Everyone understands that moving from your house to another is a really hard process, since almost if not everything in your life will be different from now on, not being able to hang out with your local friends every day after school or having to change schools or jobs are definitely a struggle for anyone that is doing this for the first time.

And of course it gets worse when you move from city or even from state. But you know what is something I don’t hear a lot of people talking about? People moving from countries!

Around 3.6% of the world population are international migrants that move from their origin country in search of a better future and opportunities, this is about 281,000,000 people and it has increased a lot since the 70’s. There are many reasons why people move from countries, more specifically to the USA since about 1.5 million people move to the states every year, the reasons could be: school or work changes, promotions, fleeing war or other similar threat, search of freedom, military purposes, etc.

I am one of the 1.5 million people that moved to the United States of America from a foreign country, Mexico, and the experience is nothing you can compare to moving from a state or city. When you move cities, you still have a big probability of going to the same school you were going to regularly and still have you friends kinda close by, when you move States, at least you are still with people that can somehow relate to you since grand part of them have the same ethnicity as you; But when you move countries, literally everything changes and there is nothing or no one that can prepare you for that. Back in Mexico I had my family, my friends, a good school to go to, and there were no confusions on what anyone wanted or needed; But when my parents took the decision to pack our bags and leave, I had to leave all that behind almost forever.

I moved to a city called The Woodlands in Texas and absolutely everything was completely different in the states compared to Mexico: New language that I barely spoke when I just got here, completely new school (and way bigger than and confusing than the one I had back in Mexico), thousands of ethnicities and cultures that I have never heard of, and laws and systems that just didn’t made sense to me. In summary, it was hell, and to top it off, we had to move in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic that happened in 2020 which made adapting to a new country 10 times harder than it should have been.

Even though it took some time to get used to the USA I had good and caring people that helped me catch up and be happy, besides, I wasn’t the only Hispanic in Texas, since there is about 62.57 million Hispanics in the whole country and 11.29 million Hispanics in Texas alone. So I had people around me that had experienced the same feelings of missing my family and friends and having to learn a new language in literally weeks, and thanks to them today I master English, have friends from all over the world, have contact with my family constantly, and I feel home when my actual home is a few miles south.

This makes us remember that around us there are people that probably are completely new in the United States and need a hand or a friend to live the happy life they came to live here, so if one day a person from another ethnicity comes close to you for help, your aid could make a big difference in his or her life.