Lana Weidgenant
Are there any misconceptions that people have about you as an immigrant?
“I feel like I’ve Americanized well, as far as integrating into the culture, but yeah. In American society, there’s definitely a large misunderstanding of immigrants, especially for people who haven’t been to other countries or who haven’t personally traveled that much, wherein they see immigrants coming in and think that's because they want to take American jobs, or they associate an ethnicity or an image or a race with immigrants. I’m pretty white-passing, so that doesn’t really happen to me unless I start speaking in another language. Then they’re like, ‘Oh damn…’ But yeah, I feel like there’s a problem in society, wherein we're consistently classifying a group of people as ‘the other’, not as us, and it’s so problematic because if you look at history, you’ll notice that the Europeans were once the outside group. At one point, American society decided that it hated the Irish and thought that they were coming into the country to steal American jobs. There’s always this group for which it’s like us vs. them, but then this out-group becomes part of the in-group, and in around 50 years, there’s gonna be another group that we don’t like and we will include the people we’re now so scared about. Those who were once the out-group - the unwanted immigrants - will complain about others, a new group of people, coming into the U.S. And it’ll be the same people who were once immigrants, whose grandparents were immigrants. America is a country of immigrants, and you’re looking at people coming into the country and saying, ‘Oh, we don’t want them here, they don’t look like us", not realizing the irony. It’s a repetitive pattern, a cycle… I don’t understand why people don’t look back and see that we’re doing the same things over and over again.”
