Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Response to Sassen's "Guests and Aliens"

What I liked about this article was that it discussed the different types of immigration on other western countries besides the United States. One of the main reasons I applied to this program was explore this topic, especially since I am the child of immigrants and a grew up in a community with a large immigrant population. My parents came to America after fleeing the civil war between Eritrea and Ethiopia and living in Sudan for about a decade. My parents held on tightly to their culture, so even though I was born here in the US, I still had a strong sense of Eritrean identity that my parents constantly emphasized on passing down to me. My parents faced many problems with assimilating into American culture, especially since they came with very little knowledge of English and no formal education.

Also, with being an American Ethnic Studies major, some of the classes discuss different types of migration patterns in the US and the different types of treatment that these immigrants were exposed to by the native/dominant population. One of the main things that I've been able to tie into my studies directly is my AAS 101 class with the different migration patterns among the different types of Asian groups as they left their respective homelands for a new country. To go into more detail, it explains the specific regions that people came from, much like expressed in Sassen's article, which broke down the common idea that immigrants are from all over a country, instead of from specific regions, especially when these immigrants bring in other family members from that same area.