Why Do Immigrants Leave Their Home?

Warsan Shire, a London writer, poet, and educator, once said, “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.”. There are so many reasons why immigrants make the decision to leave their home, whether it be for freedom or for the safety of their own lives, they have a reason to go. The stories, “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan, “Of Plymouth Plantation” by William Bradford, and “My mom, a Mexican Immigrant, Taught Me to Love America” by Cristela Alonzo all touch on the difficulties and progress three very different groups of immigrants went through. Each of these took place in different times and had their own trials, but found that they could bring good things to these new places, in their own way. In the story, “Mother Tongue,” Amy Tan …show more content…
In “Of Plymouth Plantation,” William Bradford tells the story of a group of Puritans travelling on the Mayflower and trying to find a place in the Americas to make their home. They had many encounters with a group of Native Americans and at the beginning it involved more fighting from the natives than helping. When they first arrived they had no help, homes, or provisions to last them very long and during the first winter the Puritans suffered greatly, with many lives lost. Eventually though, the good that they brought shone through when they received their religious freedom and brought ideas from their homeland after they made peace with the natives near the end of the story when it says, “With whom, after friendly entertainment and some gifts given him, they made peace with him (which hath now continued this 24 years)...” (Bradford 16). After this, the life of the Puritans and the natives became much more civilized and they all received what they wanted from their journey of …show more content…
And this could be true as seen in one of the stories above, “Of Plymouth Plantation” by William Bradford because of some of the negatives they brought like guns, or in “Balboa” by Sabina Murray, another story that applies to this theme of immigration and discovery, and the main character, Balboa, brought death and desecration to a new place like it says in the reading, “Balboa is loved by no one and feared by all. He has invented an unequaled terror.” (Murray 81). But, the good that the immigrants brought outweighs the bad and if it was decided that the immigrants did bring more bad then that would be stereotyping an entire group of people based on the actions of very few. So, even though there are a few terrible instances where things have gone wrong, overall immigrants brought good to the United States and helped improve it