Last week I met with a colleague and one of the things that he and I had been discussing on several different occasions is the way in which migration affects our lives. And it's not just our lives as migrants, but the people who we still have relationships with back in our home countries. I'm a migrant myself and so I can reflect on this from a couple of different perspectives. One of the issues that really came down to was that in many cases migrants, especially those who come from disadvantaged underserved or underprivileged backgrounds. When they experience moving to a new country, they tend to. They sometimes adopt those prejudices biases stereotypes and other forms of discrimination that are present in their new home country. And so this is kind of an internalization of a new value system and a value system, that is very problematic.So their view of their home country the country that they came from becomes distorted because they layer different kinds of internal racism prejudice or whatever problematic mindset might emerge within their migrant experience. And so it's been an interesting point of reflection for me because we're talking about someone who comes to a new country and essentially adopts two mindsets. One is their home mindset where the culture they've come up with the value systems that they grew up with and the other is the mindset of their. New adopted home. The mindset of the culture and country in which they live.I used to think about these two mindsets in a way that they were becoming integrated that it's about having your own value system that again is is more or less the value system of your home country and then integrating or maybe layering on top of your existing value system a new value system of the of your adopted country. But in these discussions, I've had with my colleague one of the things that really emerged was that there's not actually an integration of value systems so much as there are two different value systems at play at once.And that those different value systems may come to the front of a person's mindset or their experience. It may influence someone's behavior in different ways depending on the interactions they've had. So, for example, the value system that you have based in your home country the country that you originate from it may only come into play when you're interacting with the people in the the culture within which you you've come from. And so rather than there being kind of,Integrated mindset where you have two value systems become one it's essentially two separate value systems that are almost jockeying for position based on the part based on the experience of the person whose life they they inhabit.And this is a very interesting phenomena I think because it's not a matter of being able to change an existing value system but rather in your an experiencing the world around you being able to kind of multitask or move between those two value systems. And I guess it becomes really problematic whenever the value system of your new country, you're adopted country starts to influence the ways in which you feel about your.Home country or your country that you originate from and I think where this comes to play in particular is when you you're a person might be moving from a socially disadvantaged area to a socially affluent area and that that affluent area might have a value system and in some ways discriminates against or is biased against the the areas that you've come from as a migrant. And so I think it's really important for us to reflect on this and to to really reconsider how we look at our home countries and think not in terms of what they were when we used to live there but more in terms of what they are now and that might be a better place it might be in a very better condition than what it was when we left.
