They are job stealers, benefit scroungers, girlfriend thieves, and criminals. Teju Cole is just one of the twenty six authors covered in the pages of The Good Immigrant, a book seeking to give voice to some of these seemingly defaced individuals on a quest to become part of the American Dream.Īs the editors of this book write, there is a “narrative that immigrants are ‘bad’ by default until they prove themselves otherwise. You begin to question to what (or whose) purpose are the categories convenient? If you ask Teju Cole, a Nigerian immigrant to American, it can feel like you are being erased, like you aren’t worth any more than your skin color or beliefs, that as whole communities are lumped together while others are separated, “Asian,” for example, those cultures not specifically brought out and recognized become unimportant.

What does that say to the immigrant new to our shores who just wants to be American, who comes from their country where, no matter what else they are they are that country, not a subgroup, to come here and be no more than the subcategory we assign them? We are subcategories upon subcategories and, let’s face it, the more we divide ourselves the more we find ourselves divided. We are almost the only country in the world where once you are a citizen you aren’t simply American but Caucasian American, African American, Indian American, Jewish American, Hindi American, Black, White, Green with Pink Polka Dots. Sometimes it seems that we care more for what we call a subcategory of subcategory of a thing than the thing itself.

The good immigrant authors