The immigrant experience isn’t something that could be described in words. No matter who you are and what your writing capabilities may be, words can never fully encapsulate the experience of being an immigrant. Being the son to two loving immigrant parents, I still don’t and never will fully know the struggles they experienced, but through this essay, I hope to shine some light on an experience that not only my parents have suffered through in the past, but also so many immigrants who can’t share their story.

            The standard hospital experience for non-serious medical cases is that a patient goes to a hospital, gets treated by a healthcare worker, is given an aftercare treatment plan, and is discharged. When that patient is an immigrant, every step of this experience is ten times more difficult. To give a little taste of how a simple step can become so complicated, let’s look at this part of a discharge paper that a patient in China received.

            If someone with a limited understanding of the Mandarin received this discharge paper, they wouldn’t have the first clue about what this paper is telling them. Personally, I had no clue what this paper said. After receiving a rough translation, I learned that the text in the red box is describing a diagnosis for Hirschsprung’s disease in a three-month old patient.

            For immigrants in the U.S. with limited English language proficiency receiving discharge papers, it is quite literally trying to read a foreign language, except in this case, that foreign language text details extremely important information pertinent to the health of the patient. This is just one example of a struggle immigrants face when being treated by the U.S. healthcare system.

            In fact, this is an example of a recurring theme that can be found: accessibility to healthcare information and services before and after treatment/hospital visits. In the peer-reviewed article “Impacts of English language proficiency on healthcare access, use, and outcomes among immigrants: a qualitative study,” main author Mamata Pandey describes how the ability to “secure appointments” and “post-appointment care” is directly correlated to one’s English language proficiency (Pandey et al.). Despite the ways that the U.S. healthcare system has improved with time, there are still many weaknesses that can be seen by those without much command of the English language. During my own father’s recent visit to the ER for his broken, his eleven-page discharge papers were filled with plenty of medical jargon that I couldn’t even understand at some points, but the part I would like to highlight is the first page: instructions for reaching out to a specialist for a follow-up appointment.

            During the hospital visit, we were given many assurances that the phone number given to schedule an appointment would have language interpreters available that could help with finding the right doctor for his situation. After being given this guarantee, my family felt pretty comfortable allowing my father, an immigrant who worried commonly about language barriers wherever he goes, to schedule his own appointment. However, when actually calling that phone number the next day, my father discovered that there were zero language interpreters available, resulting in a confusing phone call where no follow-up with a specialist was made. The story I described is not unique. Both healthcare workers and immigrant patients alike struggle to communicate properly about important information and services before and after receiving treatment. One healthcare worker in the study conducted by Pandey stated that “We need to make the community or the clients’ population know that this is available for you and this is the process how you get access to this service, the language barrier is a huge barrier for this population and to access like any health care service” (Pandey et al.). A solution to the struggle I’ve described has already been implemented in one way or another in most, if not all, U.S. healthcare systems. However, this system is not perfect, still having many flaws that can be improved on.

            In the scholarly article “Barriers to and solutions for addressing insufficient professional interpreter use in primary healthcare,” main author Fabienne N. Jaeger analyzed the barriers to using a language interpreter effectively. In the questionnaire-based study conducted by Jaeger to target healthcare professionals, she found that the main struggles to effective language interpreter usage were “cumbersome organization,” “absent financial coverage,” and “lack of knowledge on how to arrange interpreter interventions” (Jaeger et al.).

            When a language barrier remains unaddressed due to a poor/nonexistent language interpreter experience, a healthy patient-doctor relationship can fail to develop for a number of reasons that could have been addressed by removing the language barrier. Due to immigrants coming from different regions of the world, they have different cultural viewpoints and perspectives on the role of healthcare compared to the culture of the country they immigrated to. As Pandey identified in her article “Impacts of English language proficiency on healthcare access, use, and outcomes among immigrants: a qualitative study,” many countries do not emphasize preventative care like how mainland United States does (Pandey et al.). This creates a disconnect between immigrants and their healthcare providers, reducing the quality of healthcare provided.

            A healthcare worker gave the following example in Pandey’s study: “Say I am treating an ear infection. I have told the clients many times that the medication is to be administered by mouth, but they thought it was to be installed in the ears. So, I have a couple of disastrous cases where I have prescribed medication where they don’t realize it is given by mouth. I think also, when they don’t understand, they feel uncomfortable to ask for clarification. They get very embarrassed and they get very frustrated.” Through this situation, a massive disconnect can be seen between the healthcare worker and their patient. When the bridge of trust isn’t built between patient and healthcare provider, an adverse outcome is almost always imminent. Due to the background that the patient comes from and the unfamiliar environment they are being placed in, the quality of healthcare became worse.

            In extreme examples where some immigrants face a combination of all of the factors discusses above, the result is disastrous. Amy Tan, a popular author known for her novels and short stories, in her essay “Mother Tongue,” discusses her mother’s experience during a hospital visit as someone who didn’t speak “standard English” (Tan). When Tan’s mother visited the hospital to receive a consultation about a benign brain tumor discovered during a CAT scan, she was told in an apathetic manner that she visited for no reason because the hospital lost the CAT scan and in order to get any more information, she would have to schedule another appointment. In the face of this challenge, Tan’s mother stood her ground, insisting that the hospital call her daughter who spoke “perfect English” (Tan). Once Amy Tan herself had been reached, promises that the CAT scan would be found and apologies for “a most regrettable mistake” were made (Tan).

            The inhumane manner that Tan’s mother was treated highlights how the struggles immigrants face when receiving healthcare not only compound, but they also grow exponentially, where each struggle adds to the impact of the others. Assuming that the healthcare workers Tan’s mother was addressing could not communicate their thoughts properly due to a language barrier, no corrective measures like a language interpreter were even taken by the healthcare provider for reasons unknown. The healthcare workers’ background and opinions on immigrants/those with limited English proficiency may have also played a factor in how Tan’s mother had been treated. As a result, what was already a strained healthcare relationship has collapsed even further into ruin by this disastrous experience.

            Terrible experiences are a part of daily life, but one of the places that extra care should be taken toward preventing these terrible experiences is in a healthcare setting. For immigrants, the challenges of the healthcare system are compounded by the general struggles that they face in their daily lives. In this current political climate, the opinions surrounding immigrants are varied to both extremes, but despite this, improving everybody’s healthcare should be a constant goal because at the end of the day, we are all human and we all deserve to live happy and healthy lives.

Works Cited

Jaeger, Fabienne N., et al. “Barriers to and Solutions for Addressing Insufficient Professional Interpreter Use in Primary Healthcare.” BMC Health Services Research, vol. 19, no. 1, Oct. 2019, https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-019-4628-6. Accessed 12 Nov. 2025.

Pandey, Mamata, et al. “Impacts of English Language Proficiency on Healthcare Access, Use, and Outcomes among Immigrants: A Qualitative Study.” BMC Health Services Research, vol. 21, no. 1, July 2021, pp. 1–13, https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-021-06750-4. Accessed 9 Nov. 2025.

Tan, Amy. “Mother Tongue.” The Threepenny Review, no. 43, 1990, pp. 7–8.

齐浩宇. “出院证明.” Baidu, Online Image, 13 Aug. 2021, image.baidu.com/search/detail?adpicid=0&b_applid=7473660471018896287&bdtype=0&commodity=©right=&cs=552626845%2C202458127&di=7562963243866521601&fr=click-pic&fromurl=http%253A%252F%252Fnews.sohu.com%252Fa%252F687392969_120873932&gsm=1e&hd=&height=0&hot=&ic=&ie=utf-8&imgformat=&imgratio=&imgspn=0&is=0%2C0&isImgSet=&latest=&lid=88d5e4a601fce0b4&lm=&objurl=https%253A%252F%252Fp5.itc.cn%252Fimages01%252F20230620%252F708b6d420d244454a4a6204e686697c7.jpeg&os=3946005703%2C4162269463&pd=image_content&pi=0&pn=1&rn=1&simid=3329350900%2C250620017&tn=baiduimagedetail&width=0&word=%E5%87%BA%E9%99%A2%E8%AF%81%E6%98%8E&z=. Accessed 8 Nov. 2025.