Then Later of course, we moved on into much more complex things, such as doing a research essay which would put my skills that I learned back in highschool AP seminar to the challenge. These were things such as coming up with the research question and then finding the sources, articles, and scholarly journals to cite my work. Of course, My work is cited in this page too, and it is categorized. While this was more linear in terms of what the structure was supposed to be, it was still enjoyable to do, and I was still able to express myself greatly thanks to Phase 1. This is “The Struggle of The Immigrant in America”

Over many years, immigrants have come to America,  Also known as the land of opportunities, for many reasons. Whether it be to flee their countries riddled with high crime and corruption, to just simply looking for a better life through better work opportunities, and even some wanting to reunite with their own family once again after what would feel like many years, the Immigrants that come to America have the most diverse group of people, having people from Europe, and Africa, and Asia, and South America immigrate to America’s major cities and even some rural places at times. But at the same time, as diverse as they may be, all immigrants have to go through the same issue one way or another. And that problem is Assimilating into American Culture. Whether it be having to learn a new language and develop literacy skills in order to get the most basic of jobs and to be able to communicate better with people, or even just trying to get used to the work ethics and the education systems, and even the form of democratic government that America has, Immigrants are constantly faced with struggles that are all centered around the idea of a person having to deal with personal identity in a language and literacy sense and also cultural sense. While learning the language may not be the one and only struggle for some immigrants, it can be understood that there is a cost to adapting to a new way of life. Using research articles and journals and some statistics talking about the immigrant struggle and how it affects specific groups, the question becomes, how is an immigrant’s identity affected by assimilating into American language, culture, and even life? 

To start off, we must recognize the considerable diversity among the immigrants that come to America to understand the gravity of the situation when it comes to the identity they face. To begin with, I will focus on immigrants that come from South America and the Caribbean.  Immigrants from places like Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Dominican Republic, and Haiti have faced the equivalent struggles of immigrants from Europe, Asia, and Africa due to their family norms and culture. Especially the youth are affected.  Timothy M.Diette, professor of economics and politics, along with Ruth Uwaifo Oyelere, associate professor of economics, through their article written, “Gender and racial differences in peer effects of limited English Students: A story of language or ethnicity?” which is a research done by the two in order to analyze the abilities of limited English Students, or in other words, immigrant students. Through this research, we can see that both Diette and Uwaifo have discovered that immigrant students are not only the ones affected but also tend to have an impact. It is shown that this impact is significant amongst boys rather than girls, which concludes that boys are more sensitive to such school resources rather than girls (Diette, Timothy M., and Ruth Uwaifo Oyelere. “Gender and Racial Differences in Peer Effects of Limited English Students: a Story of Language or Ethnicity?” IZA Journal of Migration, vol. 6, no. 1, 2017, p. 1–). This shows that one-way immigrants are impacted whenever they arrive in the country is that the education system set up for both immigrant and native students severely affects both parties. Whilst teachers Invest all their resources to help the LE Students, the Native students start to see a drop in their grades due to the fact that they may be neglected at times because of the attention into helping LE students.  This does not mean any group of people is at fault, but the apparent effect on immigrants and their counterparts is shown here because of literacy and language. Additionally, if we were to dive deeper into the effect on immigrant youth with things like how they perform in school, we would come to find that Immigrants. However, they tend to have higher motivation, at the same time, tend to perform worse academically compared to their native counterparts. A study was conducted by Carola Suárez-Orozco  and Ha Yeon Kim in their report “The Language of Learning: The Academic Engagement of Newcomer Immigrant Youth.” They have discovered that immigrant students academically, although more motivated in school and associated more with people aiming for success, still, feel incompetent compared to their counterparts. They lack many engagements, behavioral, and cognitive skills academically due to the fact that they struggle to understand the English Language well, so then as an effect, they tend to shy away from participating in any class discussions or even building relationships with teachers or other peers at all. (Kim, Ha Yeon, and Carola Suárez-Orozco. “The Language of Learning: The Academic Engagement of Newcomer Immigrant Youth.” Journal of Research on Adolescence, vol. 25, no. 2, 2015, pp. 229–45) This goes on to show that one way the immigrant identity is affected Is by the youth academically, where they feel like they cannot compete with everyone else, so therefore they shy away from building relations with teachers and other peers and refuse to participate, thus demonstrating lower performance than usual. 

Secondly, aside from the immigrant youth usually feeling incompetent due to their lack of ability to speak English fluently, many immigrants struggle to feel like they even belong in America in the first place, with the problem being their accent or the way that an immigrant speaks compared to an English native. Laurie Olsen, a researcher and director of the SEAL initiative, writes about a study she conducted in her article “Learning English and Learning America: Immigrants in the Center of a Storm.”. Through her study at the very beginning, it starts off by asking a Taiwanese Immigrant if they feel American, with the immigrant replying, “Of course not! If you cannot speak English right, you cannot be American” (Olsen, Laurie. “Learning English and Learning America: Immigrants in the Center of a Storm.” Theory Into Practice, vol. 39, no. 4, Sept. 2000, p. 196. EBSCOhost) Due to the fact that an immigrant itself recognizes that if you cannot speak English properly, you are not allowed to be American goes on to show how isolated immigrants tend to feel whenever they arrive in the country and how much It is engraved into their brains that they need to learn proper English and because of the accent that they have then they do not have any form of belonging in the country. This shows that immigrants struggle with feeling like they belong because of the language barrier that is out of their control. Additionally, Laurie Olsen, later on in the article, comes to a conclusion in her text that as immigrants try their best to integrate into society, “they and their families are saddened by their discovery, which comes too late, that becoming English fluent usually is accompanied by a loss of home language use, fluency, and development.” (Olsen, Laurie. “Learning English and Learning America: Immigrants in the Center of a Storm.” Theory Into Practice, vol. 39, no. 4, Sept. 2000, p. 196. EBSCOhost) through Olsen’s commentary, we can understand that immigrant families and immigrants themselves precisely when they come into the new country which is called America, one of the main problems that they tend to face with identity specifically, is that no matter what they do to preserve their original culture, it will be lost to the new American way of life. 

This graph was taken from the Pew Research Center, which collected government data in order to create an estimate. In the article, it is shown that there has been improvement in English proficiency while most of the time, an Immigrant coming to America suffers a negative impact due, especially with English, there is some good to be shown, and this proves that Immigrants are also impacted on their identities in positive ways, as over the years there has been an improvement on English Proficiency amongst the all immigrant communities.  

So in conclusion through all these research articles we can discover that immigrants are affected in their identity and their language and their culture when they come into America because due to the fact that the education system for the immigrant youth is designed so that they can receive some sort of assistance special assistance aside from everyone else, it can be seen that it takes a toll not only on the immigrants but also on the natives themselves as they would tend to struggle academically because the immigrants are struggling themselves and additionally, not only does the academic youth of immigrants get affected but also overall even immigrant adults as they come into the country and they realize that they can never assimilate to American life or language culture because of the way that they sound and sometimes the way that they speak and yet, all this has a very negative impact as the immigrant can lose their own identity ,their cultural language, and their native identities, all in exchange for a look towards a more American life. 

Works Cited 

Olsen, Laurie. “Learning English and Learning America: Immigrants in the Center of a Storm.” Theory Into Practice, vol. 39, no. 4, Sept. 2000, p. 196. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.ccny-proxy1.libr.ccny.cuny.edu/10.1207/s15430421tip3904_2. 

Lutz, Amy, and Stephanie Crist. “Why Do Bilingual Boys Get Better Grades in English-Only America? The Impacts of Gender, Language and Family Interaction on Academic Achievement of Latino/a Children of Immigrants.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 32, no. 2, 2009, pp. 346–68, https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870801943647. 

Diette, Timothy M., and Ruth Uwaifo Oyelere. “Gender and Racial Differences in Peer Effects of Limited English Students: a Story of Language or Ethnicity?” IZA Journal of Migration, vol. 6, no. 1, 2017, p. 1–, https://doi.org/10.1186/s40176-016-0074-y. 

Kim, Ha Yeon, and Carola Suárez-Orozco. “The Language of Learning: The Academic Engagement of Newcomer Immigrant Youth.” Journal of Research on Adolescence, vol. 25, no. 2, 2015, pp. 229–45, https://doi.org/10.1111/jora.12130. 

Jeffrey S. Passel, and D’vera Cohn. “U.S. unauthorized immigrants are more proficient in English, more educated than a decade ago” Pew Research Center, May 23, 2019