This paper examines the immigration experience of a Kenyan family from the Luo community of Western Kenya who relocated to the United States in 2001. Drawing on a personal case study, it explores the socioeconomic and cultural pressures that motivated emigration, including poverty, family expectations, and debt. The paper then analyzes the challenges the family faced during assimilation — including language barriers, cultural isolation, and unfamiliarity with American consumer society — before considering the role that cross-cultural friendship played in easing their integration. The study offers an accessible, human-level portrait of the immigrant experience and the complex interplay of push and pull factors in international migration.
The family at the center of this study immigrated to the United States in 2001 from the western part of Kenya in East Africa. The family consisted of two parents and three children — a ten-year-old girl, an eight-year-old boy, and a five-year-old girl. Before immigrating, the father worked as a primary school teacher in the small township of Rongo, in Nyanza Province, Kenya. Life in Kenya was difficult; his monthly salary was insufficient to support his family, and the prospect of a better life abroad grew increasingly appealing.
Several interconnected factors motivated the family's decision to emigrate. First, in Africa, families are typically extended, and certain members of the father's family mocked him continually, claiming he was cursed and would never amount to anything. As a member of the Luo community in Kenya and the firstborn son of his family, he was expected to leave his father's home — where he lived in a simba (Pabaris Paradise, 2012) — and establish his own homestead. The Luo believe it is improper for a younger brother to leave the family home before the elder one. His younger brother, who worked in Nairobi and held a better-paying job, pressed him to vacate their father's home so that he too could leave. These persistent remarks and familial pressures caused him significant mental distress.
Second, he had taken a small cash loan from his school's Savings and Credit Co-operative Society (SACCO). SACCOs are popular in Kenya; almost every employed person belongs to a job-based SACCO (Kenya and the National Assembly, 2008). He was three months in arrears and had no repayment plan, as his salary was insufficient to service the debt. His predicament was not unique. Poverty, corruption, and underemployment are major socioeconomic issues in Kenya (Kenya-Advisor, 2007).
A cousin living and studying in the United States mailed him a Diversity Visa (DV) lottery application form. He applied and was selected as a successful applicant. To purchase his airline ticket, he organized a community fundraiser commonly known as a harambee (Sobania, 2003, p. 166). He traveled to the United States first, and four months later, his family joined him.
Life in the United States was markedly different from what the family had known in Kenya. The father initially worked two jobs and lived with his cousin in Baltimore before moving the family into a small apartment in the county. From the outset, the family encountered significant obstacles in their assimilation process.
"Language, clothing, and cultural isolation in America"
"Friendship with American family eases assimilation"
Always verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.