America Through My Eyes

By Anonymous / Spring 2021

You are going to live your happy life and all your dreams will come true! That was my mom’s voice when we qualified for coming to the United state for the first time. My parents and I were so excited to live in America since we all have read and heard about America’s promises. We moved to the United State seeking happiness, freedom, and equality. We were sure that our life would be better and easier in America. It’s been five years and ten months since the day we moved here but our expectations have not been met. From that day on, I have been asking myself some questions such as Do I feel happy in America? Do I have freedom here? Do people treat me equally here? And everytime, I have no answer to these questions. Or I do have, but I am afraid that my answer makes me doubt my decision of living here. It is stressful to live and be deeply happy here which is opposite of America’s promise of happiness. Moreover, even though America is a first world country, the branches of inequalities are still alive and able to observe here, this is contradictory with their equality promise.

Life in America is stressful. People always have to compete with each other to win the game. The game of pursuing happiness here. We compete so hard and ignore ours and others feelings because we still think achieving our goals is giving us happiness. However, this only turns us into robots. When I moved here, I never thought America would treat me like a slave! I never thought life would be this much stressful here. I do not remember the last time I laughed from my heart. I do not remember the last time I slept without having a terrible dream or woke up without having a tension headache. This is happening to me, who is a student of one of the best universities in the United state. I interviewed, talked, and asked other students studying the same or different majors in America, and they all have the same feelings. We are all worried about falling behind the quarter system, failing classes, our finances, and not getting an internship and a job. We all are working too hard without having a time to relax, to enjoy the best years of our life. This is not what I have dreamed and thought about education in the United State of america. This is not what happiness is described in my mind. Happiness here is like a ball and the United state is a coach. We are running after the ball and everytime that we are close to catching it, America shoots the ball one more time. There is also some time that they let us touch the ball for a moment in order to keep us craving and being thirsty of chasing happiness. But in the end, we are all running after a ball shooted by the coach. And this is a loop of our life here. 1619 was the beginning of slavery in America, by stilling men and women from their homes in Africa and bringing them to the United State. The slavery never ended here, it only traformed form stealing humans to different form. They are not stealing african anymore. But they are stealing our mental and physical health. I know that I have happiness here more than in my own country. That was the reason my parents and I moved here. Iran is a third world country and America is a first world country. But my expectation from a first world country before living there was different. As well as my imagination, dreams, and beliefs about the United State.

There are still inequalities in America, especially for immigrants. Being an immigrant is challenging for all the people who moved to America. We all moved here for a successful life. But we did not know that living in the United States means being separated from American people. Immigrant people feel the separation everywhere, from our heart till the environment we are living in. We feel separation in their heart since we had to leave their own country due to some difficulties and move to the United State. Which is challenging for many of us in order to adapt to a whole new environment and learn rules and laws here. We also feel separation in the environment we live in, which is the United States since, American people do not consider and treat us equally. We get separated for the language we speak, for the accent we have, for the color of skin we have, and for not speaking English fluently. This separation can be seen in school, workplace, and home place environment. As an immigrant student, I faced inequality when I was trying to explain a concept to my American classmates and they were not taking me seriously due to my English and my accent. This did not only happen in school but also happened in a workplace. I never thought that this would happen to me in the United States. I never thought people would treat me differently only because I was born in a different country. I never thought people would separate me from them only because my native language is different than them. We all may come from different countries but we are all humans, share the same sky, and live on a plant earth. As an immigrant worker it was challenging and rare for me and other immigrants to get raised to a higher position when I was working in an American company. Most of the higher positions are only for American people. These higher positions are not based on their skills or knowledge, they are based on people's race. Before moving here, I never thought of facing inequalities by American people. However, immigrants are benefiting the United States through many things such as starting businesses here which creates jobs for American workers and other immigrants, becoming engineers, scientists, and innovators, and improving America’s economy. Therefore, it is truly unfair to treat immigrants differently. We left our first home to pursue a better life and thought of America as our second home without knowing that the inequalities are bold here.