To immigrate is to move to another place and to stay and live there. In class, we were learning about immigrating to America and the push and pull factors. We have to also interview an immigrant that immigrated to America. This isn’t so easy, though! There is a whole process to do! Let me tell you about it!

When I heard we had to interview someone, I thought that the project would be hard from the beginning. It wasn’t that hard though. First I had to figure out who I was interviewing, and I realized that I was living with an immigrant: my Aupair, Monica! I asked her if I can interview her and she said sure! Next, we had to learn how to write interview questions and figure out which ones would be good. A resource that I thought was very helpful was BrainPop. It taught me how to make my questions not “yes or no” and to make them questions that Monica would be able to say more on. We also learned about how to make follow-up questions to make the person we were interviewing say more and elaborate on what they were talking about. We also learned that we have to ask questions that we don’t already know, but the questions have to be important. They can’t be useless questions. I had to have 10-15 questions but I started with 20, then I narrowed down my questions to the best ones, I also sometimes combined 2 questions if they went together or if they were very similar. It was a little hard to narrow down the questions because I had to figure out the ones to delete, I finally got my 15 questions ready, so the next step is to interview!

The interview took place in the dining room. I started recording and then I just started asking questions. It was really fun doing the interview! It was so cool asking the questions and getting really cool answers! It made me feel like I was in a game show or on tv. Her story was super cool and fun! A few things that were a little challenging were that when I asked a question, she would answer a really good answer, and it would make me wonder about something else! Staying on my questions was a little hard. Another thing was sometimes someone would come into the room and distract me, so my choice of where it should’ve taken place could’ve been better. But overall, I really liked interviewing Monica because she had lots of good answers and her story was fascinating! The interview took about 19 minutes and later that night, I rewatched it and wrote down her answers as I listened. That was a little challenging and I had to rewatch some parts, but when it was finally done and written down, I was satisfied!

The immigration interview was super fun. The story was incredible and I was fascinated the whole way through! I am so excited to make a video about the story of Monica immigrating to New York!