What types of support are the non-immigrants in your story offering the immigrants? How helpful have these supports been? What things have characters been unaware of until an immigrant explicitly points them out?
In the TED talk “What Marrying an Immigrant Taught me About Cultural Bias”-Kyle Quin. It's about this American husband who is a U.S. citizen and talking about the cultural bias his wife, Isebelle, faces on a day-to-day basis. He explains a few stories that he's seen that they have encountered with his wife, who is from Brazil, and they married. He explains his side of culture bias, advocates to others on how they need to understand or value everyone, and not to dehumanize immigrants. A quote from the TED talk is, “Because despite the legal protection that is granted toward documented immigrants in our country, this legal system does nothing to protect them from the hate, discrimination, or dehumanization they experience on a daily basis in the U.S..” (Quin) Quin is trying to help immigrants by describing ways to show support to immigrants from the US citizens.
In my book Out of Nowhere by Maria Padian, it's about a high school student named Tom Bouchard who lives in Maine. He goes to a school where Somalian immigrants are now attending. This school is known and being looked at for the immigrants. He's been trying to get to know Saeed. Tom has been getting into a little trouble, but he's trying to help Saeed on his team. Tom's making up for this behavior is spending community service hours at a center for kids and he's helping them. He is helping a little boy named Abdi. He's a Somali kid who's not the best in English. So Tom and Saeed's older sister Samira make a plan and make a book of the Somali-English Dictionary with letters a-z plus a drawing with words from both languages. Tom and Saeed had a conversation about immigrants and Tom learned that Saeed didn't know his birthday, most of them didn't know their birthdays, and Saeed said they didn't have one. Saeed didn't have a birth certificate, and how people identified him was his green card, and on those green cards, which lied about birthdays, and they were all January 1st, because most immigrants who moved at a young age didn't know. Saeed was explaining to Tom. The mayor in the town wrote a letter about the Somali immigrants encouraging them not to tell their friends or families to move to Ennistion because the immigrant population is maxing out and they don't have the space for them. Tom then finds out about how Saeed religion and how Ramadan was going on so he starts fasting and he was going to try having him break it for a soccer game but then Myla explains to him that his religion as being a Muslim is his way of connecting to his home lifestyle and that's all he might have left so he shouldn't ask him to break it. A quote that shows support is, “ That's when I knew I wasn't going to ask Saeed and the other guys to break their fast the next week”(Padian 199). This shows Toms consideration to the immigrants since he's learned that most refugees there religion they practice is like the one thing that they connect to their home countries life.
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