Going back home to Pakistan used to be my favorite time of the year. I would anxiously wait the entire 26 hours of flights and travel to get hit with the warm (120-degree) smell of cigarettes and gasoline upon my exit from the airport. For a good amount of time, I couldn’t understand why my parents would ever want to leave the food, the culture, and the family of home for the United States, where they didn’t have the support system I could tell energized them to be proud Pakistanis. As I moved back and forth between the two disparate countries, I began my journey toward the appreciation of the immigrant experience. It struck oddly to me that I was learning about the American Dream and the wide variety of opportunities up for grabs in the U.S. but politics had convinced me that being non-American (as defined by citizenship status) ultimately meant your experience was going to be underscored with the idea that you simply aren’t from here. My parents and their friends always joked about how they lived in America longer than their kids (myself included), but would never be truly American like them. I wanted to know how this outlook on immigration in society affected immigrant communities both large and small, together and separate, historic and recent. This is how I became interested in my current research topics, looking into how critical race theory applications of Linked Fate and Group Consciousness can be reflected in a non-racial identity like being an immigrant. Immigration has been significantly racialized since the turn of the century, and as we begin to become increasingly conscious of identity-based impacts, I want my research to prove how our systems deliberately and disproportionately impact those who are most vulnerable in American society and culture.