Iran Press/ America: The situation is completely different for the immigrants who have reached America on foot from thousands of kilometers away.
For them, America is no longer a place to find gold, a good job, or a better social position. They wander the streets of Los Angeles to New York to find a shelter to sleep at night and, if they can, food to eat!
For one 29-year-old Venezuelan woman, who left her two children and partner behind in her home country to embark on a six-month journey to New York City, America represented hope. She thought she would find safety and the opportunity to make a living. But four months after arriving in the U.S., she says it’s nothing like she had imagined.
“It’s too difficult to come to a place where you don’t know the language,” the woman, who agreed to speak anonymously to protect her safety, told Yahoo News.
Speaking in Spanish, the woman had been standing along the granite wall of a bustling midtown Manhattan restaurant attached to the Roosevelt Hotel, which in recent months has been transformed into the city’s migrant intake center.
She embarked on the dangerous journey to the U.S. by herself, traveling through the perilous Darién Gap that connects Colombia to Panama, then multiple countries, including Nicaragua and Honduras, by foot and public transportation.
She stopped for weeks at a time to work only long enough to make enough money for the next leg of her trip. Since arriving in New York, she’s struggled to make money and obtain basic necessities while navigating the city’s shelter system. Eventually, she says, she hopes to bring her family to America, but she’s unsure how she will make that happen.
“I just want a job,” she said. “It is very difficult to get to a place when you have nothing.”
The woman is just one of an estimated 57,300 migrants seeking shelter in New York City. The majority of them have been bused in from Texas, a political move by Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to force the federal government to tighten border security. Others have made their way to New York on their own.
For most migrants, the prospect of finding a decent job and safety is enough to justify the arduous and often dangerous journey to the United States. But now that they’re here, some say the U.S. is nothing like what they had imagined.
“I thought of New York differently, but now I also see that New York is in chaos,” said a 48-year-old Ecuadorian woman staying at the Roosevelt. The woman, who declined to give her name, told Yahoo News that she, her husband, and their 2-year-old child escaped violence in Ecuador, traveling for two months before they eventually reached New York.
“In my country right now they are stealing, they are killing and there is no longer security, just desperation,” she said, rocking her child back and forth in a stroller on the sidewalk. “We come to look for work. When we die, we are not going to take anything with us. But we want at least to have stability to live, at least while living in this world.”
Now it seemed that America is no longer the country that was in everyone's mind, and New York City, where today the richest men in the world live, is not a Big Apple, but a Big Chaos.
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