Letter 08
Re: Nobody Is Coming to Help You
Dear Immigrant,
This is the hardest letter to write because I want to soften it and I know that softening it would make it less useful.
Nobody is coming to help you. Not in the way that help was available at home — the cousin who knew someone, the neighbor who would cover you, the family network that absorbed the shocks of bad months. That infrastructure does not exist in the new place. The people around you are strangers. The institutions you interact with are designed for people who already know how they work. The country does not have a protocol for newly arrived immigrants that involves someone taking care of you.
When things go wrong — and things will go wrong — the response will be yours to organize. When you are sick, you will navigate the healthcare system alone. When you lose a job, you will navigate the unemployment system alone. When something breaks in your apartment, you will negotiate with the landlord alone. This is not cruelty. It is the condition of being a newcomer in a place that has no prior knowledge of you and no established obligation to you.
The practical response to this is to build your own safety net before you need it. Financial savings — even a small emergency fund — change the character of a crisis from catastrophic to manageable. One person you can call in an emergency, even if that person is a recent acquaintance rather than a lifelong friend, changes the experience of a bad night. A basic knowledge of the systems you are likely to need — healthcare, housing rights, employment law — means you are not learning them from scratch in the moment of crisis.
Prepare for the absence of the safety net before you feel the absence. The preparation is the net.
From someone who learned to build their own net,
A former immigrant
dearimmigrant.com