I’m from Syria, and I came to the States in January of 2012. I lived through about 9 months of the uprising. My family just got out recently. My dad made it in a boat to Italy. He almost drowned in the sea and was rescued by a Netherlands ship. He made his way to Sweden. My mom and the kids, they left the country about 22 months ago.

I’m from Homs, which is where the uprising started. Before the uprising, Syria was a peaceful, welcoming country. People there were really nice, welcoming, loved everyone who visited the country. You would just be walking in the street asking for directions and the minute they found out you were a foreigner, everyone would invite you for a tea. In our tradition, this is a sign of welcoming people and offering peace, to make you feel like you are in a safe country.

The minute the uprising started, it was a war zone, so people started fighting each other for the simplest needs, sometimes for money, for bread, or for the basic needs of daily life. That was the time I lived in Syria.

The majority in Syria are Muslims, but Muslims come from different branches, and my whole village was a minority within a minority, so the whole village was targeted over and over. When I was there, one time at 3:00 in the morning, I cannot forget that day, they dropped a bomb over the village. This is where me and my dad sat down and said, ‘It’s time to leave the country.’ I never, ever imagined that these things would happen in my country.

The issue started getting bigger and bigger, and now it’s out of control. A lot of people are being displaced, in refugee camps. It’s hurtful because Syria actually welcomed refugees. They welcomed Palestinians, they welcomes Iraqis, they welcomed Lebanese, and every country where any political issued happens. Syria was the most welcoming country. It’s hurtful to see that, when that happened in Syria, none of the neighboring countries accepted Syrian refugees.

A lot of people were displaced, over three million in Lebanon. Thousands of people went to Turkey, where they have no rights to go to school and you cannot get a job. My mom and the kids are in Turkey now, in Ankara. My two brothers and my sister, they tried to get into school, because they have been disconnected from education for over two years, but they can’t because they need to have a Turkish identification. They cannot get it because they are Syrian, they cannot get a job; they cannot do anything. Basically it’s just living there, day by day, doing nothing, A lot of people got stuck on the border between Jordan and Syria, and their life is pretty much miserable.

I felt very welcome in New York, and especially the Lower East Side. You feel like no matter what your nationality is, your religion, you fit perfectly because it’s a melting pot. Even when you walk in the street you don’t stick out because you look different or because you have a different accent. Here you look around and feel like a citizen of the world. I see all the nationalities, hear different languages everyday, which brings comfort. I wish people were living in harmony everywhere like they do on the Lower East Side, because they just want to live. Do I feel welcomed in New York? Yes, I do. Did I have cases where I felt I’m not welcomed? Yes, I did, unfortunately.

This is still a great country. It’s disappointing when you see people going to the old ages, judging people based on skin color, religion, beliefs, backgrounds. I did not choose to be born in Syria, I did not choose to be born to a Muslim family, but I choose to be a fair person, the type of person who treats people equally. I choose to be understanding, open minded, a person who accepts other people no matter what.

Our friends, all of them are from a different nationalities, all of them from different religions, backgrounds. I got used to just speaking my mind, saying whatever comes to my mind in a respectful way, even if I have criticism or a disagreement with a topic related to politics or religion. I wasn’t afraid to say it. Where now sometimes and in some places, I feel hesitant to even pronounce my name because I don’t know who’s going have those feelings towards Arabs or Muslims or even immigrants in general. It’s sad that I have to be careful even expressing myself.

Let’s go back to history, where are you from? America is a country of immigrants. That’s what made the United States the United States. That’s what made it the strongest country on the planet, because they have people from different backgrounds, different minds, opened up new opportunities, whether business or technology, everything. People, when they come here, they adapt so well because it’s a melting pot. The main source of power of the United States is being the nation of immigrants.

Immigrants built the United States of America. All these great minds who migrated because they did not have the chance in their country, they found a society that protects them. You can get the best out of them after moving them from a very strict environment or very hard circumstances. When you move them to a different society, this is where human beings minds start creating.

A lot of people are saying it’s not our responsibility to accept refugees here. What if every single person said why is it my responsibility? We have a saying in our culture, if you did not scream for your neighbor, your neighbor will never scream for you. Us who live safely and who have a good lifestyle, have jobs, we are stable, if it’s not our responsibility, then whose responsibility is it? These refugees are someone’s brother, sister, dad, and mom. Just imagine if you were living in that country and that happened to you. Wouldn’t you wish that other countries would at least reach out and accept you, give you an opportunity, give you the chance to live? These refugees are not asking for anything. They are just asking for the chance to live as normal human beings.

I’m from Honduras. I came here when I was 11 in 2012. First my dad came here when I was five. I was living with my mom and sometimes we wouldn’t even have food to eat. It was really hard for her, so she left me with my grandma when I was seven and came here because she wanted to give me a better education. When my mom came here, I got really sick. I was vomiting for a long time. I got really terrible. I felt like I needed my mom.

Then when I was 11 my dad asked for the papers so I could come here, and I was really happy seeing her after five years. It was just crazy for me – I was not believing it.

My dad started working as a welder and my mom, she barely finished sixth grade, so when she came here she didn’t know anything. She still doesn’t know English, so it was really hard for her. She started working cleaning restaurants. When I came here, I didn’t even know how to say hi. When I started middle school, I was in a bilingual school, so everybody just spoke Spanish. ‘What was only for two years. I first came to Queens because a lot of Spanish people live around there, but then my mom moved to Brooklyn.

At first I did feel welcome. I came to a place where there were a lot of Spanish people. They all went through the same thing I went through, so they felt how I was feeling in that moment.

Then when I started high school, it was really tough for me because Manhattan is really diverse, so a lot of people just speak English. I wouldn’t understand anything. Most of the time, I would end the day with a headache because I wouldn’t understand anything. Sometimes I used to cry because I used to get bad grades, and when I was in my country I used to get high grades. It made me sad when I would see my grades and see that I would get a C average.

And then it got even harder for me when my mom gave birth to my two sisters, because I’m the only family she’s got here. I had to deal with my sisters’ school, trying to learn English, trying to get used to these people. Sometimes they used to make fun of me because of my accent and because I didn’t know how to say something. They used to tell my friends, ‘How can you understand her? She doesn’t even know how to pronounce things correctly?’ That used to make me sad. I felt I knew how to speak English but nobody could understand me, so what am I doing wrong? Am I not learning English correctly?

People from my school who were born here, I guess they haven’t been through what we have, so they think we came here and that’s it, but they don’t know what it’s like to be in a place where you have no idea how to speak the language, and it’s not like you choose to come here. My parents brought me here. I’ve got to stay here because my parents told me to stay here and I want to be with my parents. I guess they just think we are less because we come from another country. I guess they just don’t like us coming here.

Some people don’t end up getting an education because they are afraid to stand up and they give up easily. That just makes me want to work harder and get what I want. I think immigrants need hope. Immigrants are really important because they are the ones that make this country. We are the ones that help build this country. A lot of immigrants do the hard work. They just want to be a better person. They don’t come here to steal somebody’s job. Not everybody is bad that comes here.

I came to the teen center when I was in 10th grade, but I used to help my mom with my sisters a lot and I would get home really late, so I stopped coming here after a week. Then in 11th grade, I started coming again because I really liked it. It made me feel good how people accepted me, how the staff were really nice to me. It helped me because I had to speak English even more, and the programs helped because I was a really shy person. I wouldn’t even talk to anyone. I was scared that I was not going to say things correctly, so I would just go home straight from school and that was it. But then I realized that I had to go out more, meet more people, and stop being afraid of not speaking up. After coming to Edgies, it helped me to be a better person and not be shy anymore. This is a really good program. I was not as open minded as I am now.

Now I’m happy with my grades. I have an A average, and last year, the whole year, I was in the honor program. was really happy because now I feel like I understand English better and I’m speaking it better. I’m still learning, but I just keep going. I don’t listen to what people say anymore. I’m just trying to make my goals come true. My main goal is to be an architect and to help my mom be happy, because she’s done a lot of stuff for me.

I was born in Nigeria. I came over when I was three in 1997. My mom’s sister’s husband was in this country already and he was ready to bring his family from Nigeria. Public education wasn’t the best, so my mom sent me to America with my aunt and uncle to get citizenship, so I was adopted and I stayed with them to get a better education and have more opportunities that weren’t provided to me in Nigeria.

My biological parents are both still in my life, but they’re in Nigeria. saw my mom once a year, but I didn’t see my dad until I was 13. I had an estranged relationship with my dad but I had a complicated relationship with my mom because she knew my aunt and uncle weren’t treating me well, and I struggled with why was she allowing that to happen. Why wasn’t she advocating for me or speaking up for me? So I resented her for a very, very long time.

My aunt and uncle, they were more guardians for me. They made sure to provide shelter and food, and I got a good education, but it was really hard. They had four kids, and I was literally a Cinderella story, taking care of the younger ones, making sure the house was clean, making sure I was cooking.

When I was younger, I went to daycare and I didn’t know that we were on food stamps. I just thought this was how everybody lived and how everybody bought their food. I used to go and give out coupon papers. I look back and we used to do all this hard work. It would be in my friends’ communities, and it was awkward at times because my friends would see me giving out the papers. In middle school, I went to a predominantly white school and I didn’t know I was the Black girl until someone told me I was the Black girl in class. Someone called me the N word, and someone called me a nappy-headed hoe. I was just so confused. I thought that this was just in the history books.

I’m from Queens. We didn’t live in the projects. In school, I was picked on because I had an accent, I was Nigerian, I was skinny, I was too black, my hair was too this, or I was too white because I took school seriously. Education is key in a Nigerian household. It was this weird dynamic where other students of color that I thought I would have camaraderie with and thought they would understand me, they didn’t – they picked on me. I wasn’t accepted fully as being Black. I was African, the African booty scratcher. ‘She’s so white because she doesn’t live in the projects.’ I was just angry all the time, so of course I was acting out in school, in class. I got good grades, but I was ready to curse anybody out because I didn’t really care. I couldn’t do anything right at home, at school, so I just hated everybody.

I came to Education Alliance to get free college prep and SAT classes, and when it was time to fill out the college paperwork my aunt was like, ‘I’m not doing this. I’m not paying for this.’ My aunt wasn’t even willing to fill out the forms that she needed to fill out. I could have literally gone to other schools for free because we were so low income, but she didn’t want to do anything. I was livid, but I was more scared than angry because I always looked at college as my escape, and I felt like she was taking my escape away from me. I just packed up all my stuff and I went to my other aunt’s house and never came back. I didn’t say anything. But if it wasn’t for Education Alliance, my academic situation would have been very different in regards to college. They helped fill out paperwork, helped me apply for scholarships, and helped ensure that I would be able to go to school.

I call this place my home away from home. I got a lot of opportunities here. All of my mentors are from here and I call them my life coaches. When I came to the teen center, it was like they were tearing down all these walls that I had built up for so long – things that I’m still struggling with now. They still stay in contact with me, they support me, they really have built a strong relationship with me. They validated my feelings in ways that I never thought I had a right to. In our culture, children are seen and not heard, and they wanted to hear what I had to say. They felt that my voice was important, and it took me a long time to really understand that and have my confidence.

Now I’m in my second year of graduate school for social work. My concentration is social enterprise administration, and I’m looking into social impact and social impact investing, social entrepreneurship, and things of that sort. I’m interested in criminal justice, understanding racism, systemic racism. I think that after school programs are very important, and I think we underutilize them. They can be very valuable in communities of color, so I would be interested in directing a program specifically targeting underrepresented youth and helping them find themselves, be empowered, and gain access. I’m interested in access. How do we get young people of color into places like J.P. Morgan or big roles in policy? How do we break that glass ceiling? How do we create access and opportunity and make sure our young people feel safe and invited into those communities?

Regarding the conversation surrounding immigration, I think that a lot of this is based off of lies, lack of information, lack of knowledge, and an avoidance of looking at what’s true. When we talk about, ‘Oh immigrants are taking our jobs, immigrants are violent,’ or whatever it may be, and we actually look at the statistics and numbers, are those really the people that are affecting us? ‘Oh immigrants are lazy.’ These are the people that work the hardest and do the jobs that you will never want to do. Do you really want to be mowing someone’s lawn for hours and hours? Are you really about to be working in the factories in those unsafe conditions that nobody that was a US. citizen would want to work in? We’re pushing false rhetoric, and I think we need look into the research and understand the numbers. But we know the media runs everything and they’re not interested in facts, they’re interested in sensationalism.

And then there’s the amount of things that immigrants bring to our communities, as far as food, as far as culture, as far as intelligence, ideas just everything. If we’re constantly going to be with the same type of people all the time, if there’s no variation or diversity, even evolution proves this, you’re not going to survive. You need that creativity, you need the melting pot, you need multiple types of people. I think we need to figure out a way to try and personalize immigrants and not try to just identify them with the word immigrant, as if there are immigrants and there’s us. We’re all human. If you bleed I bleed.

I’m originally from Columbia. I was raised in Bogota. When I moved to the States I was 16, it was a difficult time in Columbia. We didn’t realize the stress that we lived under until we moved here. You didn’t know what the day was going to hold. There were a lot of terrorist attacks. There was a combination of poverty, lack of education, and corruption. Lack of money motivated people to do things that were wrong, like kidnapping. My mom had her own business there for many years. She used to have a packaging facility of salt, so she would buy salt wholesale, have it processed, packaged, and send it to supermarkets. At some point her warehouse got emptied three times in one year, so she wasn’t able to recover from that.

Initially we moved to Massachusetts. I spoke very little English. I went to an excellent high school. I felt like I was in the middle of a movie. In Columbia and all over the world you see all these movies about the football players and the cheerleaders, and this school had it all. It was extremely difficult to be able to integrate with people that had been building relationships since they were kids, and to add on to that, we didn’t speak the language. So first it felt very alienating. It was difficult, especially when you’re a teenager. I dedicated myself to just taking books out of the library, but they were books for toddlers, or cartoon books, whatever I could get my hands on, and I think that helped me a lot. I remember sitting for hours doing my homework and then realizing the next day that it was wrong anyway. It was a sink or swim type of thing, and thankfully I had no choice.

It was very difficult, the beginning. At some point my mom broke her arm delivering newspapers. We had to go through some things that living in Columbia we would have never thought we’d have to do. My mom wasn’t able to work fully for some time, so that left my brother and I having to work before high school delivering newspapers, and then after high school was over, my first job was at Burger King. We tried really hard. It was already hard, but that just made everything so much harder. We went through years where I didn’t think college was a possibility for me, where I didn’t think we were going to get anywhere. It was a difficult road. We had to move the three of us to one bedroom in a lady’s house. And then I found a job as a nanny, so I was living as a nanny in someone else’s house taking care of their three kids as best as I could. I waitressed for a long time. I thought, ‘Okay, this is it. That’s what we do,’

I loved art, so I would waitress and then draw, and come home and draw. I would take a little money and then start taking little courses here and there in drawing and painting. And then I was introduced to this group, Up With People. They are a non-for-profit organization, and they do community service and a show on stage all throughout the world for a year. That was an amazing, life changing year, because that made me think that maybe I could actually go to college, and that I could actually do something else in my life besides feeling like there was no future for me. It’s been a ride all starting with immigration.

I came back from Up With People, went to Massachusetts College of Art as an undergraduate, and I received my bachelors from BU, all in art. was very passionate about painting. My mom couldn’t afford to help me, nobody was helping me, but I decided to do it anyway.

At the time our papers had run out. My brother and I were on a student visa and we weren’t supposed to stay. I was always paranoid. You heard a siren of a cop and you always thought they were coming after you. So I couldn’t get a scholarship, I couldn’t get help, I couldn’t get anything.

I kept moving up in the restaurant world, making more and more money per night, so I was able to go to school and pay for it as I went. When I wasn’t in my studio making paintings, I was working at the restaurant, or I was at home sleeping, or spending my time with the man who became my husband, but he was the extent of my social life. I just had no time. And then I got married. My husband has been a citizen for a long time. He’s also an immigrant from Poland.

I moved to New York in 2009. At the time, I was always teaching fitness classes and that became my source of income mainly. I realized that I didn’t really enjoy teaching art and I didn’t really want to spend my time in the studio anymore because they were lonely hours. Then I got pregnant and I didn’t want to spend time away from my children in ways that weren’t bringing anything. And on the other hand, I really enjoyed the fitness industry, so I decided to let go of the art and embrace fitness.

Now I work as a fitness manager. It’s been amazing. Most importantly, for me what’s made this facility special is the mix of people. Not only races but also social and economic, some people that have plenty and some people that don’t have so much. Upstairs they’re all the same, they’re all kind to each other, and they’ll talk to each other. It’s a really nice, friendly environment.

The thing is, you don’t end up in these circumstances by choice. For my family, we had to leave. We didn’t stay here as immigrants, and as illegals at some point, because we chose to. We had no money to go back to our country. We had no choices back there. All we had is what we had month-to-month, barely the clothes on us, and we just tried to keep working and continuing. I can’t live in Columbia even if I wanted to. I could, but I couldn’t. This is home now, but I feel like I have two feet in two different boats, because I’m not fully American but I’m not fully Columbian anymore.

There is no place where I feel like I belong more than in New York. I love that about this neighborhood and this city. I feel so good here. It was always such a nice community. I have two children and it is so beautiful for me to know that they’re going to grow up in an environment where they know they’ll hear so many different languages. Some people think that it would be better to live in a suburb where everybody is the same, or everybody looks like you, whatever that means, but I think that would take away so much from the kids learning. The kids speak all types of language, and they still play together and have a good time. It is such a gift. My son said, ‘It’s so wonderful to hear so many different languages. We are so lucky.’

Originally ’’m from, some people call it the Hispaniola, but I was born on the border of the Dominican Republic and Haiti. After I was born, my father wanted to take me from my mom, so he had me when I was a baby. Then my mom took me to Port-au-Prince. I’m still working on this, but apparently I have two birth certificates, one in the Dominican Republic and one in Haiti.

It happened because my father was a lieutenant patrolling the border, and that’s where he met my mother, so he thought she was Dominican because she was lighter in complexion. He was actually having an affair, because he was married, and my mom was a widow. My mom had me when she was 42 and my father was 56, so all my siblings, they’re like 20 years older than me.

My mother came before me for better opportunity, and then I came to the U.S. in 1988 when I was seven. When my mom came to pick me up, I was calling my aunt my mom. I didn’t know who she was. It turned into a fight between her and my aunt because all my life, my aunt was my mother. Even when I came to the country, though I was calling her mom, I still didn’t feel the connection. And throughout my whole life, it became that way with my mother’s side of the family. She was never there, and then I never really had conversations with her that any child should. The cultural ways that they approach kids, kids are supposed to respect their elders, and anytime you speak to an elder your head is supposed to be down. Looking at them face to face is saying that you are the same level as them, and you’re pretty much going to get your butt whooped.

My father’s side of the family, ’’m disconnected with them because I didn’t meet them until 2007. Growing up, my mother always told me my father died, and I never understood that. Then I started questioning that when I was in college. It was not until 2007 when I went out there and I got the story from their side. I found out he passed away in 2002. I started college in 2000; I could have easily met my pops. Learning about all this was kind of like grieving.

I always said I’m the bridge between both worlds. It’s funny because you would think that I would experience the Latin roots or the Latin culture in the Dominican Republic, but I really experienced it growing up in Connecticut. Where I grew up was predominantly Puerto Ricans and African Americans, but I was hanging a lot around the Puerto Ricans. I didn’t understand who I was on an identity level. I didn’t understand who I was as a teenager growing up, so I was a troubled teen. Teenage years are the most vital years where kids can go any way. I didn’t really go to school. I would take the school bus, get to school, hop on the city bus and go to Washington Park in Bridgeport, hang out with kids around my age, and sell drugs all day.

Then I ran away and I was pretty much living in a crack house. This girl, she was a crack head, and all of us who used to sell drugs around my age used to stay at her place. I stayed there for close to a year. They were looking for me and couldn’t find me. And actually a crack head snitched on me. They had my pictures all over. I used to look at them and laugh – these guys are still looking for me.

A lot of times I talk to the youth and I address these experiences I went through. ’m surprised I’m still alive. I could have easily been in prison, shot or killed. I’m saying that because a lot of my friends ended up in that direction.

I was fortunate. The police came through and then my mom sent me to a boarding school in Haiti. There I had a couple Theologian students who pretty much woke my imagination up to realize I needed to do something with myself. I even got baptized there, and I ended up back in the United States the year after. ended up becoming a straight-A student. I was an honor roll student all the way up to college.

The identity situation definitely played out with me growing up. This is one of the reasons why I went to school for history. I focused a lot on Caribbean studies and learning about the situation between the Dominican Republican and Haiti, between all the Caribbean islands, and the history behind how these two worlds, continuing to this day, clash with one another through political views, through racial views, through economic views, and so forth. I understand both sides of the story with my mother and my father now that I went through the whole history thing in college. I respect both sides.

After I graduated college, I started working with a program called Gear Up – Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs. It was a program that Clinton Started in 1999, where they focused predominantly on the low-income communities, but they follow students from middle school, high school until their first year in college.

Now I work here as an academic advisor program coordinator. I work under the Early Childhood and Head Start Program. Our college access program is under that program, and it’s focused on adult education. I oversee the ESOL, which is the new GED, and the college prep. This is a very rewarding program. The more work you put in, the more progress you see, and you see it face to face. Right now we work on getting parents in college, getting a lot of parents to see that there’s another option out there, a way to break the cycle of poverty. I’m coming from the hut to living in buildings.

I’m able to see what it is that exists within me. I’m able to see that people are able to communicate with each other, wherever you are from, you’re able to come together and focus on one mission, and the mission is to pretty much break us all from the cycle of poverty and to unite. I think what makes this neighborhood special is the fundamental idea of respect. The idea that we have respect for one another here, especially in this program, and understanding that we all have the same vision, but it’s just constructed in different ways based on the culture that you’re from.

I’m from the Ukraine. I was born in Crimea but lived in Odessa until I was eight and a half. I lived in the cultural epicenter of Ukraine. Odessa is very welcoming, open, tons of Russian Jews and people coming from all over the world.

The tradition in the former Soviet Union is that when the family leaves, the whole town comes to say goodbye, because it was such a big and traumatic event for the whole community. We were like a family. Even playing in the yard, everyone watched the kids. Everybody was involved in raising children.

I remember very well what it was like there. I just remember wanting to leave because it was scary, especially with the Soviet collapse. I remember the whole terrible immigration process, the customs officials, I remember us coming, I remember everything. It was a traumatic experience. We were fleeing as refugees. Well we received refugee status but it wasn’t as bad as in the ‘70s and ‘80s when a lot of people were refused entry. This was already post Soviet collapse in 1994. But still it was all about who you know, and how can you get this to happen. We were lucky because my dad’s family emigrated from the Soviet Union in 91.

My mom is not Jewish, but we were able to go because my father is. There was a lot of controversy. here was looting because the economy was so unstable. People were worried about the second coming of pogroms. If people owned, suddenly it wasn’t theirs. There was inflation – one day the cost of a loaf of bread was the same, the next day it was like a case of champagne. Everything was in flux.

I remember walking to the Opera House and my dad covering me. There were signs that said jyd, which is translates to kike – something that no one expected in that city, so we needed to go. I first heard the word Zhydovka, which is the feminine version of kike, at customs when we were trying to leave. Everything was tariffed. Suddenly my mom’s jewelry box became like she was stealing an art possession of the country. I’m there seeing this guy call my mother all these horrible names. I became this sudden adult at eight and a half. I remember crying and having to lie so they thought I had a stomachache, rather than me being scared. Our suitcases were torn apart looking for everything they could get money for. My mom, she was wearing her cross, and the guy was livid and saying all these horrible things. I’m trying to translate but there’s no word I think that can translate the gravity of what was said.

We moved to Brighton Beach, which is where most Russian speakers at that time moved to. The funny shock for me was that we read all this propaganda about fat Americans and about how everyone’s wealthy and everything’s clean, and I come in and the first thing I see was dog poop on the street. I was like, ‘This is not what I heard. This is quite dirty.’

My mom ended up leaving my dad. Immigration is a hard time. A lot of people fell into depression, and there were a lot of divorces happening around that time. My mom decided she wanted the real America and she moved us to Indianapolis, where I hated living, and every vacation I just wanted to go back to New York to be with my family and friends.

There I was completely misunderstood. I felt like I knew more about different cultures and geography, and in general, just about life. Even though on one hand I had been closed off, because in the former Soviet Union you didn’t learn. Speaking Russian was embarrassing to me. I closed off. I shut down. I was called a communist, and I was bullied. For some reason Ukraine sounded like Bahrain, and I got called things for that. I just kept feeling like I was the other, for the entire time. I was 10 or 11, and I was there until I moved back when was 17. Now we live in Queens.

It’s been hard being an immigrant, and surprisingly in such a welcoming city, it’s still being a really big struggle. I started working with the Russian speaking Jewish community when I was 20 years old. In Ukraine, I was too Jewish because I had Jewish blood, but here I wasn’t Jewish enough because by Halakha, because of my mother, I’m not Jewish. So when I wanted to do more work with the community, not everyone was very open to me. It’s a constant identity struggle. It’s always been a question of how to be and what am I.

Immigration is a very hard topic. What I’ve discovered in my circles of Russian speaking Jews who have more contemporary views is that there is a big rift in family circles. We came to this country because of the opportunities for refugees. Whether we came here legally in terms of having to go through paperwork or not, still strings were pulled. And it’s so concerning to me that there seems to be some sort of mass amnesia going on within the Russian speaking Jewish community. Suddenly, there’s call for ending opportunities for refugees, segregation, there’s a lot of racism – all these hateful things that are coming out. I never expected that.

I’m having a hard time with my own family, and it’s hard because you love your family. It used to be that political views didn’t really matter, but there’s something about this particular presidency that’s causing a lot of separation within families and close friends. I think a lot of it is a fear, and it’s a fear of the other. From what I understand, it’s also that fear of going back to Soviet times. ‘Socialism doesn’t work, this is what happened to us, and it won’t happen.’ That’s the fear, so against this idea of socialism.

Meanwhile, many of them, especially the elderly benefit from Medicare and Medicaid opportunities. It’s like, I benefit but I’m against all these other things, but what would you do if this wasn’t there for you? Others were helping us. What about you? It’s just so mindboggling to me. Why do you think that you’re not just as responsible for others as they were for you? There were programs in place, by people who new nothing about us, to help us.

I’m from Wales. I first arrived in the early 90s as part of my sabbatical. I was teaching sculpture, fine art in the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. I always wanted to come to New York; I was obsessed with the idea of New York. I wrote a letter to the department of cultural affairs, and they wrote back to me, and said yeah come overt.

I knew no one here. I had a room through a friend of a friend of a friend of one of my lecturers. It was a pretty rough neighborhood on the Upper West Side, and the taxi driver said, ‘I don’t want to let you out here.’ I said, ‘Oh it’s alright, completely naive. It was on the cusp end of the crack epidemic, and it was pretty hairy. I got out of the taxi and had a bullwhip whipped in front of my face. I got my bags and said excuse me, and the guy looked at me like, ‘what the hell’s going on,’ because I looked like Kurt Cobain with my Doc Martins and Sonic Youth T-Shirt.

I was completely oblivious. In the morning, I got up and there were two lads in the apartment. One was called Toni and one was called Bebe. Toni was the local leader, a very bright man, and Bebe was his goon, and they just questioned me. Toni was very bright and he knew where Wales was, which I was amazed by. I told him what my name was and he said, ‘You can’t have that name on the block, you need a good black name, so they Islamed me Akbar. I said, ‘That’s ironic, your name’s Tony.’ They all called me Akbar, and those lads who bullwhipped me were dealt with and they never, ever bothered me at all. Bebe would wait for me at night if I came home late and would walk me down the block. Tony and I got along really well.

When I was illegal, I was working on construction sights, and I remember one day we had no joists to hold up the floors. We were in the basement and we had these milk crates, with me in the middle and two Jamaicans on either side holding up the floor. It looked like we were Jesus and the two thieves. We were there for three hours while these people were rolling over machinery. My pay rate was $2.50 an hour and the Jamaicans got paid $2. Because I was white, I got 50 cents more.

I met a girl and fell in love with her, and I didn’t want to go back. I had to go back briefly and I handed in my notice and came back. We were trying to negotiate a position for me through the Public Art Fund since I’m a sculptor. I got a work visa but I ended up being sort of illegal as most immigrants usually become. I thought I could wing it, but I got deported. They were very lazy in the deportation. They didn’t do any of the real paperwork that was supposed to have happened, so we got married back in Scotland and I came back in through a different route.

It took three years to get my green card. I couldn’t leave or anything. I missed family funerals. The process was absolutely outrageous. The INS, it was like jail down there. They gave out deliberate misinformation. remember being down there for 10 hours once and finding out that they deliberately sent me to the wrong room, and they handcuffed me and threw me out. I was handcuffed three times and escorted out, never arrested, but humiliated. It was revolting. Even my wife, the way they doubted our relationship was horrible. We had been dating since the early ‘90s. We had all this evidence and photographs of her and my mother in Wales.

The political climate now reminds me so much of the Thatcher era that I grew up in, and it’s always the poor people and it’s always the immigrants that are scapegoated. I hate it. There’s so much resistance towards immigration and there are not the nods to what we’ve brought to the country. Economically, if the immediate immigrant force, and that’s how I like to see ourselves, a force to be reckoned with, if we were to retract our work this city would collapse.

When politicians say stupid things about immigrants, that’s because it’s deflection. It’s deflection to take the attention off of what they’re doing. It’s insidious, it’s decisive, it’s deceitful, and it’s ultimately untrue. If people could just read more.

And here were are on the Lower East Side. Seward Park is one of the first parks, the library is one of the first libraries in America. The Lower East Side is an immigrant district; New York is immigrant city. This is it. I see New York as a microcosm of the whole country.

What immigration does for New York is it gives it a fantastic diversity. It was very apparent to me early on that it’s very self-segregated here, and it’s also very forced segregated. It’s self-segregated because people when they arrive have to go where people of their own culture are, so you have those areas, but then you have Brownsville and East New York, that’s economic.

I moved down here and started building bars and restaurants. There we a lot of artists and musicians, and I was in a band as well. There were a lot of great things going on, and it was exciting. There was a bit of danger. I ended up working, because this man liked me, for one of the Chinese bosses in one of these after-hours clubs. That wasn’t too good, but it was very exciting. I was like, ‘Oh Jesus, I don’t want to be involved in this shit’ The night I didn’t turn up to this one place, that was the night it was raided and he got busted. He was implicated in a few murders, extortion, prostitution, and all sorts of things.

Coming here was for all the right reasons, and being in the Lower East Side was essential for that experience. Seeing the flux of people and being amongst the Chinese, the church community, the Hispanic community, and realizing that you’re one of the people that have been here the longest. And I’m the only Welsh person in this area. I know that for a fact.

If you get a chance to travel, do it. It doesn’t mean go to another country. It could be on the bus to another city. Talk to other people, see what other people are doing, eat different foods, it’s a great laugh. Read different books. To quote one of my favorite pop stars, Morrissey, ‘It’s so easy to laugh, it’s so easy to hate, it takes guts to be gentle kind.’

I’m from China, Guangzhou, a city close to Hong Kong. It has the tropical weather, hot and humid, and in the summer there are lot of tornados and mosquitos. My family came before me. My brother got married and he came 30 years ago, and then he applied for my mother to come. My mother applied for me to come here. Whoever settles first, it is more difficult – you are without money, you are without a job. That’s impossible.

I came here in 1991, and I did not get used to the American life. In China, I worked in a laboratory in a hospital. I’m a technician. When I first came here, everything for me is the wrong thing. My brother said, ‘America is not good for you because you cannot do the labor jobs. Everyone goes to work. If you live in the home, you will be crazy.’

For a living, at first because I didn’t know English and I could not get a better job, I worked in a garment factory. For me, it is difficult because I have polio. I walked with difficulty, with a cane, and so if I did the seamstress work, I worked very slowly. They count the pieces, so I could not make more money. So I found a job in the garment factory as a cashier. 1 worked Monday through Saturday. I worked a lot and then I felt very tired. It was long hours for low pay, for sure. I lived with my brother, that’s also not good.

But right now, I study English everyday and I feel much better. It took me ten years to feel comfortable with English. I went to the free English classes after working in the factory. It got easier. Living in America is the best for me. | can use my wheelchair. In my country, the roads cannot load the wheelchair. Right now, I get my wheelchair and can go anywhere. I feel more comfortable.

I’m retired. I went to the center to learn English and keep my brain running. This is my second year. I live in Chinatown, ten blocks away. It’s convenient to buy Chinese food and see a lot of the people. I live in senior housing, which is very convenient. You can go anywhere, take the subway, take the bus, go to restaurants. I like living in America. I like to travel.

A lot of the labor jobs that immigrants do, some people cannot do it. It’s difficult. I think if more immigrants come here, we can learn from different cultures, from each other, and make America better. I think America needs to open the doors and let immigrants come here and they will make America better. Every culture is different. The talented come here and make the new America.

I’m originally from Arequipa, a second city in Peru. My environment was related to Catholicism – I went to Catholic school, I joined the local church choir, helped with Catholicism classes. So that was my life. I had no career aspirations, and since I spent a lot of weekends with the church community, with the nuns, I was thinking I could become a nun, until I saw this giant underwear, and that was the thing that struck me. Am I going to have to wear this? So I quit and chose to pursue elementary education. I wanted to become a bilingual teacher.

To perfect my English, I went on a three-month student exchange visa program, and it was great. I met students from Columbia, Brazil, Poland, Thailand. The trip was to North Carolina, the outer banks, the beach area. It was beautiful. It was me and a group of friends — it was a blast. I worked in McDonalds. I didn’t know what McDonalds was. I just wanted to go, improve my English, and go back.

But I wanted to come back. It was like I had taken a piece of a cake and I wanted some more. I went reapply for the student visa and they denied it. I was so devastated. I was like, ‘I cannot be a nun.’ I was doing elementary education, but I wanted to go back.

Later I learned that my friend had a brother in North Carolina. He was going to come through the U.S. Mexico border and he said I was welcome to join him. This was 2004. Back then, it wasn’t so popular as today, or three years after I did this trip. used my savings from McDonalds – the whole trip was about $8,000. It was me, the only woman, with three other guys traveling. Had I known what it was like, I wouldn’t have done it. It was ignorance and me feeling young and athletic, I can do it, a little rebellious.

So I did the trip, and it took three months from Panama all the way to North Carolina. The trip was by car and by foot. There was a small river we crossed and then the dessert three nights. The south Mexican border, that’s the toughest part to go because below Mexico you just bribe people. In the south of Mexico, I went to immigration jail. Twice we were caught by U.S. immigration and returned to Mexico. It was adventurous, but when I arrived I was like, ‘Holy cow, what have I done?’ I could have died, been raped. God was my strength.

Once I was here, I thought in my silly mind that with the documents that I had been accepted before, I would just go to college and say, ‘Here I am.’ I later found out that I needed a visa. I stayed in North Carolina for a year and I found out I could go to school here in New York City, so I went to CUNY LaGuardia Community College for two years and then I went to Baruch. I pursued business. It’s an enchanting city. I was doing housekeeping, gardening, babysitting, all these kind of odd jobs. I admired this particular family that was in business, but my heart wasn’t there. I had promised my family, but really arts were in my heart.

You had all these financial institutions coming for the students, but I didn’t have the documentation to work. I knew my reality then, so I just focused on working. People in class were talking about hanging out after class, while I’m thinking, ‘Hey, I’m running out of toilet paper.’ It was really tough, for about four years of me working, home, school, work, home, school. I felt I had no life, no social life. I was afraid. Nobody knew about my situation, not even my bosses, because I was afraid that they’d call immigration on me.

Whatever money I was making was just to live. I was paying like $250 rent for a space in a living room in Queens. I was like, this is not life I’m going to get my degree, and with this degree I can find any job in Peru. But before my senior year, I met the person who now is my husband, and he introduced me to what is yoga and meditation. I took yoga first because it got rid of my pain when I was doing housekeeping.

Four years in the city, alone, I was like a stone. I wasn’t that innocent child no more. My heart was an icicle, and I guess I didn’t notice it. It was me drowning myself in this darkness, in the shadows. Why should it be easy for you when I had it tough? When I realized I was that way, I wanted to change, so then I pursued the meditation and everything changed. I wrote down a song. I loved art, so I started writing. Before would only focus on the negative things. Not even if I married my husband could I fix my immigration status. When you come to the U.S. without inspection, crossing the border, you couldn’t. But then in 2013, out of nowhere, the Obama administration passed a miracle. It took a year, I applied, I went to Peru, I got the waiver, and now I’m a legal immigrant. I can travel. Now I go see my family every year. Eventually we bought a house in Brooklyn, sold it, then bought another house.

Everybody, you work, home, kids, you have no life. Because of the benefits, you are attached to a job, which shouldn’t be. They should give us more resources. They want to keep us all busy, in a way that they don’t want us to be together, to work for our rights, to work for our own well-being. They want to divide us, to fool around so they’ll keep the money and the power.

Something that is really ugly is that the U.S. is so good at giving out names, like alien, that people get to identify with, and they get angry. I’m this and you’re that, and then we fight. Those are just words. Don’t let words define you. People immigrate for many reasons. The importance of immigration is obvious. That’s why all big cities have grown and are important, because of all our creativity. Everyone comes together and we create something different. The first time I came here, I was cleaning. I was doing the job that maybe other people didn’t have the time to do, or didn’t want to do it because they had the time, or skills, or ability to create something else.

Because in North Carolina, let me tell you. It was a nice, beautiful beach area. For McDonalds to bring students year round, it’s because nobody wants to do the job. I know that the beautiful teenagers from there, maybe middle class, they’ll pick the waitress jobs because of the tips. They’re not going to apply for the McDonalds job. The U.S. and all big countries need labor, work, and only the immigrants will do it, I know. People say they are taking their jobs away. Go ahead and do it.

I was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I was nine years old when we left. From what I know, the late ‘70s were a time of oppression politically in Argentina where people were disappearing, tortured, and killed – thousands. It was called the Dirty War by the generals and supported by the CIA.

My family decided to move to Israel. It was always an option because my father was a Zionist. went to Hebrew school every day and I spoke Hebrew. I thought it was just an extension of Hebrew School, and then I started to realize what immigration really is all about. I knew the language, but the mentality was completely different, the culture was different, the way people speak to each other, the way they behave. There was a lot of adjustment and it was very difficult for my parents.

By the end of high school, I was as Israeli as an Israeli can possibly be. I joined the army. At the age of 16, I was sent by the state back to South America to speak about Israel, so for two months I was off high school with another three kids from Israel and we toured South America, met with press, met with politicians, it was crazy, just talking highly of Israel, propaganda style. Seven years into this immigration, I was already more than willing to speak about my new country enthusiastically. That changed later on, but yes, it was a very successful assimilation.

I was there for 20 years, and I was 29 when I came to the U.S in 1999. There were many reasons. There was always the desire to explore. Politically, I became a person who was very critical of Israeli politics. Back then it was through music. I would make performance art, cabaret style political satire. It was in the context of a dance group. I wrote the music and the text, and it was a kind of in your face, angry, critical, political art – very avant-garde back then. The performance was very effective in creating a lot of reaction, so in a way I was on my way to establish myself in Israel as a critical artist, but I felt I needed to explore more, I needed to put my ideas into a different context. I think I was seeing where Israeli society was going, which 20 years later I have to say unfortunately, I was right.

I got a gig in New York to come to La MaMa, an Off-Broadway theatre in the East Village. That was the spark. It was a disaster, I didn’t get along with the director, it ended up with nothing, but I stayed in New York. I always had a dream to live in a city like New York. I feel very happy in a city that is as unpredictable and mixed as this one is. There’s this indifference. It was a blessing to be in a place where nobody really cares. I felt at home immediately. It’s just a feeling. I haven’t had this feeling any other place, not even Argentina. New York very quickly felt like home.

Eventually I did my Masters. It helped me to feel more of a part of this place, not just as an observer. I felt like an observer when it came to my ability to articulate my thinking in English. I call it the second Latin period of my life, where I decided almost not to talk, and I love to talk. For a good seven years I held back in a way because I didn’t have that confidence. Going to graduate school helped me to develop some ease. It still hurts my mouth, breaks my teeth, but I have the courage to just speak whatever comes out of my mouth. That’s something I didn’t even have six or seven years ago.

The United States has this history of opening the gates to immigrants and then once in awhile closing the gates. In 1924, my grandfather tried to make it from Eastern Europe. He got all the way here and they wouldn’t let him off the boat. He ended up going back to Italy, where he took a boat to Argentina.

I think immigration is definitely the heart of this country. It’s a central question and a certain crisis in the identity of this country today. Historically speaking, to say this is a country of immigrants is true. It’s just a fact. This is a colony. But in terms of the ideology, the American Dream, especially as it was articulated in the 60s and 70s with human rights, civil rights, it has a different meaning as a safe haven for all the people of the world that are still looking for democracy and so on.

These days, it’s very clear because the face of evil is very clear – it’s the face of tribalism, the face of nationalism. I think right now it’s very clear the world is moving towards a global culture. We’re all going to be moving constantly around the globe, but there are forces that are trying to stop that and bring us 100 years back in terms how we see culture today. I think there’s a struggle between global culture and multinationalism. There seems to be a reawakening of tribal and nationalistic thinking, but it’s fighting the forces of evil beyond immigration. Immigration is just the easiest scapegoat. ‘You know why you’re suffering? Because of this guy.’ We’ve been here before, and if we need to learn something from history, this is the time. History repeats itself perfectly. It’s the same means, the same aesthetics. This is not the first time this resonates with something very ugly in European history not so long ago. We need to place immigration again as a value of American ethos.

A: We came to the country about two years ago for my job. We are from Tel Aviv, Israel. I work at a tech company that has an office in Tel Aviv and a headquarters here. E: I’m working on a documentary. I’m a producer. We have a kid in the school, almost four.

A: You always bring yourself with you to here. Moving here has been like life, a lot of it has been great, but also up and down. E: But on the good side, we can talk about the neighborhood. We came right here. In New York, you can feel comfortable to be an immigrant and a foreigner. There’s a vast majority here that are more than second-generation immigrants, and you feel that. We feel that especially on the Lower East Side. The neighborhood for us felt like home because we live in a place that is similar in Tel Aviv. I think there is the big diversity of not just people but also types of things you can do. You can basically spend all your time in the neighborhood.

E: There’s a character, a personality to the neighborhood. A: Everyone feels welcome because it’s all kinds of people all the time. You all stand out a little bit, but also you standout just like everyone else.

H: I think immigrants from other countries maybe have the same difficulties and the same cultural barriers. They have the same troubles tackling the culture here – what’s considered polite or direct or the opposite. We found ourselves with friends from all over the world. And as a parent, having your kid know that not everyone is like him, it’s an important experience.

E: Our kid just started here. A: When we were looking for the next school for him and we decided to come here, we very quickly liked the place. There’s something very warm and cozy about it, I think because it’s a community center and because beyond the school there are additional things here. It feels like an actual place, and they are involved in additional activities. They meet other people. E: For example, they had the sing-along a few days ago, and it was very moving. Having the kids and the elders in the same room. We had a Chinese choir singing Hebrew songs. It was amazing.

A: We come from a place where the political climate is also pretty wack. It’s definitely a tough time I think. You can see that for everyone, but I think it also can be an opportunity, and I think that’s how a lot of people here in this neighborhood are addressing it — an opportunity to rethink the ways things are handled and find a better way to fix them.

E: The moment, the night of the election, November 8th, it was a very significant evening for us and all the crowd in the East Village that we were watching the election with. Everyone was surprised. Apparently we live in a bubble here and in Israel because each time I’m surprised.

A: This is a very similar bubble to the bubble we live in in Tel Aviv. E: It’s a political bubble, being friends with people who share the same views. We don’t know yet what will be the actual impact on our closer circle, but it is kind of wacky to live in a place that each day there is something in the newspaper that you can’t believe you’re really reading.

A: I think when we came here, there was this whole notion that we were coming to a more sane, relaxed place, and it’s interesting to see how the whole world is in turmoil, and there’s no place that is very relaxed and has it all figured out. You know, we’re living in interesting times. E: Challenging times. A: Everyone is struggling to figure out what the future should look like, everywhere, all over the world. Ina way, being in a bubble creates some sort of illusion, but it is also fun in a way that maybe this is a place that can set an example. There’s a need to create a deeper discussion. don’t really feel that immigrants are unwelcome in this country yet. I think there’s small activity around that, but I don’t really feel that. Everyone here is an immigrant, and maybe some people have forgotten it.

A: In a way this place is kind of a greenhouse for new ideas and new types of culture. think that kind of creates a grassroots growth. If it helps generate confidence in both the immigrants but also other people to be able to speak their mind openly and stand up for themselves, they can definitely do that in this community. I think it encourages them to do that also outside, hopefully with other people.

E: People should be reminded that this is a country of immigrants. Living here, living in the Lower East Side, it’s so obvious. Walking in the streets and seeing the shop signs and looking around you, for us it is such an obvious thing, but it is not like that all over the country. So I’m not sure what would be a good way to demonstrate it.

A: ‘This neighborhood does really demonstrate it. You see the layers of the different immigrants coming in at the different times. If you walk on East Broadway, you see the synagogues and the Chinese temples and the restaurants with all different types of foods, and you see how that’s been happening for a long while here. A long while, but it’s still only a couple of centuries really, so it’s still pretty new. There’s a lot of revolution happening all the time. I think people can easily forget that when they’re slightly more remote and surrounded by people who are similar to them. This is a good demonstration. This is a microcosm of the whole country.

TI’m from Fujian, China. I came to the United States in 2008. I had no choice because my whole family immigrated, so I just came with them. In my hometown, everybody wants to come here. A lot of family, they immigrated here. We waited for so long. My father came first, and then my mom and my sister and me. I was 23 years old.

I came from a small town. I think everybody knew each other around the neighborhood. It was easy to walk to anywhere and it was not expensive. It was hard to find a job in China. Usually people are just waiting to come here. Like me, I just finished middle school and I waited to come. When I was little, I knew that I had to come here. They gave me the idea that study was not very important from that time, but when I came here I feel like I didn’t have enough English because I hadn’t finished high school or university, so my English was just a little.

When I first got here, I could only get a job in a Chinese restaurant. I first lived in Indiana, because my uncle opened a restaurant there. I think a lot of restaurants want the worker to have some experience, and when I first came, I knew nothing, so I had to learn there and then I could find another job. The houses were bigger. I didn’t have a car. On my off day, I usually stayed in my apartment. I couldn’t go out.

When the people talked to me, I didn’t understand anything. I just worked and learned some English for the restaurant, like the food, the sauce. I never thought I would do that job in China. When I was in China, I did facials and it was easy for me, but the restaurant is very hard. From ten to eleven, it’s a long time. And if the restaurant is very busy you have to work hard all day, but everyone who came here is working like that.

The first time I came to Chinatown, I felt like the streets and the buildings were similar to my hometown. It was a little bit different from my image of it because I thought the United States had more tall buildings. It’s exactly the same. In Chinatown, I feel more comfortable, because it’s all Chinese people.

In Indiana, when I was working in restaurants, sometime some people would look at you and smile. Sometimes I don’t know what they mean with that smile, and I can’t talk to them. But sometimes they would say, ‘Oh, you’re Chinese.’ That feels bad. Another one is my pronunciation is not very correct, and people sometimes talk to you and you say a word, and they say, ‘What?’ They don’t want to guess what you are saying, just, ‘What?’ ‘What?’ They ask more times and I don’t know how to say it correctly, and it makes me more nervous. It’s been tough when I need to speak to Americans. When I speak English, I get very nervous. I don’t know why. I’m really afraid to talk to people on the phone. When people talk to me too fast, I can’t understand.

My English is improving because I have studied here for almost two years in the ESL class. My friend told me about it. The classes really helped me a lot. In China, I can do anything in my language, but here I don’t know how to do things. I learned a lot about how to live here, like how to open a bank account, and transportation. learn a lot of words from the class. And I have two daughters – one will be four in November and the other is two, and they both are in this school. This would never happen in my country, because you would have to pay for an education, at any age.

For now, easy things I can handle by myself. I can go to the bank. Before, for anything, I have to find someone to help. I remember, when I first came, AT&T charged me $1,000 for Wi-Fi. I didn’t know how to fight them. I paid for that. Now I think I can fight that by myself. I don’t need to pay that much.

I think I will get more comfortable because I am learning. I think my English will improve a lot, and I hope I can go back to school again. That’s what I want. I want to help my children. In the future, they will speak English. I think I have to learn more and I can talk to them and help them with their education.

I think more immigrants want to become citizens right now. My mother in law, she came to the United States about twenty years ago, and she wants to go to China, but she is afraid that she cannot come back. So she is studying for her citizenship now.

I think New York is good, for me, because I know how to go where I want to go. It’s much better than before. I know how to take my children to the park, I know how to check Google Maps and go take a train. It’s much better. I think my family is happy that we came. In China, my mom was a housewife, she didn’t go to work, and here she found a job. It’s good for her.

I think if New York City was without immigrants, it might be empty. There are a lot of immigrants here. I think a lot of American people like Chinese food. So if all the Chinese restaurants moved out, it would not be good. I like New York City because there are a lot of immigrants. I am not alone.

I’m from El Salvador, an hour from San Salvador. I came to New York in 2002, by myself when I was 18. There were so many reasons that I came. I wanted to be better, to prosper, to be a better person, and to get out of the danger. My country right now is very dangerous, and also there are no opportunities. Even for people that have degrees, it is hard to find jobs. There is a lot of robbery, a lot of guns, young people gather together and do bad stuff to the working people.

It’s your country and you can’t feel free. You’re always afraid of something, and I think that was one of the major things that made me get out of there. I wanted to work hard and get an education. It was too dangerous for my kids. I got married here and I have four children.

When I first came, it was challenging. First, being undocumented, it was hard to get a job. That was the first obstacle, and the second was no English. I said to my husband, I can’t live here, because it’s too difficult. I went to school. That was the solution. I needed to learn and I didn’t want to depend on others. saw close families and relatives, how they’ve been here for 20 years and how they still depend on translators. I said, ‘I don’t want that for myself.

I started working housekeeping in Brooklyn, cleaning apartments. I couldn’t get a good job because of my status, and I started going to school at night. I had access to a close community college, which I had to pay for, but it was helpful. It helped me to put away my fears, because I was so afraid to start learning. It is hard to learn when you work the whole day and go to school at night. That was every day for about two years. I wanted to quit so many times, since the class was all in English, but now I’m grateful. And I kept on learning.

I always wanted to go to college and get my high school degree. That was always my dream, all this time. Even though ’’m a mother and a wife and ’’m busy, I think it’s always good to have your own time. You have to push yourself. I wanted to continue my dreams that I couldn’t realize back home, but maybe here I have the opportunity to do it. Now I realize how important it is for my children to see me. You can do it if you want to do it.

We moved to the neighborhood in 2013, and then I found out about the Education Alliance and how they provide childcare. I came to learn more. The public schools all have an ESL program, but they don’t have free childcare. And since then they took care of my child while I take my classes. I started with ESL. I feel grateful because I didn’t have this for a long time. I could have been a student for a long time. It’s nice to learn during the day because your brain is fresh and you are not tired.

I studied for a couple semesters and I realized I might be ready for the high school equivalency test, so I decided to move to take classes to prepare me. I did it for about two years, and thank God I just passed in September. I got my diploma. One dream accomplished. Now I’m thinking about college. I know it’s going to be hard, and I need to practice more. The Education Alliance helps you apply for college. I sent the application last month, and I’m waiting for the answer. I’m thinking about studying either health or education. I now also volunteer at the center, helping out in the classroom, because if I go into education I would like to have experience, and I would like to know if I will like it or not.

Sometimes you feel welcome and sometimes you feel rejected. People see you as an immigrant and see you as a stealer. I experience good things and bad things, especially with my four kids. That part hurts. It’s my life; it’s my decision. I decide how many children I want to have, but sometimes people make you feel that you can’t have more than one or two. The way they look at you, it makes you feel like you’re not allowed to do it. I learned that I have my rights, and I can’t let nobody see me this why, or criticize me this way. They don’t know my life.

Some people take advantage of the government help. I know, and I understand. I heard many stories how people have abused the government, but we are not all. It’s not all the people. They make me feel that they think I’m abusing the government, which I’m not. have a husband that supports me. We have this many kids because we know we can support them. When people see me this way and they count my kids with their eyes, it’s a terrible feeling. And I feel like the people who attack the most are your own people sometimes.

Immigration is very important because everywhere you go you see immigrants, and how helpful they are. Every time I eat an apple, I eat a strawberry, and I pour milk into my cup, I think about who brought this. Everybody has different roles, and this is an important one. We need each other, and it hurts when people say these people are bad and these people are good. We all need each other. We need you because you are good at computers, you are a doctor, or you make me feel well, but you also need me. I bring your food onto your table, which you cannot do because you are busy. Everybody is special; everybody is good at something. So it hurts when they say these people are bad.

A lot of immigrants pay taxes, but they don’t get the returns, and it’s hard to get treatment. Getting doctors is hard without insurance, and what Obama did was great because he was trying to help low income families. My brothers they pay taxes, but they don’t get returns, they don’t count that. Obama was trying to help people doing that, people with good records.

Why don’t they give people the opportunity to become legal without being so strict about it? They could do better things if they were legal. I think this is something silly that they do. They put people on hold. You are not allowed to do this, that. If they would think more, they would say lets give these people this opportunity to work here and get their papers so they can apply for a government job or an office job. They would get more money back versus now with people working without papers and not paying taxes.

My parents met in Puerto Rico. They moved because of the economy when my mother was only 19. She told me a story about how she went looking for jobs in the Garment District in wintertime, and to her all the buildings looked alike, so she couldn’t remember which was her building. She kept going passed it. She was crying because she didn’t speak a word of English. All she could say was, ‘I’m lost’ A cop stuck it out with her. He felt compassion for her and he walked with her, and then she eventually found it. He told her to memorize the number of the building and how many blocks it was away.

My father, since he was in the military, he spoke English. He didn’t have such the hard time. His hard problem was that he couldn’t find a decent paying job. At first he started washing dishes, then he took the civil service test and started driving trucks for the post office. Then he became a bus driver and drove the Grand Street bus. My mother was a seamstress. You have to be very skilled and thank god she was. Her bosses loved her.

When I was growing up, it was austere. We were poor. Pretty much everybody down here didn’t have a lot of money, but they were working people. We were all in the same boat down here, some better than others. You had a mixture of everything. Everybody pulled their weight pretty much. My father became a victim of homicide. He was killed in 89. He retired from driving a bus and decided to drive a livery cab. Little did we know that at that time they were killing cab drivers. And I was a cop, I was a sergeant at the time and I didn’t even know. The police department kept that very quiet because it was bad enough that people were leaving the city. Only the cab drivers knew about it, and especially the livery cab drivers, those were the ones that were targeted the most.

The city didn’t start getting safer until the ‘90s, when they made a massive change to take back Manhattan, because it was very important. How do you let this happen to the financial capital of the world? I saw it at its worst, when it looked like a bomb hit. I was in junior high school during the time of the racial riots in the Lower East Side. We had curfews, all of that, forget it.

Look at me. Look at where I’ve come from, 45 Essex Street, that’s a tenement. was a lieutenant before I retired, and now I work for the New York Stock Exchange. All my cousins, we’re all from the Lower East Side, and we all did well, but the ones that did well also had very strong family roots. That plays a big part in it, because we could have gone by the wayside and become junkies.

The teachers, the community, the ties, all helped each other. If I did something wrong, my parents would know before the night was over. You were able to carve out a niche where you felt comfortable with your own, and you benefited from the experience of the other cultures. My best friends were either Jewish or Chinese. In the beginning, one of my Chinese friend’s parents said, ‘You can’t come into the house.’ I used to have to wait outside in the hallway. Then eventually as time went on, I was allowed in. First, ‘Stand there,’ then another time, ‘Okay, come into the living room’ – a little inch. They were good people.

Where else can you see something like this? You get Chinese food, Jewish food, Ukrainian food. We’re not that far from Little Italy, Chinatown, Wall Street, Little Odessa. Many dances were at the Ukrainian Hall. This neighborhood wouldn’t have been so accepting without immigration. It’s really, really good because everybody gets to see what other people are like, and with time those walls come down.

We can’t live without immigrants here. This is what New York is about. We need the immigrants, we need the services, and there has to be a middle of the road. It’s a give and take. You start fitting into different things and people start adjusting, and it’s a good adjustment too. This is the heart and soul of what America started out as. This is it, the kind of people. It’s the same concept, the same fears, the unification of communities within their own culture and then expanding and learning new ones, and especially with racial intermarriages, once those occur, then the floodgates open.

I went to the Edgies here at the age of four because both my parents were working full time. We were here since early in the morning until six at night. They provided lunch and snacks. The rooftop was our playground. It was where everybody went to summer camp. It was extremely helpful, because where else could you go where the children are safe? It was Jewish run but it was multi-racial. We learned all the songs like Hava Nagila. They did this for us until I was seven years old.

I grew up on the Lower East Side, my mother grew up on the Lower East Side, my grandmother lived from age 19 to her death on the Lower East Side, my dad grew up on the Lower East Side, his parents lived on the Lower East Side, so this is basically home for multiple generations.

It’s interesting because so many of the stories that both my parents and grandparents tell actually very much mirrored my growing up here. I remember going outside and being completely free to roam the streets of the city. We had the freedom to be out and about constantly, from sunup to sundown. It was very community based. Back then you didn’t need security guards in your building, you had a bunch of women who lived in the building who would sit in folding chairs outside of the main entrance. They were the security. They watched everyone’s kids coming in and out. It was everyone looking out for each other. It wasn’t until the sun went down where it was like, everybody come inside. We’re done.

My best friends growing up were Chinese, Japanese, Puerto Rican, Orthodox Jewish and Black. And the diversity wasn’t just from ethnicity, but also of socio-economic. To me it was completely normal to be around somebody whose parents was super wealthy or someone who was living off of welfare. No one cared about any of those things, and I wanted my children to experience it without even realizing the diversity and inclusiveness.

At one point, I was desperate to convert to Judaism. My family is very catholic, but I remember that a lot of my friends in our building were Orthodox Jews and they were always so welcoming and inclusive. They would invite me into their homes for the Shabbat and for all of their holidays, and I just remember being so enamored with the tradition and the ritualistic nature of all of it. I remember walking into our kitchen when I was nine and telling my mom I wanted to convert. She was horrified because she was such a devout catholic, and my grandmother just looked at me and was like, ‘I tell you what. If you turn 18 and you still feel the same way, I will help you.’

At the time, all I wanted was to be a part of that. As I got older, I sort of realized the comedy of it, and especially because my mom had been engaged to a Jewish man and was going to convert, but unfortunately he passed away before the wedding. I didn’t realize that there was already this history within our family of the conversion, so I think it sort of struck a nerve with my mom.

My grandmother never looked down upon anyone else or shied away from having conversations with anyone about their faith, their belief, their cultures, their lives. She would spend half of her days spending her time outside with the other ladies on folding chairs women of all different faiths and cultures. It was always very inclusive, and I think that was something she always tried to instill in me. There is no difference between us and everyone else. We’re just trying to do our best in the world.

I went to the preschool for two years and now this is my son’s second year here. My first best friend was an Orthodox Jewish girl who lived across the street from the center. I remember the first time I walked into the center since they renovated and it was so different and modern and beautiful, but at the same time it still had the same kind of warmth and community that I remember even as a child. In the morning you see an elderly Chinese couple hanging out in the lobby and ten kids running through of all different ethnicities, and you’ve got a bunch of teenagers coming in who are going to tutoring programs. Everyone is here, everyone is together, and we’re all just coexisting happily and harmoniously.

You almost can’t talk about New York, or the Lower East Side, without immigrants. Neither would exist, and so the idea of a New York or a country where we don’t have immigrants, or we’re turning away immigrants, or that we’re selective in our immigration process, to the extent that we’re saying people from this country or people from this faith are not allowed, is just so absurd to me. I believe in doing our due diligence, not letting anyone and everyone into the country, but at the same time ostracizing and targeting specific groups is just so against everything that this country stood for. And we went through generations where there was enough infighting of immigrants, but at least they all came here with the same purpose and trying to achieve the same goals. Having a government now tell you that you can’t try to better your life, try to reach for that brass ring, is just completely contrary to what we stand for as Americans.

At the end of the day, there is so much value that comes from immigrants. No matter where you are, there are always going to be givers and takers in every facet of life, but everyone that’s taking is most likely taking out of need and not wanton laziness. That’s such an easy scapegoat mentality. I think the majority of immigrants do give back and do try and are here to work hard and achieve the stereotypical American dream.

People came to this country, especially my grandmother’s generation, not speaking the language, from a very different culture, background, community, and landscape. She came here with very little money, completely by herself, didn’t know a single person here, didn’t speak the language, and worked her fingers to the bone 14 hours a day as a seamstress. She worked and worked to provide a life for my mother, to give her the ability, education, and support for her to better her life. I think that is more likely than not the real immigrant story. People who come from a place where the opportunity is so slim to a place where they feel that opportunity is in abundance, that if you work hard you can achieve, you can support your family, you can send money back to your country. And my grandmother did do that. She sent money back to her family and flew her siblings out here so they could get their start.

Immigration is such a sensitive topic and such a hot button topic, but at the end of the day what I wish people knew is that we are a sum of all of our parts. We generally are welcoming. We want people from all over the world to be here.

I’m from China, the south. I came in 2004. I came because of the education — it’s good for the kids in my opinion. It’s more free than in my country.

I came right to New York. I lived here one year and then I moved to Missouri. I move with my auntie. They owned a restaurant so I worked there. I felt separated in Missouri, because you go outside and it’s all English, but here I can talk in my mother tongue. I felt nervous in Missouri. When I spoke, I felt nervous because of my pronunciation they didn’t understand me. But here, we come from different countries. Missouri was just okay, but I prefer New York because it is more convenient to me. Here I have more chance.

When I married, I moved back. I live in Chinatown. New York was different than I expected. In China, because my friends and my family paint a picture, I always think about the high buildings, 42nd Street. When I first came here, some buildings were not as big.

People are very friendly. If we don’t know each other, we always say, ‘Good Morning.’ I like this. I like the community. I like the people. It’s a nice family place. I enjoy it. They have my food. You can eat many countries food. It’s convenient, and the education, we can learn. Whatever your age, you can learn, or you can go to college. Here the community is very, very good, but the rent is very expensive.

It’s become more expensive, just living, but not eating – every year it raises. Midtown and uptown are so expensive that some people move downtown. People are moving and more immigrants are coming, so the rent is going up. So many people are coming here. Chinese people are coming, so some people move to Brooklyn.

I have taken the English classes at the center. Our class, in the summertime we eat many countries foods. They bring us to try the food, sushi, Chinese food, sometimes tacos. My kids were born here. The school gives them many different cultures, Asian, Euro, American, everything. We support it. Their first language is English, their second is Chinese. My first language is Chinese, second language is English.

My husband works in midtown in a restaurant. Now I take care of my kids. Before I come here I work in restaurants. When I finished, I said no more, so I worked in a nail salon. When I worked in restaurants, it was hard work. Sometimes I would work ten hours, sometimes a half day. The whole day is ten to eleven. It was just working for a living.. When I worked at a nail salon, that’s my interest. You get to make people more beautiful, so I like it. When I return to work, I think I will go back to a nail salon. I worked there for five years until my third baby came. I take care of them, but I like working.

I think we just want to do better for ourselves. Everything has the good side and bad side. Immigration, on some sides it’s good, on some sides it’s bad. Some come here for their family, some come here for their kids, the education. I think they come here for a good future. I have felt welcome.

I’m from Russia, Moscow. I came to the U.S. about four years ago. I married an American. Moscow was lovely. I liked it a lot. New York was different from what I expected. I had been to New York a couple times as a tourist, but when you come to live it’s a completely different story, especially when you have children. So it was tough for me, especially at the beginning. Moscow is completely different in landscape. It’s very green, we have yards with playgrounds everywhere, we have lots of trees. It’s basically like nature, so I miss nature here.

My husband and I met in Moscow. He used to work there. ’’m a photographer and my husband is a photographer as well, so when he came to Moscow we started working together and I assisted him on his commercial shoots.

I came right to the Lower East Side. My husband is from Chinatown. I’m still trying to know New York. I’m trying to learn. In general, I think New York is a really cool place, you just need to get used to it. New York reminds me of a huge, wild animal. It’s too much of everything here. You can be here completely happy or completely unhappy – it depends on where you are right now. Just now, after four years, I have started learning some things here. Before I was completely alien. There are too many buildings, too many people, too much of everything here.

Now it’s getting better. At first it was really scary. It was too much, because I cannot remember anything. It looks simple, all these streets, but every door has something going on. It’s not like this in Moscow. Every door has to have a store or a cafe, so for me it was just hard to remember places.

My English was worse at first, but when I came I immediately went to the library and took the classes for English and improved a little bit. It helped me because I also found some friends there and we still keep in touch. It was a really good experience and I’m glad that New York has this program for new people because it helps with English and with connections. didn’t know the system. It’s little things, everything, how transportation works, insurance, even grocery shopping. I read some article where they said that immigration is the same type of stress as if somebody is deaf. It’s stressful. I went through all of that. It’s not easy.

People are friendly. I don’t know if it’s this neighborhood, but I think in general, Americans are very friendly. Coming here, I didn’t meet many friends, but people are waiving hi. It’s good.

My older daughter, she used to be in Manny Cantor for pre-K, but now she’s in first grade. And Ruby, she’s waiting for a spot. My older daughter, she was born in Russia, and of course there are only white people there. She didn’t see anybody other than white and Chinese, but through the school, it’s fantastic, it makes them more open-minded. They see life from different angles. They see other people’s cultures. There are so many different cultures, and I like that. They even bring parents to introduce their countries. I went and showed them nesting dolls and told them about Russia and the kids were listening, I like that about New York. They are trying to keep the culture of other people. I see all the parades and we participate, the girls like all the dance and dragons. I’ve probably become an expert in Chinese food, since I’m eating a lot of the cuisine.

There are many lovely things about the Manny Cantor Center. I like how they grow kids. I like the system, because in Russia sometimes in Kindergarten, it’s more like school, with discipline and stuff like this. Here they play more with kids. In this age, they should play. They don’t need discipline yet. I really like that they do this. I also have my mom here visiting and I put her in the senior citizen center. They have some Russian meeting group there so she found some friends. It’s really the heart of the neighborhood. Almost all my connections in the city and neighborhood are from the center. If I did not find this place, I would probably not be so happy in the neighborhood. I would still be lonely.

In general, people are very nice here. Everybody has been polite. I never had any experience of people treating me badly. This place is very good for me. I was surprised, you know the relationship between Russia and America is not very good, but I never met anyone who said something bad to me.

It’s a city of immigrants. People are trying to have good relationships with other people, because mostly everybody is from someplace else. If New York will lose immigrants, it will lose its soul, because it’s historically a city of immigrants. If you take away immigrants from New York, it will be a completely different place, like any other town. Tourists will stop coming here because this is what attracts. hey can’t. They shouldn’t. There’s only one place on Earth where you can try food of almost all countries. No other place is like this.

I can compare to my country, when someone comes to my country as an immigrant, there is no real help. Basically no one will help you to learn the language, there are no special schools, it’s just on your own. You have to learn everything yourself. Here, at least in New York, you feel the support for immigrants. If you want, you can find it.

You can learn the language in the library and have some avenues to meet people. In America, I like this idea that you can go to school at anytime, so I also think maybe I should get some local education too and do something completely new. It really amazes me. It’s a country of possibilities. If you want, you can really change your life anytime.

I’m from China. I came about five years ago because my husband lived in New York City. He went to China and we married, and I came here. We moved to Chinatown.

American people are very kind. When I came here, I couldn’t speak English, and most American people would teach me English. The environment, the government is good, better than China. China has many, many people. When you go in the street, there are so many people. Sometimes Chinese people, they are very passionate, but I think the American people are even more passionate than Chinese people. Sometimes in China, if you are a stranger, they don’t want to help you, but when I come to America, many American people like teaching me English.

First I came to New York, then I moved to Virginia to work, and then I moved back here for my kid to go to school. I worked as a cashier and my English was very bad. In my brother-in-law’s restaurant there’s a waitress, she is American, and she often taught me. So I learned much English there. Virginia had few people and big houses. Everybody has a big house and there are not so many people in the street. hey all drive cars, and there is no Chinese food and no Chinese supermarket. Living here, we have Chinese food, Chinese supermarkets, and so many Chinese people, so we can speak Mandarin. I can take the bus, subway.

When I came here, I was very excited and scared to come to a new environment and community. Now I’m adapting more. Before I just saw the American movies. It’s sort of different when you actually see the movie and you see the real place. In the movie, it seems more modern and more developed than you actually experience yourself.

My kid goes to school and there are translators. I have been taking the English classes at the Manny Cantor Center, and I have made many friends from different countries. The school has many activities. I will go to the farm, go to see the movies, and then we joined the family learning plan last year, and ve learned many parenting skills. This school, the teachers, social workers, many people are very kind. They help me with a lot of things.

My son is four years old. When he first came here spoke Mandarin, so before he came to school he couldn’t speak English. Now he has gone to school for one year here and he can speak a lot. When he goes home sometimes he speaks English and I say, ‘What is this?’ And he translates for me. Before he just saw Chinese movies and now he goes to English movies.

Here you can learn many different cultures, you can hear many different languages, and you can make friends from different countries in school. Immigration, I think some is good, some is not so good. If a lot of immigrants move to the U.S., it may lower the development of the economy, but for the immigrant families, if they want to apply for their relatives or family members to come to the US., then there’s a problem for them.

Mary Belle: I was born here and raised in the island of Montserrat in the Caribbean. I came here when I was 14. When I arrived, it was the first snow, and I wanted to go back. I told my mother, send me back. But she said, ‘I’m your parent so you got to stay with me, I was crying all winter long.

We lived in the Bronx. It was okay; it was nice, but some of the neighbors wanted to fight all the time, and I got in fights so many times because they would say, *You’re black.’ When I went to school, it was Spanish, Puerto Rican, some Blacks, some Jewish, but there weren’t that many Black people then going to the school.

Then I went to the high school in the area, Jane Adams, I graduated and I went to work. I was a seamstress in the factory. I had to work so it was okay. After that, I had quite a few jobs because some times you were laid off and you had to find something else. Then I met Stanford, but I already knew him from the islands.

Stanford: I came in was 1954. I was 17. My parents wanted to come to America, that’s all it is. It’s one of the greatest countries in the world. Everybody wants to come here. We moved to Harlem. I used to spend most of my time there. Harlem isn’t like Harlem anymore. All my brothers and cousins all living there and every Saturday, that’s where I went. We used to meet and play cards and have fun, play dominos. I worked in a perfume factory for 16 years, and then I got a job in a hospital.

Mary Belle: We moved to the Lower East Side around 1957. The neighborhood was pretty much the same. he people were a little nicer. The youngsters would say good morning. It was a nice community. My children all went to school here in the area, so they had to make the best of it, and we just made sure that they did their best. It was diverse. People were helpful. You could watch somebody’s children and they’d watch yours if you wanted to go someplace. It was that kind of togetherness.

Elaine: I feel like I wasn’t affected by racism and poverty as much because I grew up in this area. The LES prepares you for everything. There’s so much of everything around here. My grandparents made sure I understood the importance of education, the importance of working, the importance of manners. By the time we got home my grandmother already knew what we did. Mary Belle: I knew what was going on from everyone. We kept in touch with everyone.

Elaine: It was more of a community back then, and now they’re trying to get back to that, but it’s kind of hard because we sort of lost our way. So I’m very grateful for this center because my daughter’s here now and she gets to experience the different people, the different culture, the different food, and I get to be involved in the center and reach out to other community members and hopefully build this community back up. For me, I’m just trying to have my daughter experience it all. I try to make her walk to Chinatown, Little Italy, Delancey Street.

Our family is really diverse. My grandparents are Caribbean, my dad is Caribbean but he’s Jewish, my grandparents are Christian, my husband is Muslim. I got invited to a lot of Bat Mitzvahs, then I went to Hunter and it was like being on the LES, because it was very diverse there.

I feel like the Lower East Side is an immigrant community, but it’s changed so much. They’re trying to push us out right now. It’s gentrification. They’re building so much and it’s sort of scary with the new building coming up, 30,000 people, where are you going to put them? So I think that’s the problem with immigration, like my grandmother said, I don’t know how you would limit them, but I think we’re just worried about our resources being used up. But also that’s distribution as well, the one percent that are super rich and powerful, there’s enough resources to share with everyone but you don’t want to distribute it to everyone, so we have a class system. So it’s very complicated.

Mary Belle: I think as long as there’s no trouble with immigrants, I think they should be accepted, and those that were here before, even though they weren’t citizens, should be able to stay because they were born here. I think they should be able to stay. We have so many different immigrants coming in from different cultures that they should limit them then in other ways, but not just one place. We need an equal distribution.

I’m from Venezuela. I came in 1979. At the time, Venezuela was fine, but my parents wanted me to learn English. It was just me, my uncle, and my little cousins. I was 15, but I adjusted really good.

I didn’t even know how to say water in English. It was really difficult. I went to an ESL class to learn English, and I went to Washington Irving High School. It was really cold. Where I come from was tropical weather, and I was constantly shivering. The cold was terrible.

The East Village in the “70s was totally different from how it is now. I was young and I had a lot of friends because they were also coming from their countries like the Dominican Republic, Columbia, Ecuador. We used to hang out together because we could communicate, but it was challenging when I used to go to a store where nobody knew how to talk Spanish.

I was taking everything in English, except for one Spanish class, so most of the time I was lost. My worst challenge was to talk because I was not confident. I thought people were not going to understand when I talked because of my accent and pronunciation, but little by little when I started working, I got much better and I lost the fear that I had talking.

I got married. My husband is Puerto Rican and we have two children, who right now are adults. And we’ve been living ever since I got married in the Lower East Side. The center of my life is the Lower East Side. Everything is here: my doctors, my work, my job, my friends, my church.

I moved here around the ‘80s, and I moved to Delancey Street in 1984. The buildings, all the back apartments were burned. There were a lot of burned and abandoned buildings. It was terrible, horrible, really scary. A lot of bad people went there and they hid and did drugs and many other crimes. I was always aware of my surroundings and always with friends. I would not walk alone. I really didn’t like it too much because there were a lot of drug dealers. They would hang out on every corner. You would see them almost falling. It was ugly.

Now, it’s diverse. We have so many different nationalities, and of course new buildings, new construction. Everything has changed, for the better. Even though sometimes you feel a little nostalgic about little things that you cannot see anymore, I think it’s coming up really well. Now I can walk until three in the morning.

I felt welcome when I first came. I didn’t think it was a big issue, at least that’s the way that I perceived it at the time, but it was very different from now. It’s totally different. I can see it. It’s very sad and it does hurt because I know most of the immigrants that come, the reason is because they can’t have a life in their countries, and they come and they’re just here basically to work and to have a better life. They are pursuing the American dream and not everybody is a bad person. You cannot judge because of a little group that’s going to mess up. You cannot be judged because of their actions.

This November is going to be three years that I have been working for the senior center. I’m in charge of the food handling. I think this is such a great organization. It’s wonderful – I love it. I love to help people. I’m constantly in contact with the seniors and helping them. When I have a chance I talk to them. I have many seniors that come to me and talk to me – they even sit down and talk about their life. It’s about helping the community.

This is a diverse city that has such a great number of immigrants from so many different parts of the world, places that you don’t even know that they exist. That’s what makes America great, is the diversity and the different cultures. Everybody puts in a little grain, and it makes the city, and the whole country, great.

My family is going through very hard times because of what’s going on there with the government. It’s really bad and I’m trying to help them, taking them out of Venezuela. Some of them are already in Ecuador, some of the ones that got American visas, they’re here. I still have others that I need to help, like my sisters and the rest of my nephews and nieces, and of course my mom. I’m planning to bring her, God willing. She has an American Visa and I don’t think it should be difficult since I am an American citizen.

I come from China, Beijing. I came because I liked America. I think that America is freedom, a democracy. arrived in 1990 when I was 55.

I worked in the Academy of Science. My background is in computers, as a computer engineer. I worked upstate and in New Jersey. I like it and worked for a phone company, controlling the system and running the equipment. New Jersey had no Chinese at all. Communication was sometimes hard.

I liked Beijing because the people are very, very polite. Some of the customs I liked – it’s very, very traditional. A lot of things were different here, different culture, different backgrounds. I knew a little bit of English before I came, but it was hard to learn. I learned because I had to work, so I studied, but I had no time to practice. My work didn’t need much conversation so it wasn’t too difficult. It felt isolating because I didn’t understand what people would say.

I think people welcomed me. Everyone was very friendly and polite. The mood of the American people is very polite and friendly. I like that.

I came to the Center because after I retired I had nothing to do. I’ve been coming for three years. I wanted to learn something. wanted to improve my social life. I didn’t want to always get home with nothing to do, that’s not good. I think the senior center is very good for the senior people. I can learn English, I can make friends, I can paint. It’s very good and the volunteers are very good. They give a lot of help.

I think most people immigrate because they think America has a good culture. I think it’s very important to have gratitude. Some people that come here complain – they want to change the system, want the American society to change for them, and I don’t think that’s good. You have to change yourself. Coming here is much better, and you have to respect the American values and the American customs. I think we must live with each other. We must understand each other and respect each other.

People come from everywhere, like the United Nations. It’s the culture here. I think [it makes America stronger]. I think it’s good. Most people are from other countries. The culture is very different from China. I think the culture of New York City is still fresh, but I enjoy my culture, and I enjoy other cultures.

I was born and raised in Puerto Rico. I came in 1989. Puerto Rico went through a hurricane called Hugo, and it destroyed my family’s house and business, so the week after my mom and I came to New York, and then a month after my father and brother came. It happened pretty quick.

My mom’s family is from New York and my father’s family was from Connecticut. When we initially moved here we moved to New York, but then my father came to Connecticut. I felt like an outsider for the first couple years. New York always felt like home because of the diversity, versus being in Providence, Rhode Island, or even Connecticut. I felt more of an outsider out of New York. That’s why I always came back.

In New York, everything was fast paced and in English, versus everything being in Spanish and more laid back. My father is a military guy so we always spoke English, but as a second language, so when I first got here I went to ESL school until middle school and helped a lot. Everything was tough because everything was English. I got held back because of my English, but I was able to make up two years in one when I got to high school. My mom was born in Puerto Rico so she had the hardest time adjusting, and she also went to ESL classes.

I’m the general manager at the fitness center at Manny Cantor. I’ve been working here for two years. This is my first non-profit, and I wish I would have known about it 10 years ago. The money that we make goes back into the community. It doesn’t make one person richer; it makes the community richer. It’s very diverse – the amount of diversity seen here is tremendous.

The city was built by immigrants; the whole country was built by immigrants. Especially being in the Lower East Side and seeing how diverse this community is, Jewish, Chinese, Spanish, and how well they integrate with each other, I think it’s amazing. I haven’t seen this kind of mix in many cities I’ve traveled to. Diversity is everywhere, and it’s important that we all work together to make everyone come together.

We have to make it feel like it’s a community, so they can feel welcome, and can feel like they finally have a place, like I felt when I first got it here. For me, Puerto Rico was destroyed so I had to look for another place, and when we came to New York for the first time, I felt at home, especially when I first saw the Statue of Liberty from the plane. I remember it like it was yesterday.