Posts Tagged ‘interviews with immigrants’

Interviews With Immigrants: Hanna From Iraq Seven Years Later

Posted: May 24, 2026 by datechguy in American Success Stories, culture, education, short films/interviews
Tags: , , , ,
1

One of the proudest things I did as a reporter was a series of Youtube videos called: Interviews with Immigrants.

During these interviews I sat down with a person born in another country and talked to them about their life, their coming to America etc.

One of those interviews was with Hanna From Iraq: At the time she agreed to an audio only interview: You can listen to it here:

It’s been seven years since I conducted this interview Hanna was 23 and we worked together at my former company. She moved on a while ago although we became friendly and she picked up a love of things American including pinball:

Yup that’s Pintastic 2019 back in Sturbridge on the last day as they are taking the last machines out.

Well every year I take some friends out for a Woosox game as a Christmas present so that we can enjoy not only baseball but some time together which is the real gift and Hanna was invited. It was also her graduation day from college so she attended in her cap and gown. After the game she wanted to take some pictures from center field and it hit me that it would be a pretty good sequel to our initial interview to talk to her about her journey to this point. So I pulled out my camera and here we are: Hanna from Iraq seven years later:

When Marco Rubio talked about what America is, this is what he was talking about.

The full interviews with immigrants playlist is here:

The Final Four Days Interviews with Immigrants The Best thing that didn’t Catch on

Posted: December 28, 2024 by datechguy in dablog, short films/interviews
Tags:

Over the years of the blog as a business I did a lot of things that were good and cool and I think significant, but looking back at those things I think the best thing I ever did was my series of videos called: Interviews with Immigrants where I interviewed people who came to America from all over the world.

Mary Margaret England:

Hanna From Iraq:

Joy from Nigeria:

Lucine from the Cape Verde Islands

Donald from Cameroon

Alvin from El Salvador

Maria from the Dominican Republic (Christian translates)

Paulo from Brazil

Phillipe from Haiti

Lucy from Vietnam

You’ll note that some are full videos while others were just audio because people didn’t want to be on video. People from the Fitchburg/Leominster area will recognize the old Happy Jacks Restaurant which was my favorite haunt which is alas no more. (Although as a Christmas Present this week I was given the recipe for Border Sauce!)

Thanks to the Youtube banning it doesn’t reach the audience it once did, but if I was to be remembered for one thing I did, I’d like it to be this.

The Biden/Soros Left Finds the Solution to Illegal Immigration Crisis

Posted: August 7, 2022 by datechguy in short films/interviews
Tags: , , ,

Apparently it’s: “Make US Cities so crappy and unsafe that even legal folks go home”

The bodega clerk who was infamously charged with murder for fatally stabbing an assailant has had it with the crime-ridden Big Apple and is returning to the Dominican Republic, pals told The Post on Friday.

 “He doesn’t work here anymore. He’s getting ready to move out of the country,” the manager of the Blue Moon convenience store, where the grisly Manhattan stabbing happened July 1, said of Jose Alba, 61. 

And it’s not like the Dominican is the safest place in the world as Jazz Shaw notes:

Jose Alba came to the United States looking for the American dream, and for a while, it seemed as if he’d found it. But thank’s to New York City’s backward-facing court system, he wound up living out the American nightmare. His great opportunity to have a stable job and a home of his own was transformed in a single week to an “opportunity” to be abused by the legal system that was supposed to protect people like him from the dregs of society.

Consider what it means for someone like Alba to willingly choose to move back to Santiago. Our own government issues travel warnings about the Dominican Republic, citing “armed robbery, homicide, and sexual assault” as frequent dangers. The tourist resorts are safer than they used to be thanks to investments in law enforcement resources, but Santiago is simply a dangerous place.

Yet given a choice between New York City and Santiago, Jose Alba is choosing… Santiago.

I can’t help but thinking of my interview with Maria from my “interviews with immigrants” series when she said she knew the US was for her when she was at a pond alone and wasn’t afraid when there were men who walked by.

If you really want to understand what the left has done to America, this crystalizes it perfectly.

Two Happy Endings in One Day

Posted: May 21, 2022 by datechguy in American Success Stories, culture, education
Tags: ,

You might recall a while back I did an interview with a young woman from Iraq who told me her story of live there, fleeing the country and coming to America and what it meant to her.

Yesterday I attended her college graduation in Worcester. Her class was a cacophony of people, a majority were woman and people of color

Now bad for a land of inequality and oppression eh? Of course I suspect if you tried to make that argument to Hanna she wouldn’t buy it.

From refugee in fear of her life and oppressed because of her sex and religion to college grad in the US.

Here is the base interview from 2018

Her graduation is not a bad ending for that story but of course the story of this young lady is just beginning.

Postscript: Speaking of happy ending when I got home from the Graduation guess what I found at my house:

Happy Birthday to Me

Maybe that’s why DaWife wanted me out of the house on my Birthday. So two happy endings in one day!

Older Entries