Immigrants Navigate Two Worlds

Dear friend:

Before you kick us out of this country, come into our world for a second and understand what it truly means to hear the phrase, “When in Rome, do as Romans do.” For immigrants, this is not a polite suggestion. It is daily practice, a matter of survival. We are expected to keep our authenticity while also mastering every unwritten rule of a new society. What rarely gets acknowledged is that we align and adapt constantly.

Public debates often use words like assimilation or integration to describe the immigrant experience. But these terms do not tell the truth. Assimilation implies that we erase ourselves. Integration implies that we blend into sameness. Neither captures the reality of living between two worlds. What immigrants do is far more complex: We align, and we adapt.

Alignment is the immediate adjustment, the quick reading of a room, the shift in tone, accent or posture to ensure we are understood and safe. It is “doing as Romans do,” not because we seek to become Roman, but because functioning in Rome requires fluency in its norms, and sometimes, we get lost in this and end up being labeled as criminals. Alignment is resilience disguised as conformity. It is the immigrant’s way of saying: I understand the rules, even if they were never written for me.

Adaptation is the deeper process. It is adding new layers to our identity without removing the old ones. Immigrants expand ourselves. We learn new languages, cultural expectations and ways of thinking, not to replace our origins, but because survival and dignity in a new country demand growth.

Adaptation is not a loss of authenticity. It is the construction of a new, more layered authenticity.

Because we spend our lives aligning and adapting in two cultural worlds, many immigrants develop what I call a third self. We do not fully belong to the country we left, nor the country we entered. We live in-between, shaping and reshaping ourselves to meet competing cultural demands. This is not weakness. It is cultural intelligence. It is resilience born of necessity.

What may look like contradiction from the outside is, in truth, survival from the inside. Immigrants navigate workplaces, schools and public spaces by reading social cues that others never have to think about. We shift, adjust and recalibrate. Not because we are lost, but because we are building lives in a world that demands constant interpretation. The immigrant identity is not divided, it is expanded. It is not confusing, it is layered. It is not inauthentic, it is resilient.

So, before you our experience for a moment. Understand that what you see as inconsistency is a form of endurance. Immigrants align and adapt constantly, not because we are trying to be someone else, but because we are trying to survive while holding on to who we have always been. We are not less authentic because we navigate two worlds. We are more. We are the third self — aligned, adaptive and resilient in societies that may never fully claim us, yet are shaped by our presence, politically, socially and economically, every day.

-Chol Majok

Chol Majok is a former Refugee from South Sudan and an at-large city councilor in Syracuse. This piece was originally published on Syracuse.com

https://syracuseculturalworkers.com/collections/immigration

#immigrant #nohumanbeingisillegal #abolishice #stopmassdeportation