Carlos - Essay on immigration

About Immigration

Last week we received at our English Class the visit of Louis, a Belgian young man that came to Poli as an exchange student. He told us about the immigration life in Belgium.
An interesting fact I learned from the interview was about the multilingualism of Belgium. This country is divided in three Communities or three Regions where the local population speaks different languages. So someone that is thinking of immigrating to this country has to think about this. In the Flemish Region (Flanders), for example, the main language is Dutch. Wallon Region (Wallonia) is a German-speaking Region and at the Brussels-Capital Region the official language is French. Although these three languages are official languages at these Regions, Belgium has also different local dialects.
Our interviewee spoke to us in English. As it is usual in European countries, in spite of a mother local language, English is the academic and business language, so the most recent young population speaks English as a second language. As our interviewee came from the Belgian Region where French is the official language, he has an English with a French accent.
Louis was invited to visit our English Class because we had studied a lesson about the Patel brothers whose family immigrated from an Asia country to Kenya – Africa. So the family had a native spoken language and at the new country they had to speak the local dialect or the Swahili and English, because Kenya is a multilingual country. When the two Patel brothers, Vijay and Bhikhu were young they had another immigration experience. They moved to the UK. In this new country they made fortune.
As a subject of our English Class we listened to a tape with the Patel brothers answering about their immigration experience in the UK. As Louis they speak English with an accent, but differently from Louis’s their accent is not a French accent. I suppose they have an Asian or African accent.
When a person is thinking about immigrating to another country there are several important questions to think about, as local rules about immigration, for example. Nowadays, the European countries are becoming increasingly xenophobic countries, probably due to economical reasons. This is a serious question to consider when someone is planning to immigrate. The most secure way to immigrate is to have legal papers. Someone with no legal papers living at another country has to survive with a psychological strain every day - What can happen to me if I’m caught without papers?
Louis spoke to us about the liberal immigrant context that they have in Belgium. The immigrants, even those who live there without legal papers have no problems with the authorities. He gave us an example of this. His Brazilian Portuguese teacher lives there without papers. When the authorities ask for her papers and she can’t prove that she is in a legal situation in Belgium, the authorities by their turn don’t take her to prison, she is not deported. She is advised to get official papers or to move. Louis told us when this happens, she would move to another place and continues to live in the country.
I don’t think of immigrating to another country, but I would like to have another experience abroad. I lived one year in London where I started my English language studies. Although I had this experience I don’t have fluency in English. Now I would like to live at least one more year abroad in an English speaking country, to finally improve my English and to have an academic experience too. For this I’m having English classes at IME-Jr.