Immigration is one of the main sources of population growth for the United States. Millions of immigrants move to the United States to get a better education, a job, or things that were unavailable to them in their native country.

“I moved here four months ago and I lived in Iran all of my life, for fourteen years. We won the American lottery in 2016. Which is the lottery for a green card,” freshman Kimia Bordbar said. “We moved to the United States because is really different from my country and my culture and I really like it because the schools are really different here and they are better in every way.”

Many countries do not have the privileges that the people of the United States have such as the things many students on campus may take for granted.

“In my old schools we don’t have any elective classes and there were classes that you have to take, you have to. No choices,” Kimia said. “There is only one hour in the week for sports and you have no sport to choose, and we didn’t have a library. When you come to the library you can see many different books but our school didn’t have any libraries. There it was a low quality in our schools, to be honest.”

Her parents wanted the best life for their children, so they did a lot of research to find the best place to live in the area.

“Our main reason for moving to United States was to have better quality of life and especially better education,” Kimia’s father Yaser Bordbar said. “There are many good things here in the U.S., but not in Iran, were good schools, good freedom, and many other life qualities.”

Getting a visa from Iran for the United States can be a tedious task, and although there were bumps in the process, Kimia’s family went through all the steps.

“One person in the family that is above the age of 21 will register for the lottery and then go to an interview. In our country, we have to go to Dubai or Turkey for the interview, and we went to Dubai two times for our passports and our visas,” Kimia said. “One day we were in Qatar to come to the United States, we lost our immigration packet in our country and that was too bad. When we came to the United States, they posted our packet to us and they gave it another office and another, and that was the beginning of problems for us.”

Perhaps the most frustrating of these problems involved something many students on campus do daily; take a picture, one needed to have any chance at receiving a visa.

“The night we went to take the picture, the special picture for the lottery, it was the last night and the last hour to take the picture, and it was raining, it was really raining in our city that night. And it was late in the night around 10 pm in the night and all of the of the places that took the pictures were closed. All of them,” Kimia said. “ We looked everywhere and they were all closed and my dad said ‘ok let’s try next year’ and then on the way home there was a little place that can take pictures, we went there and the next six months my uncle told us that he won the lottery.”

It’s a feeling the entire family shares, as by doing their research, and getting help from their relatives, they were able to make it to Frisco, while still getting to “see” their family.

“We asked our friends in U.S. and get help from them, and before moving here we read about the United States before coming here,” mother Behjat Raeisi said. “And about our family, back in Iran, we missed them and we video call them every week and this is so good.”