Backgrounds

Hello there!

This week we're facing the deadline for the second graded essay. I'd already told you here that I'm a bit impatient. So, I submitted it on Sunday. I know, I already regret being this hurried... there were some things I could have wrote to get it better, but now it is really too late.

It is not just impatience, though. I have a lot to in many classes, so I try to plan all the assignments due this week to not get too crazy trying to submit them at the same time. This week, I have to translate a chapter of a Jiu-Jitsu manual, finished the outline of a research project, finish to write a  paper to a graduate class... From all those, the most daring was the second Essay - the article for the Lit class is due to the first week of December, leaving me with more time to develop it. In this scenario, I decided it was best to work on the essay first, the more complicated task right ahead.

The second essay was a bit different from the first on its planning, for it involved more research than the essay about Internet surveillance. In a planing that started at the begin
ning of the semester, Thiago asked the students to vote for two subjects (the class chose Immigration and Mental Health). After that, we had to submit an opinion essay from the Internet about each theme. Teacher and monitors chose two of them and sent them back to us, as a lead off research material for the writing. And so it started.

Nicole Nguven and family

About Immigration, the subject on this second essay, we had different kind of editorials. One is more political, a opinion text from The New York Times named "Donald Trump Isn't Making the Country Safer", by the Editorial Board*. The second opinion text approached immigration in a more personal tone. Written by Nicole Nguyen, "Making Great Pho is Hard, But Making A Life From Scratch Is Harder" talks about assimilation through the analysis of how food is an element of cultural identity for immigrants. Nguyen's parents were Vietnamese refugees in 1975; despite being born in the US, Nicole tells a strong and heart touching story about adaptation, identity and food.

II  was torn between those two different views on immigration, as both are relevant and explanatory. One is more general, revolving about politics in Trump's administration. The other revolves around people and their lives far from their native country. Together, the two opinion texts built a more  comprehensive view of what is involve in the legislation that regulates immigration - and, more, the lives of immigrants.

So I attempted to evoke both texts on my essay, choosing to talk about how some misleading ideas pose wrongfully as true for long periods of time, specifically on the US, as the country has being pointed as a protagonist on the debates about immigration in the context of President Trump's administration. I was particularly surprised by the first essay, from The New York Times, and how it shows that the legislation on immigration is more dangerous than the immigrants supposed to be (one of the raised flags by Trump's ban on immigrations is the raise of crime).

Zygmunt Bauman
(1925-2017)

In my first year as a Translation undergraduate student, I had to translate an interview with Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish socialist and philosopher, under the name "The refugees crisis is humanity crisis". also a publication on The New York Times. It is such a strong statement, one that I keep it close when talking about immigration. The subject of immigration make it clearer how sovereign nations are more preoccupied about economics and political gain than people freezing to death on the border of a country waiting for rescue.

For me, the permanence of misleading ideas is one of the most dangerous elements in the world, for it allows people and institutions to take wrongful measures based on fake data. Because of that, and from the idea presented on The New York Times editorial, I tried to write an opinion text about three misleading ideas about immigration that influence people and nations on their take about the subject. For that, I had the support of an opinion text on the blog published by the CATO Institute (a libertarian American think tank). It is important to highlight that all the research articles for my essay are opinion texts.

One of the misleading ideas discussed on the second essay is related to cultural assimilation by immigrants, and with this topic I could bring a little of Nicole Nguyem beautiful and strong testimony about building a life in a foreign country.

I hope I'd succeeded on that! Now it is wait for the comments on the second essay.

Stay tuned!

*It is a NYT article, so the access is not free (it is limited to 10 articles per month).

PP: On November 11 we had the third quiz - this one about Inversions. So, it is a double wait time for the next days  :)