of love, life and living it up

looking for accurate statistics on the foreign population in texas and houston more specifically turned out to be quite a challenge for the purpose of this post. so if any discrepancies are noted, corrections will be gladly accepted. in the meantime, i will work on the approximations i have gathered (not very accurate, but bear with me) i have refrained from quoting any specifics though.

one fact that all the surveys and statistics i have looked seem to agree upon is that minorities (hispanics, african americans, asian, other) now outnumber the white population, the more prevalent being hispanics considering texas' close proximity to mexico. putting aside the number of illegal immigrant workers of any nationality, i feel that it's pretty safe to state that there is a significant number of immigrants incorporated living and working in houston. this as you can imagine has caused many to feel that foreigners are "taking away' their jobs and that is why many of them are unemployed/unable to find suitable employment. this is no less evident than when there was the whole border patrol issue going on, and as i watched ordinary people being interviewed on tv and on the radio, i cringed to think that so may could be small minded. the way they spoke it was almost as if people were jumping over the border and immediately taking up jobs as bank managers and the such. don't get me wrong - i understand the impact that an influx of cheap labour into the job market can have its negative side. but the general stereotype of immigrant workers and students taking away opportunities from those who rightly deserve them is one that has gotten on my nerves.

case in point is where i go to school: it's a HBCU (historically black college/university) which means that it came up as a result of a need for african americans to go to university during segregation. so the student population most definately leans towards blacks then hispanics then asians. its all about giving opportunities to minorities, foreigners included. my issue is that in an environment where most individuals have discriminated against and stereotyped, the very same people would turn around and do the same to people who's cultural background just happens to be different from theirs.

as a science major i spend alot of time in the science building. anyone who is in the same university as i am would agree that it seems positively overrun by foreigners - from the professors to the students. every department from physics, biology and computer science to maths and chemistry seems to be homeground for foreign-born persons. i don't know if this is a trend, but where i am, that's the way it is. and over and over again, i hear the phrase "these damn foreigners' or its equivalent day in and day out. i haven't been here a year and already i expect it wherever i go. there may be any number of reasons for this, but i definately see some form of trickle down effect from what i described above.

leave alone the fact that many seem to be fascinated that anyone from a developing country would know their way around a microscope or computer or know how to use a calculator. or that "it's simply amazing' the way we have grasped the general elements of sciences and other subjects ... makes me wonder what they think we learn back home. but that ontop of being stereotyped because i'm black and being discriminated against because i'm female i now have to worry about being foreign and my accent? come on!

alot of my professors in the science department are foreign, and as you can imagine, they take no bullshitting when it comes to their course - they don't care about being your friend or giving you leeway: you slack, you fail. that's how my entire education career has been so i have no issues. those not used to that kind of environment seem to have problems adjusting and if something goes wrong, trust me, you will hear anti-foreign sentiments in the myriad of complaints. "too much work, i'm failing this course" and my favourite "i just dont get his/her accent - where the f**ck don't they speak right?" then inevitably comes the "these damn foreigners" phrase. i have seen people move from a class so that they can find someone who speaks proper english and someone who won't work them so hard. in most lab classes you will find international students in groups together and those who speak 'right" in another - you can't work together because they just don't get you. or your accent. but they are also tired of being told tall stories about africa and other developing places. as much as i am for spreading the word that the motherland is not all about poor people in huts running around barefoot some questions defy comprehension. for example, in my biology lab group there was this one girl who was constantly asking questions about africa.we humoured her for a while but when they began to border on the absurd we played along - like when she was amazed that cell phone technology had actually spread all the way there, someone told her that when you send a text message it reaches home in the form of a telegram and the operator has to send word out to the recipient ... lol. or the story of four wheel drive camels that take us to the airport. okay, some of the stuff we told her was abit extreme and when she figured it out she had a sense of humour about it. not everyone takes it the same way though, and they move away from the "damn foreigners."

strangely enough, alot of the anti-foreigner sentiment i get seems to be from black people. it's almost as if they are irritated by my very presence. i don't claim to have met all black people, but it's just an observation. maybe it's because i learn with them or maybe its because white folks are afraid of being percieved as racist so they tread very very carefully (then again, i've encountered alot of them who are openly unpleasant). i'm probably offended and shocked that people who face the same hurdles i do everday would be so small minded. so today when i heard the damn foreigners comment directed at me because my accent was too much for them to understand during a group discussion, i told the person not to blame me for his intellectual shortcomings. i wasn't being mean, i just refuse to apologise for the fact that i speak the same language he does in a different way. useless twit.

random rant of the day
on to my other beef for the day - apparently alot of people are miffed because myself and others petitioned for a change in the way the ISO (international student organisation) is run on campus. now i have been labelled "msaliti" because first i refused to vote for some miscelleneous canidate just because he was kenyan. apparently i should have so that i can "benefit" by the virtue of the fact that i have someone "from home" in office. since the majority of international students are african, the organisation tends to be divided into east and west - kenyans, tanzanians etc and nigerians, ghanians and the like. the trend every election period is to have a tug of war between the two sides, with the asians and hispanics totally ignored. things got so bad that another organsation was formed (dare i say typical africans? :-D) and instead o sitting around and complaining the "rainbow coalition" went ahead and asked for the university to overhaul the whole ISO. you'd think people were running for president of a country the way they have taken it personal. vive la révolution i say. i enjoy ruffling peoples feathers once in a while :-D and to imagine, that these are the same people who are meant to change the way things work back home, some of them are our future politicians, law makers and channels of progress ... people, are we as the next generation screwed? hell.

random thought of the day
"They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself."
Andy Warhul