Immigration, not just hispanics

Since the devastating 9/11/11 immigration has taken a drastic hit, but not just from hispanics.  I read a book Jaguar by Paul Stoller.  It is a fiction novel of African Americans who come here without the proper documentation and what they do to survive in america.  It opened my eyes to how hard it is to be an immigrant in America.  The thing that stood out to me that I never realized before is how much of an obligation Immigrants have to their families back home.   Often people expect that Immigrants come here and work for cheap and live the dream.  Yet often times this is not the case.  These immigrants usually send over a good portion of all the money they make in the US to their family back home.  So the amount of money they make, they only live on a fraction of it.  Immigrants come here and are forced to assimilate in order to fit in, yet they still don't fit in.  They are discriminated against on a regular basis, for what reason? Because they were born somewhere else?  In this book I saw the journey of a man who came to the US looking for a better life, he made his living by selling knockoffs of designer purses, he sent home 200 dollars a week to his family in Niger.  He never got to see his family again because he couldn't get legal status in America.  He was spit on for doing his morning prayers, and told he wasn't good enough to be American by others.  His life was far from a walk in the park, and he wasn't treated like a human being often times.