Failed integration/ successful integration – my experiences with integration and the media in my country

By Cristiana Moisescu

A few weeks ago, when walking down the street, I heard a couple of young men call rudely after a black woman, not much older than myself. She did not say a word, a stranger in a foreign country, but people were staring, and the boys were jeering. She did not say a word.
This image is not such an uncommon one in Bucharest. It can happen related to black students in the street, or Chinese workers in the subway, or perhaps Muslim women in shops. It’s an image that I dislike seeing, and that I wish to prevent from happening.
It may seem as though the problem described above has more to do with racial discrimination than migration, but the truth is that after you see past their skincolour or different beliefs, the people described above share a common status and a common name: immigrants.
These are the people who, for mostly negative reasons, decided to leave their country and try to make it somewhere else, in somebody else’s country. They changed homes with the promise of a better life, but instead, what they came across have been racial discrimination, xenophobic behaviour, intolerance and social status discrepancies. These and other factors, put together, are the main underlying causes of failed integration.
This is an old problem, and one that stems in an equal manner from the governments of countries, and the laws (or lack thereof) they pass, as well as from the inhabitants of the new immigrant Meccas, the actual people amongst whom the immigrants have to spend their day-to-day life. In other words, us.
And how foolish we are. In equal measures, we, the perpetrators, who mock, and stare, and jeer at others, without realizing that in their most intimate selves, they are just like us, and we, the onlookers, who, despite knowing of these social aberrations, do nothing to prevent them.
I am not an immigrant myself, but one day, I might be. How will I be treated then? Will I still be myself, a daughter, a student, a journalist, or will my whole self be entailed in that one word: immigrant? And if that does happen, how much of it will be the fault of others, and how much my own?
In order to change the situation, we have to raise awareness, and keep this subject in continuous attention. One way through which we can do that is the media, because it can get information to people in the shortest, easiest way. On the other hand, what happens when the media itself stirs the waters and creates false rumours, thus giving more power to the already existing negative pressure?

Cristiana Moisescu studies Journalism at the University of Bucharest. The 19-year-old currently does an internship with the Romanian newspaper “Romania Liberta”