Immigrants tend to worry about their kids. After all, for many, that’s why they came to the United States. Will the opportunities be there? Will they fit in? Will they fit in too well and abandon their roots?

Ferrer was tortured and imprisoned on Chiloe Island. “I understood it was the price to pay for my ideas,” he says.

Even after he arrived in Chicago in September 2006 on refugee status, the sound of an ambulance or police siren would still spook him.

Nigar Turkel is the only Uyghur she knows currently living in Chicago. the lack of a Uyghur community to cushion her transition into American life may have been a positive thing. Turkel integrated into life in the United States fairly quickly, not by choice but because there was no alternative.

Despite his hard-won skills while wandering the Cambodian jungle for weeks, Ty Tim admits through a thick accent that once he came to America, one of the hardest adjustments was the seemingly simple task of speaking.

“ICE took away my family,” Anthony Figueroa explained, using the acronym for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency charged with enforcing immigration law. “ICE took away my dad.”

Mofak Hasan values education above almost all else. He holds a piece of carved and polished wood adorned in Arabic script and an Iraqi flag, and fondly remembers the group of Iraqi students he taught more than twenty years ago who gave it to him so that he would not forget his home.

To Clematine Wamariya, America means falling asleep without worrying if she will be woken up to pack and leave. She spent years in refugee camps in Africa with her older sister, Claire Mukundente, after the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

“I consider myself half and half,” Chris told me sheepishly as he chuckled softly. “I don’t know very much about Vietnam, and in America, I’m in the middle…I can read and write Vietnamese, but beyond that…”