English · Chapter 39
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
Immigration and Identity is a Language Development unit of the Grade 11 Compulsory English textbook. Its theme is what happens to people, and to their sense of who they are, when they leave one country to live in another. The unit trains comprehension on a reading text about migration and belonging, builds the vocabulary of movement, settlement and citizenship, teaches the grammar of phrasal verbs and the prepositions of moving and settling, and puts both to work in speaking and writing tasks. NEB questions reward the student who can distinguish a migrant from an immigrant, an emigrant and a refugee, explain the difficulties of settling, and argue a position on identity.
Confirm the exact title and author of this unit's reading text against your own copy of the textbook, because these notes develop the substance the unit's reading treats rather than a particular title.
The words come first, because the unit's questions turn on them. A migrant is anybody who moves in order to live or work, within a country or across a border. Immigrant and emigrant describe one person from opposite ends of one journey: a woman who leaves Nepal is an emigrant to those she leaves and an immigrant to the country receiving her. A refugee differs in kind, having fled war, persecution or disaster rather than chosen to move for work, and an asylum seeker has asked a state for that protection and awaits a decision. Diaspora names the community that forms when people from one homeland settle far away and keep a shared identity with it.
People move for reasons that are usually mixed: wages, work that does not exist at home, study, medical care, marriage, relatives already abroad, or plain fear. Nepal knows the pattern from both sides. Labour migration has taken many Nepalis to India, the Gulf states and Malaysia, and smaller numbers further away, so that Nepali communities are established in Britain, Australia, the United States and elsewhere. Nepal has also hosted refugee communities within its borders for decades.