There Is No "Good" Immigrant
How the "deserving immigrant" story shapes mental health, and what helps us heal.
I have lost count of how many times someone called me "one of the good ones." Honestly, it never felt like a compliment, and it often made my heart sink.
As a clinical social worker, I have spent over a decade supporting immigrant and first-generation communities in schools, hospitals, and community mental health. One theme keeps coming up in my own life and in the lives of the people I serve. It is the idea of the deserving versus the undeserving immigrant.
Worth with conditions
This might shock some of you, but the public story about DACA and undocumented immigrants is often a story about worth. It centers the honor student, the hard worker, the one who "earned" the right to stay.
It sounds like praise, am I right? But unfortunately, it quietly sets an exhausting condition to keep proving you belong.
Over time, that condition seeps into you and shapes how you move through the world. You say yes to everything because rest feels risky. Your body stays on alert and hypervigilant, and for good reason. Without meaning to, you start measuring yourself and others against the "good immigrant" ideal.
I want you to know this isn’t a personal failing. Instead, it's a predictable response to living under pressure to prove yourself. How do I know? I have carried this weight for over 23 years, and I see it in the people I serve every week.
Three practices that help
If you carry this, know you're never alone. Here is what I invite you to try.
Name it. The voice saying you must earn your worth is a survival response, not the truth about you. It once kept you safe. You can thank it AND still choose differently.
Cultivate joy and ease on purpose. Make many intentional moments every day to play, rest, and dilly dally. Nothing productive. Just EXIST in your wholeness.
Find community that sees you fully. Seek support and care in your language and culture, where you don't have to explain your whole story to be understood. NO one on this earth is meant to heal alone.
This past summer, I went picking mulberries with my dear family. I had no clue what mulberries were, but boy, I had so much fun just dilly-dallying and being silly in the sun. Looking back, I realize it was never about the mulberries, but about the chance to just exist without conditions.
Our words matter
Clinicians, educators, leaders, and allies, I invite all of us as a community to be mindful of our language. When we praise some immigrants as exceptional, we quietly suggest others are not.
There are no good immigrants and bad immigrants. Only human beings deserve dignity, respect, and compassion, regardless of status or where they came from.
When organizations drop the "deserving" frame, they create space where people can rest, struggle, and still belong.
Want to bring this conversation to your team? Book Kiki for a training or keynote.
