Most Of My Friends Are The Children Of Immigrants

I was thinking about the nastiness of the current immigration debate recently when it occurred to me that most of my friends are the children of immigrants. My best friends’ parents hail from the Philippines, El Salvador and Mexico. I stopped to think about this fact and realized the grand impact that U.S. immigration policy had on my life and it just bowled me over.

Because, really, if we want to get into immigration and all its twisted incarnations in our conversation about it, it’s easy to forget that, at the end of the day, we’re talking about people. The kinds of people who help you out when you need to move, or the people who invite you to their quinceañeras, or the ones who let you sleep on their couch after you get laid off. Those are the kinds of people affected by the immigration debate, the kinds of people that you can’t help but love because they’re just so darn amazing.

The kinds of people we all have in our lives.

And perhaps those people come to your life via a long route that involved amnesty or struggle or immigration or legal battles, but once they’re in your life, you’re just glad. I consider myself lucky to have grown up in the diversity of Los Angeles, surrounded by people whose families came from all over the place but with the same goal of a better life.

All of us kids may have had parents from other places, but when we were together we dealt with the same problems: teasing, popularity, pettiness, jealousy and friendship. It didn’t matter whose parents had papers and whose parents did, or who had been granted amnesty or which person’s family had escaped civil war or whatever. At the end of the day, we were all Americans, and despite our squabbles I think we all enjoyed growing up together.

Now that I’m older and I’ve studied the ways in which we use media and language to disparage particular groups or control policy debates, it just breaks my heart. I think about growing up eating Philippine egg rolls and fried plantains and taquitos from different peoples’ grandmothers and how little I knew, or cared, about immigration policy. And now, as I reflect upon the great people in my life, great Americans, whose parents happen to come from someplace else, I realize that I still don’t care.

I’m lucky to know people who bring new experiences and culture to my life, but that has very little bearing on whether or not they know how to be a true friend.

Follow Sara Inés Calderón on Twitter @SaraChicaD