Emigration empathy

Unless all your ancestors were enslaved, indentured, or indigenous, you are at least in some part descended from immigrants if you are a U.S. citizen.

Family records tell me that I have at least two great grandparents who came to the U.S as children in the late 1800's. I vaguely remember my Great-grandma Fyfe teaching me how to count to five in German. It is easy to forget that my Gotsch, Brady, Fyfe, and Johnson roots in this country are fairly shallow. And that makes it challenging for me personally to empathize with today's immigrant population.

However watching a couple movies this weekend helped me understand, I think, a little better the challenges all immigrants face. Produced in the early 1970's, The Emigrants and The New Land, two Swedish films directed by Jan Troel do a great job in telling one family's courageous decision to leave a repressive country and start fresh in the wild frontiers of Minnesota. Slow paced, in Swedish with subtitles, and very long (each film is 3 hours plus), these films are realistic, gripping, and quite moving. While sympathetic toward blacks and Native Americans, the director creates no great heroes or villains, but simply shows human beings with both virtues and foibles.

Human beings want and need comfort, familiarity, and safety. Anyone who voluntarily leaves the country of one's birth is surely lacking one or more of those. A lack of job opportunities, a totalitarian government, and/or a lack of physical security for oneself and one's family are why humans are willing to risk everything, dive into new cultures, learn a new language, and bear the too-often shown displeasure of longer-term residents of a strange land. 

I admire my great-greats for taking the risks these movies so vividly portrayed. And I will remember what was true for my family years ago, is now true today for the many new members of my community who are also seeking a better life.

PS - I obtained the DVDs of these movies from my public library.