Mexico. They make schools so expensive that no one can afford to go. If no one goes to school, then how do you expect a child to do well in life? We take for granted our free education system. Even though we all have to pay for college and are drowning in student loans, imagine how much more debt you would be in if you had to pay to go to kindergarten.
Tie that in with the expensive education system, it is hard to succeed in life if you never learned to read or write because you simply couldn’t afford it. It’s a system that keeps poor people poor, and the rich, rich. If you were born into poverty, the chances of you moving up the economic ladder are slim. Then you hear about this country where restrooms and schools are free, so everyone’s first instinct would be to go to this country. These people believe that they can have a better life if they were to leave Mexico, but what everyone in Mexico knows and most Americans don’t, is that the Mexican government makes a poor person’s dream of leaving the country legally almost impossible.
It is nearly impossible to get approved for a Visa. Why? Because you have to prove that you have lots of money to leave the country. The government doesn’t care if you want a better life for yourself. If you don’t have a certain sized property or several properties that you can prove are in your name, you aren’t ever getting approved for a Visa. This makes leaving Mexico legally impossible, which is why Mexican immigrants risk their lives crossing the river and desert just to leave their home country.
Down the line, everyone’s ancestors were once immigrants. They all left their home country to escape war, famine or poverty. People leave the place they call home because unfortunately, not every country is like the United States where the government protects your right to free education or your right to make something of yourself. Even though it is not the United States fault that these people are suffering in their own country, but when has the United States ever been a place to turn away people who needed a new start?
Long ago, the Statue of Liberty was a symbol of hope to new immigrants. On her tablet, it is written: “Give me your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses yearning to be free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” My question is, when did the United States decide to close their door to those who are only looking for a new place to call home?