When I first arrived in America as a young 12-year-old boy, my family lived in a mostly immigrant neighborhood in southern part of Boston. The neighborhood school was filled with immigrants from Eastern Europe, especially the Balkan countries of Albania, Bosnia, and Serbia. As fellow students of ESL classes, I spent years with them, earning American culture, English language, and talking about the homelands we left behind. And talked we always had about our homelands, with bit nostalgia, and plenty of gratefulness that we all got out.
Once the Albanian told me about the view of America people had back home. He said with a certain degree of cynicism, “back there, everyone thought America is a land where money grows on trees and the roads are paved with gold...I mean, literally.” The naiveté of the comment had such a huge impact on me that six years later, it became the first sentence of a college application essay that got me into Yale. The optimism with which new immigrants approached America cannot be better summarized by that comment.
And then, eleven years after the 12-year-old Albanian uttered that line to me during recess at a public middle school in Boston, I am sitting in a restaurant in Tirana, Albania, enjoying perhaps the best full-course lunch I had during this entire European trip for a mere 7 Euros. The atmosphere is non-deceptively friendly, the setting spotlessly clean, and the staff perfectly fluent in English. The restaurant is everything one can ask for back in America except the price tag is maybe 30%.
In fact, the city of Tirana brightly sparkled just like this restaurant. Under the warm winter sun, the fountains and the parks are filled with families on outings, the outdoor cafes inundated with friends chatting and laughing over cups of freshly brewed coffee, and the streets buzzing with pedestrians and cars going about daily business. The city hums with productive activity, yet simultaneous shows its friendly, laid-back side full of people confidently enjoying their leisure.
Sure, there are clogged streets and run-down buildings, but the cars and buses clogging the streets are brand-new, and even the most decrepit building has bright-colored paint consistent with the overall optimistic feeling of the city. All in all, Albania, at least here in Tirana, is not at all as described by my middle school friends a decade ago. It is a country rapidly moving forward through relentless development, with stylishly dress locals finding their bright future right here in their homeland.
Emigrants, in general, have a tendency to exaggerate; they exaggerate how wealthy and full of opportunities their destinations of immigration are, and they exaggerate the backwardness and poverty of the lands they left behind. Yes, indeed the employment rate and per capita income of immigrant-receiving developed countries may still be relatively high, but there is no guarantee that the quality of life is indeed worse in the “impoverished” homelands. Albania, with her cheap prices and leisurely lifestyle, may be a perfect example.
Ultimately, what drives and motivates emigrants to emigrate may be overblown imaginations rather than any sort of hard facts based on on-the-ground reality. Too long have people from the developing world held steadfastly to their inferior complex: that their countries always are and will be worse off than somewhere else out West. From their standpoint, it makes sense. They, as emigrants, must find some way to rationalize why they emigrated in the first place.
But today, as the gap between the haves and have-nots quickly shrinks, it is fine time for the mentality to change and the complex to disappear. I ask that emigrants everywhere to stop irrationally narrow-mindedly concentrate on the perceived greatness of the West. Go back often to your homelands for visits, in the past decade or two, the grimmest places may have become as trendy and fashionable as any town in the developed world. I know, 100% sure, that when they go back, they, as Albanians will of Tirana, will find renewed pride in the positive changes of their homelands.
Once the Albanian told me about the view of America people had back home. He said with a certain degree of cynicism, “back there, everyone thought America is a land where money grows on trees and the roads are paved with gold...I mean, literally.” The naiveté of the comment had such a huge impact on me that six years later, it became the first sentence of a college application essay that got me into Yale. The optimism with which new immigrants approached America cannot be better summarized by that comment.
And then, eleven years after the 12-year-old Albanian uttered that line to me during recess at a public middle school in Boston, I am sitting in a restaurant in Tirana, Albania, enjoying perhaps the best full-course lunch I had during this entire European trip for a mere 7 Euros. The atmosphere is non-deceptively friendly, the setting spotlessly clean, and the staff perfectly fluent in English. The restaurant is everything one can ask for back in America except the price tag is maybe 30%.
In fact, the city of Tirana brightly sparkled just like this restaurant. Under the warm winter sun, the fountains and the parks are filled with families on outings, the outdoor cafes inundated with friends chatting and laughing over cups of freshly brewed coffee, and the streets buzzing with pedestrians and cars going about daily business. The city hums with productive activity, yet simultaneous shows its friendly, laid-back side full of people confidently enjoying their leisure.
Sure, there are clogged streets and run-down buildings, but the cars and buses clogging the streets are brand-new, and even the most decrepit building has bright-colored paint consistent with the overall optimistic feeling of the city. All in all, Albania, at least here in Tirana, is not at all as described by my middle school friends a decade ago. It is a country rapidly moving forward through relentless development, with stylishly dress locals finding their bright future right here in their homeland.
Emigrants, in general, have a tendency to exaggerate; they exaggerate how wealthy and full of opportunities their destinations of immigration are, and they exaggerate the backwardness and poverty of the lands they left behind. Yes, indeed the employment rate and per capita income of immigrant-receiving developed countries may still be relatively high, but there is no guarantee that the quality of life is indeed worse in the “impoverished” homelands. Albania, with her cheap prices and leisurely lifestyle, may be a perfect example.
Ultimately, what drives and motivates emigrants to emigrate may be overblown imaginations rather than any sort of hard facts based on on-the-ground reality. Too long have people from the developing world held steadfastly to their inferior complex: that their countries always are and will be worse off than somewhere else out West. From their standpoint, it makes sense. They, as emigrants, must find some way to rationalize why they emigrated in the first place.
But today, as the gap between the haves and have-nots quickly shrinks, it is fine time for the mentality to change and the complex to disappear. I ask that emigrants everywhere to stop irrationally narrow-mindedly concentrate on the perceived greatness of the West. Go back often to your homelands for visits, in the past decade or two, the grimmest places may have become as trendy and fashionable as any town in the developed world. I know, 100% sure, that when they go back, they, as Albanians will of Tirana, will find renewed pride in the positive changes of their homelands.
Good stuff. I would also add that too often, the very real lure of money/remittances that can be earned in the West, even at jobs far under the skill level of the immigrant, clouds the importance of one's culture. It's only after emigrating that many realize that, even with the extra money they are making (though it's usually far less than they imagined), it may not be worth the loss of culture and separation from one's family and friends.
ReplyDelete...and all the hate (overt and covert) that they endure from the natives who would both loathe them for taking away their jobs AND look down upon them for being foreign/poor/uneducated...but then again, if you are really really broke, then you will be extremely humble and do whatever is told, even if the working/living conditions are near slavery....I am working with some Bangladeshi migrant workers over here, and can clearly see that these guys are seriously desensitized by whatever negative stuff is going on in their lives....
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