From a Dream to a Nightmare

by Guadalupe

Immigration is the most controversial issue here in Arizona and other places all around the world. Well in fact everybody is an immigrant. Not everyone's parents or relatives were born here so that makes you an immigrant to. Perhaps it was your grandparents or great grandparents.  It makes no difference. Joe Arpio needs to recognize that not every immigrant is the same. We are all different and we are all immigrants, so it's ridiculous to label us all as "lawbreakers." 

Have you ever notice that most of the immigrants around here are Latino? We are everywhere we are moving around the whole world! It would be easy for people to see this and get scared.  They might see us as "taking over."  But most of the immigrants are leaving a nation that doesn't have enough opportunties. Many of us act the same way: friendly. There is always a question in my head, "Why do some Americana's treat us differently?"  We are all the same. We are humans. We are all on a journey, whether from one nation to another or from one part of our life to the next.  Everybody does the same things and and goes to the same place. We go to the same grave.  We will all end up tossed into a hole in the same rugged earth. So why treat others differently? Are we really that different if by simply beginning at a different location?

We are the same. I realize that many immigrants speak a different language and are from a different place. Some of the customs and culture might seem strange.  But hang around us and you'll see that we have the same types of families and we engage in the same activities.  What seems different at first becomes something that all humans do.  We eat. We drink. We play. We laugh. 

Certain Americans discriminate toward immigrants in the same way they did to the African Americans. The person that hates us most is the sheriff Joe Arpaio, who is essentially the Bull Connor of our generation. He is always coming out in the news with a lot of prisoners and they are all immigrants.  He has even set up a hotline for paranoid racists to secretly spy on neighbors. I don't know what we did to him so that he can start discriminating us like that! I can't think of a person more racist than him and there are lots of people that are racist but not as much as him.  I think of how the Holocaust started and it was with ideas like this.  It was with the racism, the stereotypes, the scapegoating and labelling.

I have Uncles that have talked to me in the phone and they say that there wasn't any people there in Mexico anymore and with this of Joe Arpio and other people like him and the United States are taking everybody back.  So now Mexico is staring to fill up again with people that left to the United States.  Also many people are leaving because the houses are to expensive now and Joe Arpio is telling the business owners that they are going to take there buildings and close them. So there aren't jobs for immigrants anymore and yet the deportations lead to a worse housing crisis and a lack of labor and our economy plummets. 

The Pledge of Allegiance here for the United States say that it is the land of the free and the home of the brave. There isn't freedom and there aren't brave people to say something when Joe Arpio is taking the family's apart! I don't see brave people here I just remember somebody that died for being brave and standing up for the African Americans and that was Martin Luther King Jr. They killed him because he was brave to stand up for his own racist.There has to be a person like that and like Cesar Chavez he was a leader in favor of the immigrant he helped them a lot he made people respect them more and I think that he was great leader but to bad that he died he would of helped us a lot.

This isn't the land of the free anymore! It is the land of the racism and the injustice! We once had the American Dream but now they're turning it into the American Nightmare. 

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