Reading Response 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXJXLq1lN7U

In the music video titled “Sweetest Girl” by Wyclef Jean featuring Akon and Lil’ Wayne, it takes place in an immigration transition camp. Wyclef is supposed to be watching out for this one girl named Ayabungo to make sure she gets let into the country and not be deported back to her own. Throughout the video it shows immigrants trying to make money and wanting to escape the camp. The guards start shooting a fire hose at them to make them stop. Wyclef sings about how people will kill, steal, and how they live for money because it rules everything around them. In one part of the music video Ayabungo is shown being told that she is being deported back to her hostile country. The man had no sympathy for her, and he had her escorted out by a guard for being upset about being deported. Once he takes her away, he just calls “next!”, like it is that simple to send someone back to their terrible, beat down life in a poor country. After this incident everything goes down. The immigrants burn down the camp and escape into the country, and it shows Ayabungo throwing a flaming bottle at one of the tents. I believe this video is trying to show us how immigrants are mistreated because they aren’t citizens of our country, and also how much harder they have to work to try and make money for themselves and their families. They have to do anything to make that money – maybe it is to steal from people, kill someone, or even to prostitute themselves – in order to live like we can. Unlike us, they don’t have a job, a home, a car, nothing. We have a stable enough country that allows us to keep those things. Immigrants come from poor, broken countries that cannot give them the opportunity to succeed like we can. Because we have more money than other countries, some people feel like they have the right to mistreat others because they are lower than us. That is not right. The immigrants are just trying to get the opportunity to have a successful life like we were so lucky to gain when we were born here. Maybe we should try and take a walk in their shoes, to see how it feels to have nothing, because we can be selfish, greedy people sometimes. This video seems to have pointed out a good message about immigrants, and how it is not happiness, family, or love that we live for. Money is how we live our lives.