Immigration Case StudyFour hours a week, discussing immigration issues, combined with a mountain of reading on the topic, will ultimately have an effect on a person's daily outlook. I discovered this during my last semester at university. The absence of thinking was more than made up for in the following semester, as the ideas we discussed in class spilled over into my daydreams, my free time, and my personal associations. And if all this hadn't happened, I would never have met Rosa. I walked down the stairs of the reservations center of the hotel where I work and slid along the worn but spotlessly clean tiles towards the employee break room. As had become a habit in recent weeks, I was thinking back to the most recent reading of SOC 331. Was this by Jo Ann Koltyk? New Pioneers in the Heartland, Hmong Life in Wisconsin. It told the story of several Hmong refugees who were carving out a new life for themselves in Wisconsin. It was full of statistics and numbers, but what always came back to me when I least expected it were the people and the faces I had imagined for them. Sometimes I tried to see inside those faces and watched how people reacted to me, wondering if they wanted me to leave and go "home." But, of course, being a white boy from Utah, I was one of the least qualified for that little piece of introspection. Rosa was cleaning the otherwise empty break room. At that point I didn't know his name. In fact, I had never given her more than a friendly smile before walking away from her guardian wagon and back to the clock. I had heard her speaking Spanish to the few other janitors, all of whom worked late like me on weekends. I worked little because I was relatively new to my department. They worked them, I thought because no one wanted to see the floors washed during the day. This time, as I entered the room, I looked at the woman who was cleaning the tiles for me and found that I was impressed.