Although you wouldn’t know it to look at it, this photograph was taken shortly after Maria Lucia Silva Jaimes had gone through a difficult and scary health episode. She was living in the U.S. at the time, and she went through it without telling her family back in Colombia because she didn’t want to make them worry. So, for her, this image means strength, resilience, and independence.

Maria Lucia comes from Bucaramanga, Colombia, which she describes as “a lovely mid-city on top of the Andes Mountains.” She left Bucaramanga to learn and experience more life than she knew there was in the town, to be able to live in a more inclusive society. And, she made her way to America because of that age-old driving force: “Love.”

Love has a way of taking on a life of its own, and Maria Lucia has reveled in meeting “all the wonderful beautiful people I now call friends and family.” Still, love also needs some down-to-earth practicality to help it along at times. And so, Maria Lucia, who is a scientist, secured a position as a Quality Manager at one of America’s largest and most successful companies specializing in advanced plastics compounding systems. The company sponsored her H-1B Visa, which allows U.S. employers to employ foreign workers in specialty occupations, and she worked first in their headquarters in Baltimore and then moved to their facility in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Her status as an immigrant has made Maria Lucia feel very fortunate, she says, because she has been able to broaden her knowledge and her way of seeing life. For her, the strangest part of it all has been realizing that, even though she wasn’t born here, she feels she belongs here. “I feel more normal and comfortable with myself than at my hometown,” she says. “I have grown to love this country and feel a part of it.”

And yet, being an immigrant has given her anxiety at times. “Being away from my nona (grandmother), and missing her last years of awareness, has broken my heart. I’ve never been the same since then.” Perhaps that is why, when you ask Maria Lucia where home is, her simple answer is, “I don’t know.”

When Alison Woodall was 24 years old, she set off from England to travel the world, stopping over briefly in America. It was a country she had little interest in; it was simply a stop on the way to New Zealand and Australia. Four days into her trip, she met an American at the Grand Canyon, and knew she had to come back to the States and marry him. She spent a year desperately searching for an American company to employ her and, after nearly two years, one job offer, and at least $7000 in lawyer and visa applications fees, she was back in the States. “I loved my job and the U.S.A.,” says Alison, “but not the man I moved here for!” After two years working for a consultancy firm and seeing all 50 states, just when she was ready to move back to England, she met the man she would marry.

Alison had a good role model. Her mother was born in South Africa, and moved to the UK to marry an Englishman. Having lived in England for over 45 years, Alison’s mother is proudly English. “She is my role model for assimilation,” says Alison, who grew up in England and was always English – never British and definitely never European – but loved having South African heritage. “I knew I never wanted to marry someone English. I wanted to marry someone from somewhere else, but who shared my values, as my Dad had done.”

When Alison first came to the States, she managed to get an H-1B temporary work visa, even though she was told she had less than a 20% chance of getting it because she had the ‘wrong’ degree for the job she was applying for. As soon as she married, she applied for her green card, a procedure that took over two years and thousands of dollars. In the middle of the process, when she was four months pregnant, an INS official told her that it would be all right for her to visit England. He was wrong. Alison’s green card application was invalidated. She was stuck in England for six weeks, and had to pay for an emergency visa to get back to the States. Then, she had to apply all over again for her green card, and the second time they switched her fingerprints with those of a Vietnamese man, so that delayed the process still further.

In November 2015, Alison became a U.S. citizen (the strangest part was being one of only a handful of people who knew the words to the Pledge of Allegiance and the national anthem), and it was the easiest, quickest, and cheapest part of her immigrant process. But the whole experience has given her definite opinions about immigration. “It was incredibly expensive and stressful, but I accepted that it was just the nature of the immigration process,” she says. “I have no sympathy for the people who are here illegally and expect special treatment, or those who come from countries with a history of terrorism and can’t understand why they aren’t welcomed with open arms. The rules are here to keep the country safe. If you are qualified enough or lucky enough, you will get in, and if you aren’t that is just life!”

Alison is fully assimilated into the American culture, and she is “intensely proud to be an American.” She doesn’t cling to English things, and probably the only weird part was changing her date of birth from 8/3/75 to 3/8/75, because of the month going before the day. She says that her life is a million times better than she could ever have imagined it would be, largely because of the place she lives, in Atlanta, Georgia. “Not only am I proudly American, I’m especially proud of my husband’s southern heritage,” she says. “I’ve kept my English accent simply because it takes too much effort to change, but if I spoke with an American accent it would be a very southern accent. I’d say “all a y’all” at every opportunity! I hate it when movies use actors with southern accents to portray someone stupid or prejudiced, because the south is the most welcoming place I’ve ever lived.” Alison also loves the opportunities that her children have here. In fact, the only thing that she misses is “not having family and several high school friends here enjoying my journey,” which has turned out to be a completely different journey from the one she started at 24 years old, when America was a country she had little interest in.

Margia Argüello was just a few months old in 1984 when her mother brought her from Managua, Nicaragua, to the United States. “So, she comes to the U.S.,” says Margia, “and she files for political asylum. And the INS is like, ‘Oh, we can help you, but we need a letter from your employer stating that you’re in imminent danger.’ And of course her employer is the Daniel Ortega government, so she just had to get a lawyer. So she never was able to get political asylum.” The attorney recommended that Margia’s mother – and her father when he joined them the following year – should apply for a work visa, so that at least they would have some kind of a legal status. “The work status happened right away. They got the work visas, but to become permanent residents, that took sixteen years.”

These images come from a dog-eared scrapbook that Margia has kept all these years. The pages are crammed with her childhood drawings. It’s what they say about a picture being worth a thousand words.

The Argüellos settled in Miami, and initially it was Cubans who helped the family with networking. Then, in the late 1990s, several Cuban and Nicaraguan politicians got together to lobby for NACARA – Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act – and Margia’s family was right at the cusp of this movement. NACARA was advocating for permanent residency and citizenship for people who had come in the 1980s from countries like Cuba and Nicaragua because of the governments there. “So they were able to state a case for people like us,” Margia says. “There was an amnesty, so that’s how we were able to get our permanent residence.” Every year, during the sixteen years that it took for the family to get permanent residence, they had to submit documents “updating that we were here and paying taxes and going to school and all that jazz,” and years later, when Margia applied for citizenship, she remembers going in to see the agent, and he had a stack of papers, like a book of life – report cards from kindergarten all the way up to high school.

Margia describes her parents as being “the second batch to come,” following her aunt who came in the 1970s to seek medical help for Margia’s cousin. Then, in turn, her parents assisted the rest of family to come, guiding them through the process. They helped to raise families and communities, so it wasn’t a normal childhood for Margia. “There were always people in the house. My parents were proactive about lobbying and protesting and signing petitions, and I remember being at rallies with them in downtown Miami. But still, I was a girl scout and sold cookies, so I did some typically American things. But it was bits and pieces of sharing things.”

The question that Margia is struggling with now is where home is for her. After growing up in Miami, she got her undergraduate degree from Cornell University in upstate New York, and she moved to Baltimore twelve years ago to pursue a post-baccalaureate, followed by a Masters in Science, at Johns Hopkins University. Now, she is an Associate at Johns Hopkins Medicine International. “I’ll find it,” she says about her quest for a home. “Baltimore for a while, but maybe it’s time to move on.”

Margia is pretty sure that home is not Nicaragua. “My family there asked if I would ever move there and I don’t think so. I don’t know. I’d love to do something for the country, but I don’t miss growing up there – I know how hard it is.” She’s visited Nicaragua several times in the past and she doesn’t feel Nicaraguan at all. “It’s obvious that I’m sort of this foreigner,” she says. “I go back to my country and they say, ‘you don’t speak like a Spanish person, you don’t walk like a Nicaraguan.’ The strangest part is that you don’t belong anywhere, I don’t know where home is, and growing up in Miami too just adds another layer of insanity because there are so many different nationalities. I see some of my American friends, who are so proud, and they have their flags and this whole lineage of people serving their country, but for me there is no pride. I find myself wishing I had it, and that I was fully accepted here.”

Margia’s extended family is scattered all over the world now – Canada, Australia, Oregon, California, Mexico, Costa Rica, Miami. “What is our family?” she wonders. “Who are we?”

While he was teaching English in Japan, fully intending to return to his native Scotland at some point, Neil Ferguson met an American who was teaching there too. She then returned to America and, having fallen in love with her, Neil decided to come to the States and ask her to marry him. He’s now been here almost 14 years.

The best part of being here for Neil has been his wife and kids. That, and meeting new people, experiencing “fantastic” cities like New Orleans, New York, and Philadelphia. At the moment, Baltimore is home for him but, as he says, “Who knows?” And he adds, “It’s wherever my immediate family are, but in an ideal world it would be Scotland.”

Being in the States has made Neil realize just how much he took Scotland for granted. He misses sarcasm as competitive sport … decent public transport … long summer evenings where it doesn’t get dark until midnight … British spring and autumn. And he misses the arts in general, “which seem to be in a far healthier state than here,” he says. When he first came to the States, he was a full time arts journalist. Then, print media began a steady decline, and he’s back to freelancing and working at the Ivy Bookshop. 

In light of the current administration, Neil, who has a green card, is feeling more Scottish / less “American” than ever. He was completely taken aback at quite how Conservative (with a capital C) a huge swathe of this country is. “I find the whole God and Guns brigade pretty mind boggling. See also: climate change denial as a badge of honor and the all-pervasive sense of uber-patriotism. I’m reminded on a weekly basis just how European I am.” Although he finds America a lovely country (most of the time), he also believes that it has a ludicrously over inflated sense of self. He’s found that one of the most difficult things of being here has been “frequently encountering well meaning Americans who assume that I’ve come to the U.S. to pursue the whole ‘American Dream’ malarkey, and are mildly flabbergasted that I don’t get all misty eyed at the very sound of The Star Spangled Banner.”

I think we can safely say that Neil is homesick for Scotland. His chosen image means “home and happy memories.”