Ezequiel - Essay on Immigration

Connections.

On August 17th, our English class received a visitor from Belgium. The guy is friend of Elton’s. We had an interview with him, which is reflected in this composition about immigration in our society.
Nowadays, it is common to think of the concept of “transnationality”. If we consider companies that have been created in one country but now sell products everywhere, and have become “multinationals”, we can understand a bit more about what is to belong to a globalized world.
Businesses have to be done, meetings must happen, congresses have to be made. I know this is not “immigration” strictly, but it is a kind of habit which helps to make come true the dream of an Earth without borders, a Global Village.
New generations are used to using the computer to make friends from a lot of places and cultures, which means the idea of being from this or that nation is becoming weaker. For them, there is not a strong feeling of patriotism, because people usually move virtually from a country to another in a few seconds and this is just a reflex from what happens in reality: “our planet is smaller than it used to be.”
We can see that the quantity of immigrants, no matter where, has increased. It is so due to higher speeds and lower prices in transportation. People are more confident about travelling and making a living in another land. This kind of phenomenon helps us to be more tolerant and open-minded to others’ beliefs, customs, ideas, and behaviors and, last but not least, frontiers.
On the other hand, there are local people that usually become afraid of new folks in their area. They are very conservative on this and try to make immigration more difficult. In some cases, it happens because of high costs of taxes, partly used to support welfare to illegal immigrants from poorer countries.
This prejudice turns into anger and there are some parties stating that immigrants mustn’t continue in a place that is not theirs. Sometimes, they try to hurt or kill foreigners to intimidate others to come to “their country”.
But, in our Global Village, what is the meaning of “own”? Just because you have been born somewhere, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the place is nobody else’s. Sometimes you’re more connected to someone in the other side of the world, but have never met your own neighbor! In this case, what would be the place you belong to or the nation that is just yours? It seems that these questions are losing their logical meaning in our era. There are no more space to radicalism, let’s leave it out and enjoy the fantastic and fast connections we can make anytime, which are possible just because we are in the 21th century.