We are Immigration
Board Editorial

Issue date: 11/1/07 Section: Opinion
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This year’s Bellarmine Forum took a controversial topic head on. In a “city of immigrants,” this discussion has tremendous influence on our community’s day-to-day life.

One of the events held on Tuesday evening, which is just one of the 17 different forums scheduled this year, investigated immigration in a global and literary context. Five authors known for their in-depth work on the migration experience, including LMU’s Ruben Martinez, opened a dialogue about the manifestations of the migrant in the printed word.

A student stood up and voiced concern about feeling disassociated with the immigrant experience, being a fifth-generation removed immigrant.

Acclaimed Vietnamese author, Andrew Lam responded profoundly. He recalled sitting on a plane beside a 90-year-old woman overlooking her Silicon Valley home. She remembered how it used to be covered in orchards. Now, that valley is the computer innovation capitol of the planet, with a widely foreign population that permeates every aspect of life. “Sometimes the border crosses us,” Lam said.

Even if we haven’t (and even if we have) crossed the border into this country, state or city, the border has crossed us. The businesses in our hometowns have changed. Teachers at our elementary schools don’t look the same. Walking down the sidewalk, a plethora of different languages flood our hearing.

Culturally, we don’t see the same faces on TV or in film. We don’t hear the same musical influences on the radio or online. Even our culinary options are much more diverse now than they were a decade ago.

Even those who have been here the longest have explicitly experienced the border crossing them. Whether Native American, a third-generation German immigrant or a Haitian refugee, we can all relate to the immigrant condition. It is a condition that comes to the individual as much as the individual goes to it.

This may be only one of many important lessons derived from this year’s Bellarmine Forum. Yet we believe if we are to embrace the notion of “I/m/migration,” we must consider and examine this concept of immigration without necessarily thinking others or we must go anywhere. In many ways, immigration is our condition in a less determinate way.

We encourage students to recognize that we all are, in fact, byproducts of immigration. This will enable us to better understand and operate within our diverse community in and out of the LMU bubble. After all, even the bubble has been pierced by the border.

We ultimately contend that the piercing of this bubble is hardly something to fear; rather, it is worth embracing in the most authentic way possible. Maintaining a negative orientation toward issues of immigration neglects portions of our individual identities, culminating not only in resentment of those around us, but also of ourselves.