What’s your favorite funny immigrant story?

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1. I was in a cab in New York City in the mid-2000s and the driver, in very heavily accented English, was complaining that he was always being discriminated against … because he was a Mets fan.

2. I dated a Jewish girl once. Her grandparents + family immigrated just prior to WWII. Their route was Europe > Africa > South America > America.

   When they land in Brazil her grandpa goes to get some food. He comes back with this fruit he had never seen before. He was really excited to try it but when he showed it to his family his sister grabbed it from him and threw it off the boat.

   She said “be careful, this isn’t Europe, the food here might be dangerous!”

   It was a banana

3. We were in Seattle the other week visiting friends and on our last night there we were being driven back to our hotel by a Bajan dude.

   We’re chatting away and eventually I turn to the guy and say “Look, I know this is gonna sound weird, but I’m from Florida and after two weeks in this fucking place you don’t know how good it is to hear somebody from the islands again.”

   He starts laughing his ass off and says “And you don’t know how good it is to hear a white person who doesn’t talk like they have a stick up their ass again. I lived in Savannah for 15 years!”

   The entire rest of the ride was spent annoying everyone else in the car talking about how much we hate the cold weather in the northwest, accents, the South, fried dolphin, snow being evil, why beaches made out of anything but sand are the devil’s work, and why it’s impossible to find a bar north of Everett that carries Mt. Gay rum.

4. A couple weeks ago, met a German who was sure, as sure as Iam that the sun rises in the east, that he would be the best carpenter in Vermont.

5. I was working on a construction site and one of the other contractors was a Guatemalan waller (puts up drywall and other stuff) with little English. There was conversation going between me and his foreman, and the waller excused himself by saying “I go make-ah-dah-peepee.” If you want to understand they way he said it, try saying it in a high-pitched voice outloud, as if the hypenated part was one word, very quickly.

   To cut the story short, I was quite amused by his turn of phrase and now say it like that any time I have to use the bathroom around my friends and family.

6. I’m not sure about “immigrants”, but at least foreign visitors:

   Back in the 1990’s (before GPS was common) I was at Los Angeles International Airport to get a rental car while I was visiting my cousin and a Japanese couple in front of me were renting a car for the day to go see New York City that afternoon.

7. My landlord is a Korean immigrant. He told me he moved to nyc in the 90s and didn’t speak almost any English. He got a job as a server in a restaurant to learn and says “I was so hot back then, the women didn’t care that I couldn’t understand their orders”