We Are the Immigrants

Topics of immigration and asylum seeking continue to be front-and-center in the U.S., with 45 taking every opportunity to make his unabashedly racist positions clear. The other week I realized that these are topics I hadn’t to date explored much with my almost-six-year-old, so I dug around online and found some great resources to support my conversations with him, including the animated short “We Are the Immigrants." The film, thesis project of Catalina Matamoros, an award-winning animator and illustrator from Colombia, narrates the hardships of a girl and her family as they cross the Mexican-U.S. border in hopes of reuniting with the girl’s mother. I sat down with my kid to watch, and we were both drawn in straight away, with Finn especially taken by what he called “the ghosts” as well as the appearance of, sigh, guns (topic for another post; related). 

At the end of the film I explained to Finn, who was actually paying attention to what I was saying (hardly a given with five-year-olds), that many of the families who are trying to enter our country from the southern border want to get away from governments that are doing things to hurt or potentially hurt them—but that Donald Trump, who Finn has heard his dad and me describe as cruel and only liking people who look like him/are white, doesn’t want to let them into the United States. He had just one question for me: “So where can they go?” I was struck, hearing that, and I struggled to answer in a way Finn would follow and without painting the bleak picture I guess I was trying to avoid. I pretty much said that was the problem—that they didn’t really have any good/safe options. Finn and I both went quiet, and I sensed that he’d picked up on the gravity of the conversation.