Immigrant Kids Will Thank us for a Warmer Welcome
This piece was originally published in the Las Vegas Sun.
In Nevada, almost 20% of residents are immigrants. Three-quarters of the state’s Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children, and those firms generate more than $30 billion each year in revenue.
I want us to repay the huge economic benefits of immigrant labor to Nevada with a greater effort to welcome people to the state from elsewhere. Saying “welcome” is done best in the new arrival’s language.
Right now, growing up in an immigrant household in Nevada comes with a lot of choices and responsibilities. You live in two worlds. On the one hand, you’re a regular American kid. And on the other, you become a translator in all sorts of adult situations.
I had to translate for my father — when he was filling out his ballot, when he was writing me permission slips on school forms, when he got diabetes when I was a teenager. And I still do it. I help him fill out his unemployment form every Sunday since the casino where he works shut down during the coronavirus pandemic.
Diabetes is a manageable illness, and it’s quite common in a Latino household. But I remember feeling I was put on the spot as a teenager when the physician asked me to translate for my father. They gave him a lot of pamphlets about how to modify his diet, and it was my job to translate them for him and get it right. Not only is it against patient privacy to ask a teenager to do that, but it also felt like it shouldn’t have been my responsibility to do that for my father.
I realized this extra pressure on immigrant families was something I could fix. And that’s why I studied public health in school — because I realized that the impact of where you come from, your cultural identity, affects your health in later life.
Now that I’m a state senator, I’m in a position to do more.
Nevada’s Black and brown communities suffer with a disproportionate share of the state’s high blood pressure, asthma, diabetes and obesity. They are all factors that make it easier for the COVID-19 virus to kill a person. And that’s why more people have been dying from the virus in the Black and brown community.
At the same time, we’ve seen good uptake in vaccinations in white suburbs. But unfortunately, in central and east Las Vegas, Latino people are not getting the vaccine at the same rates. There has been growing distrust among members of the Latino community. And even as a public health professional myself with two health care degrees, I still have a tough time educating my family members about the vaccine. If I’m struggling to do it, then I realize anything we can do to help other Latino, Black and Asian families in the same spot means we’re on the right track.
A large part of the distrust is because we have not done a good job with reaching out to people in their own language. If we can fix the outreach issue, we can save lives.
Health literacy begins with how information is distributed. And if we don’t translate this information, then we’re not doing our job. A bill I’m filing in the state Legislature will hold health systems more accountable and give them the resources to hire translators to start fixing this divide. It’ll mean we can focus on a more proactive strategy for getting the vaccine out to people. And there’s more. The bill directs agencies across Nevada to have a broader conversation about language access — from the ballot box to the school permission form, from the unemployment office to the hospital.
I want us to make sure our services are language accessible so Nevada’s immigrant children don’t have to do double duty as translators, and they can get to enjoy their childhood for just a little while longer. It’s a vision I know my legislative colleagues share, and one that will pay dividends for our state.
State Sen. Fabien Donate, D-Las Vegas, was appointed to the District 10 seat in February after Sen. Yvanna Cancela resigned to take a position in the Biden administration.
Photo by Yogendra Singh on Unsplash