I have read a lot of literature about the immigrant and refugee experience for this project. In this section I will introduce some of the books I read.

Welcome to Paradise
By Mahi Binebine
Fiction

Seeing him with his back bent double, folded in on himself, with the air of someone apologizing for existing, it was obvious he’d already slipped into the skin of a refugee. Perhaps we should have done the same and got into training for the future: learn how to become invisible, disappear into a crowd, hug the walls, avoid eye contact, speak only when spoken to, bury our pride and close our hearts to humiliation and insults, throw our switchblades into the gutter, learn to keep in the background, to be nobody: another shadow, a stray dog, a lowly earthworm, or even a cockroach. That’s it, yes, learn to be a cockroach.
Binebine, Pages 106-7

The Girl Who Smiled Beads: a Story of War and What Comes After
Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil
Non-Fiction

Claire refused to let anybody limit her sense of her own possibilities or determine her self-worth. People might think they could take everything from her, that they had taken everything from her. You are a woman. You are a refugee. You cannot go to school. You cannot have a job. You are nothing under our laws. She remained immovable, unswayed. Her eyes, when she boarded the bus, said: Mess with me one more time and I’m going to make it rain fire.
Wamariya and Weil, pages 195-196

The Night Diary
By Veera Hiranandani
Fiction

My childhood would always have a line drawn through it, the before and the after.
Hiranandani, page 86

Enrique's Journey: The Story of a Boy's Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother
By Sonia Nazario
Non-Fiction

The children show resentment because they were left behind. They remember broken promises to return and accuse their mothers of lying. They complain that their mothers work too hard to give them the attention they have been missing. In extreme cases, they find love and esteem elsewhere, by getting pregnant, marrying early, or joining gangs. 

Some are surprised to discover entire new families in the United States—a stepfather, stepbrothers, and stepsisters. Jealousies grow. Stepchildren call the new arrivals mojados, or wet-backs, and, to gain power over their new siblings, threaten to summon U.S. immigration authorities. 

The mothers for their part, demand respect for their sacrifice: leaving their children for the children’s sake. Some have been lonely and worked hard to support themselves, to pay off their own smuggling debts and save money to send home. When their children say, “You abandoned me,” they respond by hauling out tall stacks of money transfer receipts. 

They think their children are ungrateful and bristle at the independence they show—the same independence that helped their children survive their journeys north. In time, mothers and children discover they hardly know each other.
Nazario, pages 315-316

Between Shades of Gray
By Ruta Sepetys
Fiction

Komorov marched over to Mother. He grabbed her by the arm and spit something that resembled an oyster onto her face.

Then he left. 

Mother quickly wiped off the slime, as if it didn’t bother her at all. It bothered me. I wanted to roll the hate up into my mouth and spit it back in his face.
Sepetys, page 217

Infidel
By Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Non-Fiction

I didn’t know how I would escape or what freedom might mean. But I knew what course my life would take if I went to Canada. I would have a life like my mother’s, and Jawahir’s, and like the life of this woman with whom I was staying in Bonn. I would not have put it this way in those days, but because I was born a woman, I could never become an adult. I would always be a minor, my decisions made for me. I would always be a unit in a vast beehive. I might have a decent life, but I would be dependent—always—on someone treating me well. 

I knew that another kind of life was possible. I had read about it, and now I could see it, smell it in the air around me: the kind of life I had always wanted, with a real education, a real job, a real marriage. I wanted to make my own decisions. I wanted to become a person, an individual, with a life of my own.
Ali, page 187

Exit West
By Hamid Mohsin
Fiction

He was drawn to people from their country, both in the labor camp and online. It seemed to Nadia that the farther they moved from the city of their birth, through space and through time, the more he sought to strengthen his connection to it, tying ropes to the air of an era that for her was ambiguously gone.
Mohsin, page 187

America is Immigrants
By Sara Novic
Illustrated by Alison Kolesar
Non-Fiction

Louisa Benson Craig. For most people, competing in beauty pageants and fighting in bloody ethnic wars are mutually exclusive. But for Louisa Benson Craig, they were both acts of rebellion. 

Craig was ten when her mother entered her into her first pageant as part of a plan to endear the district commissioner’s wife to her family. It worked; so enraptured was the powerful woman by Craig’s unconventional Jewish-Karen looks that Craig’s father, a rebel, was released from prison. 

Though she was part of the Karen ethnic minority that the Burmese government scorned, Craig’s status as a beauty icon won her the favor of many of her future enemies. She was crowned in two Miss Burma pageants and was Burma’s first Miss Universe contestant, but none of it came naturally. High heels and posing, she’d later tell her daughter, the novelist Charmaine Craig, were “a nuisance.” 

By the time Craig met her first husband, Brigadier General Lin Htin of the Karen National Liberation Army, he had a bullet in his skull and had already been erroneously declared dead several times. When he disappeared in the jungle and was once again believed to be deceased, the KNLA’s Fifth Brigade looked to his widow for leadership. Craig cut her hair and led the brigade, taking on key roles in several negotiations with enemy generals and always turning down villagers’ offers of women’s clothing. 
Novic, page 147

Love Thy Neighbor: A Muslim Doctor's Struggle for Home in Rural America
By Ayaz Virji and Alan Eisenstock
Non-Fiction

“The only reason you care about me is that I have an MD after my name. That’s why I’ve been welcomed into this community. If you could take the brownness or the Muslim-ness out of me and put that part of me on a registry and somehow keep the doctor part of me, you would” .
Virji, page 72

This is What America Looks Like: My Journey from Refugee to Congresswoman
By Ilhan Omar with Rebecca Paley
Non-Fiction

As I was walking out, he said, “I have been racking my brain to figure out what’s different about you and I got it.” 
“My hijab?” I said sarcastically. 
“No, it’s that you somehow walk in like you’re a man.” 
“A white man.” 
“Yes, a white man.”

Constantly being underestimated has always been helpful to me. It was really hard for him to imagine that a ninety-pound refugee hijabi could be confident enough to walk into a leadership role of a caucus whose most important incumbent she defeated. What did he expect? For me to walk around with an inferiority complex? I didn’t feel inferior to anyone in the state house. Having been elected by the people, I had just as much right as anyone else to be there.
Omar, pages 234-235

American Street
By Ibi Zoboi
Fiction

My cousins are laughing and talking among themselves in the living room. Again, there is loud music, but it comes from the TV. I don’t want to be a burden to me, but I have no idea what to do in this kitchen. Suddenly, I feel so alone in this house. I am surrounded by family, but none of them really knows me or understands what happened to me today. My heart begins to ache for my mother. How could my aunt just leave me here in the kitchen—is this how you treat family in America? There is no celebration for my arrival, no meal is cooked, no neighbors are invited to welcome me, not even a glass of cool water is on the table for me to drink after such a long trip.
Zoboi, page 20 

How Dare the Sun Rise
By Sandra Uwiringiyimana and Abigail Pesta
Non-Fiction

My parents sheltered me from many of the civil war images that surfaced on TV. I didn’t really understand war, because my parents did such a good job protecting me from it. I did understand the need to be safe. I did not understand why people would want to target us. Some days, I would eavesdrop on conversations among my parents and other adults. I would hear them talking about war that was either going on at the time or that was about to start. That’s how I knew if we were likely to flee soon. Sometimes I caught a glimpse of my father opening a closet that he kept locked at all times, and for a good reason—that were several guns in there. I didn’t understand why Dad owned guns; he was not a soldier, and I had never seen him shoot anything. I know now that he wanted to protect us from war, but at the time, I figured he was keeping them for an uncle in the military.
Uwiringiyimana, pages 31-32

House Without Walls
By Ching Yeung Russell
Fiction

I assure him that 
we are so lucky that
we have had them on this journey. 
I assure him that
they have not just been a noble man and woman;
they have been just like parents to us.
Russell, page 304