Q:

What are your thoughts on the video?

 

 It was not that shocking to me to see something like that. When he said he pays welfare for these immigrants and even when he said that the least they can do is speak English to me. But It’s crazy to me to know that people out there think that immigrants provide nothing to this country. They still pay taxes and this country was built by immigrants.

 

 

Q:

Do you think that there is a strong English first narrative in America?

 

Yes, I do. When immigrant families come to the U.S. from countries that are faced with wars, and some of those wars were caused by the U.S., when people come from those countries they are expected to speak English as if they’ve spoken it before. They are looked down upon for not being American enough.

 

 

Q:

Did you have trouble assimilating to the American culture and what were those troubles like?

 

First thing was giving up my native tongue. I came to the U.S. speaking, reading, and writing fluently but when I started going to school of course I had to speak English. In fact, I used to get bullied in school for not speaking English in the proper American accent. There were so many times that I did not want to go back to school because of the bullying. There was this one time in sixth grade when I was called upon to read and I couldn’t read the words well enough and so the students in my class began to snicker. In many ways the bullying forced me to learn how to speak English fluently and in doing this I lost a lot of my abilities to speak my native tongue. It’s not as fluent. It’s actually really broken now which sucks because whenever I want to have deep conversations with my parents I can’t have that because it feels like there’s this language barrier between me and them. It definitely felt like I was losing a part of me.