Zubaida Ula knows that as an immigrant, she’s privileged. Her parents emigrated from Bangladesh to the United States when she was a few weeks old. Her dad, an electrical engineer with Intel, was able to bring their family into the country with ease.
“When Intel is handling your paperwork for you, it’s very different than when you’re working in fields and don’t speak English,” Ula said at an Indivisible Greater Vancouver talk Tuesday. Ula was one of three immigrants who shared their stories with the audience during a forum on immigration at Clark College.
She said the “why” is what everyone wants to know. She asked the audience to imagine they are working in their field, at the top of their game. Your salary is about $1,000 a month, and “that’s pretty much the best you’re going to get.” That might be OK, but if you move, your salary could jump to $10,000 a month.
“That is why people like my dad left behind his family and everything he knew,” Ula said. “Opportunity.”
Nadia Kassa, a recent Washington State University Vancouver graduate, was born in Seattle. But her family had emigrated to escape violence against her people, the Eritreans. Her parents met when her mother was 15 and her father was 23. They married shortly thereafter.
“They spent their whole life just going from country to country trying to find stability,” Kassa said.
They lived in Sudan in the 1990s during the Eritrean War of Independence. Out of fear, Kassa said, her father moved to the U.S. first, followed by her mother and sister.
“Essentially the path my parents took to get to the States took over their whole life,” she said.
That choice to seek a better life is the reason Kassa was able to graduate from college and why she will make more money than her parents ever did.
“It’s something everyone deserves,” Kassa said.
Speaking through Diana Perez, the Washington director for The League of United Latin American Citizens, an undocumented Clark College student urged the community to realize that immigrants are humans. The unnamed student was scheduled to speak in person at the forum but decided against it out of fear. The student sought protection under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals act but was one of the more than 3 million not protected. There are more than 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S.
“We deserve the same opportunities,” the student wrote in a letter read by Perez. “We are no longer in the shadows and we must never go back.”
The student asked the community to restrict blame placed on Dreamers’ parents.
“They left poverty, violence and an uncertain future to give us a life,” they said. “We deserve freedom. We deserve to be here. I will not let this administration break our spirits.”
Community response
After listening to the speakers’ stories, the audience broke into a passionate discussion about immigration. Many shared their own stories, including a local therapist whose parents fled Nazi Germany in order to survive. More than swapping immigration stories, the audience genuinely sought an answer to the nation’s deep divide on immigration.
“What we have to remind ourselves is, the immigrant issue is a civil rights issue,” Kassa said. “These are people’s lives we’re dealing with. We have to target policy at the end of the day.”
In terms of continuing the conversation and making an impact, the conclusion was, the community can make a difference on an individual level. But that change is in the hands of the white community, Ula said.
“Work with your people,” she said. “I am not going to do that — right now I’m not feeling comfortable, I’m not feeling safe in talking with people who support Trump. But I do look to my white brothers and sisters to do that work.”
