Celebrating immigration | Iulia Mugescu | TEDxPannonia
so I want to tell you some stories of migration and to start off I'm going to tell you my story so as it was mentioned I was born and raised in Romania in a very normal family and as a small child every time I did something naughty my parents would temper me and say if you don't behave we're going to send you to the gypsies now as funny as this might seem that statement complet really changed the way I saw gypsies for the rest of my life I never actually met a gypsy that was that bad but because of that statement that was the image of the gypsies I always felt that oh my God they're the strange cultures they have nothing to do with Romania and then they come here and then they steal children and uh the thing is that this was not an isolated case this is something that still happens in Romania and in many other countries this thing with a different culture that their bed is used as a tool to educate children as I grew up I actually encountered another culture coming to Romania uh there was a British man who was the head of an international company he moved to Romania and he married into my family and funnily enough he respected so much his cultural heritage that he really didn't want to adapt Romania he didn't even do an effort to speak Romanian he didn't even take the traditions and he would literally tell us I don't like you Romanian guys and the point is that everyone looked up to him and they would say wow he's such a respectful impressive person so for me growing up I was always in between these two extremes one the culture that's trying to adapt and is still seen as decreasing the value of the country whereas you have the culture that's not trying to adapt and it see as wow the value that they bring they must be so much more above us that's why they are so uh stiff okay um the I'm trying to make it a bit more funny in the spirit of the day um but moving on I had to go on with my career and I actually ended up moving to Austria and the first three years in Austria what happened to me because of these two extremes that I had in my head that I built myself a border so I got so much stuck in work and in my group of colleagues at work that I did not want to go outside of that group I didn't want to meet austrians because I could not bear the shame of being perceived like we perceive gypsies in Romania I could not bear being put in a prototype of volcanic food and cheap labor so what I did for the first three years is that I worked so hard and that was very good for my career but on the other side it got me not to celebrate at all migration and not to celebrate at all the fact that I'm a human being and I decided to bring value to Austria and after 3 years I managed to overcome my fears and I I managed to realize that Austria is actually a country that's 20% made out of migrants and Vienna is a city where 49% like almost every second person has a migrant background and this is a global Trend that's growing and sadly enough we get this information from the media in the most negative senses and the even more of the sad thing is that I discovered that people have such borders just like I did of not necessarily commun communicating with austrians not necessarily adapting the culture but even worse than that like accepting jobs where you're treating very bad conditions where you're not getting paid properly or even families that tell their children to go to kindergarten and not talk to other children and this is not just a problem from a foreign culture to an Austrian culture this is also a problem of cultures in themselves there's so many conflicts in between migrants that are coming from Serbia and cro and this is happening in Vienna or this is happening in grat and on top of those borders that people build then comes the Prejudice and the funny thing about Prejudice is that prejudice puts on you some expectations that you don't really want to have on you so imagine instead of putting these prejudices that people would actually have expected of me from day one that I'm going to be successful that I'm going to create jobs that I'm actually going want to I know become an educator and teach children and all that because of my cultural background so growing up I somehow realized that this culture background is too much a prerequisite for what defines our success and it's not always true so I met my partner in business uh who's also an immigrant from Romania and we thought it's time for us to do something I guess each of you who are a migrant or have been a migrant um understand the Deep reflection process you need to go through before you become a migrant because you first need to analyze your status quo so deeply that you decide you need to leave and afterwards you need to talk to your family then you need to talk to your friends then you need to gather enough money which may be back home it's one year of work to come to a new country where you can barely afford to pay the rent afterwards not only the language let's assume you know the language but you don't know the social etiquette you don't know how to do business you don't have any business contacts you don't even get a phone especially in Austria if you have not lived in Austria for a year you don't get a phone so there are so many things that you need to go through it would be actually nice that at the end of the process you get to celebrate so that's how we thought we thought it's time for us to celebrate migrants and how should we do that so what we actually did is that we founded an initiative that's called United cultures because we do want unit night cultures and what we did apart from talking to institutions and talking to Nos and talking to immigrants is that we decided that we're going to go Culture by culture and for every culture we identify a migrant that has a story that's so inspiring and replicable so it can be also done by other immigrants and then we're going to put that story out there not only through events and not only through communicating but through actually designning beautiful scarves so for every culture that migrant that has a very beautiful Story meets with an Austrian designer they sit together and they create a shape a pattern the colors of the scarf that everything that tells the story of how this person got from their home to being successful in Austria and contributing to society and like this by putting this carvs out there and these stories out there we hope that we're going to impulse to give this positive impulses to society and to give you a very very short example and this is my last story um in Romania we don't know so much about Polish people and when I moved to Austria there are lots of prejudices and a lot of mean jokes about Polish people and we didn't want to get affected by this and we were lucky enough after lots of conversations to actually meet Adela kiga who decided to be our first Ambassador for the Polish culture and actually this scarf is her scarf and funny thing with Adela is that she had let's say the traditional polish experience you're young you're enjoying your life and starting a career in Poland but you realize it's not enough so you moved to Austria maybe because you fell in love maybe not she fell in love after a year didn't work out she still felt she's more connected to Austria and she wouldn't leave but she didn't know the language and she didn't have friends so she started working as a cleaning lady she started serving tables she started taking student jobs she did that for all almost 10 years sacrificing her life goals and going through experiences that everyone would have seen as undesirable and instead of seeing them as undesirable what she said is this is great this is a great experience for me to learn how migration works it's a great experience for me to see how every class of the society works and how they combine and how they merge in Austria after going through his experiences she actually became a coach for migration and she started working more and more with the immigration institution and right now she's organizing every year a very big career fair where she is starting off the careers of more than 3,000 migrants especially the young ones so the students and making them believe in themselves and she's right now one of the most impactful female migrants in Austria after having been a cleaning lady and this is the kind of story that if it does not inspire you you must at least recognize that this polish woman has something right that she does something for this for a country that's not her own so to say because now it is her own so these are the kind of stories that we try to identify and right now when I think of a Polish person or I meet a Polish person those are the kind of expectations that I have towards them I have the expectations that they're going to at some point even if they're not in the best job ever they're going to move past that and I project this expectations on them and I tell them you can do it because look Adela could do it and then you can also do it so as a final core to action uh I would like to invite you that you unite cultures with us and the way that you do it is quite simple so for every culture where you have a lot of prejudices I invite you to make a little bit more space in your memories or that you somehow throw away some of those prejudices and for each culture you add an element of positivity an element of success and an element of Celebration and more than that every time you meet someone who's coming from a different culture such as a Romanian or a Hungarian or a Croatian or whatever someone from Mexico that you project these expectations on them instead of the expectations of you're not going to achieve much why did you come here project on them an expectation of success and allow them to celebrate and join them in their celebration of the fact that they are indeed migrants thank you