The risks young immigrants face when coming into the U.S.

When I came to the United States in December of 2014 with my older brother, I knew a little bit of English, but not enough to carry a conversation with a native speaker. I only knew the basics of the language that were taught to me in school. In January of 2015 my dad took me and my brother to get enrolled in school and continue our education in the Rochester City School District (RCSD) in Rochester, NY, where we came to live.  We had the records of our official grades from Cuba for all the past school years and we gave them to the woman that was attending us, a Spanish speaker. She looked over our school records and after a couple of minutes she told my father that both me and my brother were going to be starting 6th grade. I was in 10th grade and my brother was in 12th grade when we left Cuba. We were all speechless for a minute until my dad spoke up and said: “Why? That cannot happen,” then the woman replied simply saying: “They do not speak English, your kids will need some time to learn” (This whole conversation was in Spanish, she never spoke to us in English). After she said that, my dad demanded that we take an exam to prove our English level to her (we were supposed to have taken one before she decided what grade to put us in). Me and my brother took the exam and when she saw our results she said something along the lines of: “Oh, their English is not as bad as I though.” After that, she had to put us in our corresponding grades.

Me and my brother were lucky that our dad spoke up and said that it was not right to put us in 6th grade. If he hadn’t, neither of us would be in college right now. Unfortunately, not many new immigrants actually speak up and say that something is wrong because they tend to follow the rules of what other people say is better for them when in reality, no one knows what your family is capable of better than yourself. In my high school, for example, it was not uncommon to see a student in 9th or 10th grade that was 21 years old. This puts the young immigrant students at a disadvantage compared to other students of their age. Their risk of dropping out of school is much higher because they might not just have school to worry about, many work and have adult responsibilities to take care of at home.

There are also the teenage immigrants that come from their country already holding a high school degree with hopes of getting into college in the United States. Unfortunately, things are not easier for them. When they come here they are faced with the reality that their degree does not count in the U.S.. Then, they only end up having three risky choices: redoing high school, giving up going to college and finding a job that does not require a college education, or going back to their home country and going to college there to maybe in the future being able to come back to the U.S. again. One of my best friends in college right now took the risk of choosing the first option of going back to high school in the U.S. with hopes of transforming this risk into a reward for the future. She came from Mexico the same year I came from Cuba, 2014, and by that time she was already 18 years old and had just finished high school when I was just starting 10th grade. She will soon be turning 23, and she is just going to finish her first year of college. By the time she graduates from SUNY Geneseo she will be 25 years old, which will be the age I will be after one year of receiving my Master’s Degree and hopefully having my first full time job.

My friend says that she does not regret having to redo high school because that prepared her to be in college right now, but I know that she sometimes feels out of place being surrounded by people who might act childish to her, but she is starting to get used to it. This can be related to the short narratives from upperclassmen that were shown to the upcoming freshman that were going to participate in Urstein’s experiment in Stanford University in The Power of Realistic Expectations where the upperclassmen detailed how they felt out of place at first but gained a sense of belonging over time. All of these young immigrants including myself and my brother come into the United States of America with dreams of having a greater and brighter future, but instead, we are hit with the reality that to get the rewards we dream of, we will have to face many risks and obstacles from the beginning of our journey, all the way to the end.

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