It’s now been over a full week since I flew back from Europe, and almost three weeks since I left Berlin. Now that I have been back for some time and I’ve been asked a billion times about how my trip to Germany was, I have had the chance to reflect on my journey and think about all the things I didn’t have time to process while I was in the moment. To begin, I didn’t realize how much I was doing every day until I got back to Seattle and I didn’t know what to do with my day because I didn’t have a full schedule of things to see and do. Secondly, it never occurred to me how much I learned on this trip until I started talking about it with my friends and family.
Yesterday I was watching a youtube video of the Republican Debate of Fox news since it made the headlines of many of the news media sites that I peruse in the morning, and one of the primary topics discussed was immigration policies and national security. I have always been pro-immigration and found the arguments of republican candidates to be petty and at times racist, but after this program and learning about the immigration problems in Europe I found the politician’s arguments to be downright childish. Every single candidate talked about how as president they would increase border security of the U.S.- Mexican border to stop the flow of illegal immigrants into the united states. Only one of the candidates talked about the immigrants as people and how as president they would also look for ways to make it easier for immigrants to enter the U.S. legally. It seems that it has become nearly impossible to discuss immigration policy without also discussing national security, and I think that says a lot about the perception that republicans, and many other Americans, have about immigrants in the U.S. Since discussions of the U.S. Mexican border comes up so frequently in the headlines in association with words such as dangerous and illegal, the media portrays illegal Mexican immigrants to be dangerous. The negative stereotypes that are associated with illegal immigrants are then also used to contribute to discrimination against Hispanic immigrants who entered the United States legally or Hispanic-Americans who have received their citizenship or were born in the U.S. By insisting that immigration and border security are topics that are synonymous the U.S. media and government is perpetuating negative stereotypes on one of the largest minority populations in the United States. This study abroad program has taught me to be much more conscientious and critical of the news and to consider what different policies say about a community or the nation.
Studying abroad was one of the best decisions I have ever made. I was very nervous before I left for Germany because I had never left the West Coast of North America and I had no idea how I would react to jumping into an entirely different culture where I didn’t speak the native language fluently. For the first couple days I was in Berlin I experienced a bit of culture shock and I was uncomfortable with all the little differences between life in Berlin compared to life in Seattle. After the culture shock wore off and I started to fall in love with Berlin and I jumped at every opportunity to explore and learn more about the city. I also loved that I came to Berlin as a part of an academic program, which gave me the opportunity to learn more about German society than if I had just visited Berlin as a tourist. When I visited other places in Europe for a few days at a time I was much more concerned with sight-seeing and what food I needed to try than trying to learn about the personality of the people of that country. In the future I will make sure to stay in each place I visit for at least a week so that I can take it slow and be able to experience the people and the culture of the place. I may have had anxieties about studying abroad in Germany before I left, but now that I am back I wouldn’t hesitate at the opportunity to go back to Europe or explore another country of the world.