Selena Gomez: “Immigration goes beyond politics and political debates—it’s a human issue”

Selena Gomez is a woman who holds a lot of power. With 172m Instagram followers, she’s the fifth most-followed person in the world on the social-media platform. Gomez has had three number-one albums on the Billboard 200 chart—the most recent being Rare, released January 2020—and has sold more than 7m albums worldwide. As a TV producer, she was the driving force behind 13 Reasons Why, one of Netflix’s biggest breakout hits in 2017. Meanwhile, her appearance in Jim Jarmusch’s 2019 zombie horror, The Dead Don’t Die, saw Gomez hold her own against Adam Driver, Bill Murray and Chloë Sevigny.

She has decided to use her power to uplift and unite people. At 17, Gomez became a UNICEF ambassador—the youngest ever at the time—and was involved in the 2008 UR Votes Count campaign, encouraging teenagers in the US to vote. She’s been passionately vocal about her despair of social media and the negative impact it’s had on her generation, as well as the effect that having lupus has had on her own mental health. In 2019, she joined past winners astronaut Buzz Aldrin and actress Jane Fonda as the recipient of the McLean Award for Mental Health Advocacy. Recently, she discussed her bipolar diagnosis on Miley Cyrus’s Bright Minded IGTV series.

Her most recent project is as an executive producer of the Netflix documentary, Living Undocumented, which arrived on the streaming service in October 2019. The six-part series follows eight immigrant families living in the US and facing deportation. The documentary is at times a difficult watch, with entire families being torn apart due to the intervention of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

With our attention now focused on the global health crisis, it seems particularly pertinent that we must keep such pressing issues at the forefront of our minds. Consider those displaced refugees and immigrants around the world living in camps without access to water or soap, defenceless against the spread of COVID-19. It’s important, now more than ever, that we keep compassion and kindness going.

To support the documentary and the stories of the families featured, Gomez wrote an article for Vogue Arabia’s April 2020 issue titled “Connected: Love will Heal the World”, in which she explains why she has to be a voice for the voiceless. Her disappointment in US immigration policy, as the grandchild of immigrants herself, is keenly felt. When asked about how she feels living in Donald Trump’s America, Gomez insists we must do better. “We simply have to,” she writes. “I hope we can still offer the American dream. I hope we can still offer people a better life.”

From Selena Gomez’s own heritage journey to the importance of listening to the stories of immigrant families, here are four things we learned from her Vogue Arabia article.

If you haven’t already, you must watch Living Undocumented

Arriving on Netflix in October 2019, the documentary follows the lives of eight families from different countries and backgrounds whose lives are being ripped apart by the immigration policies of the US and its president, Donald Trump. For the families, who were seeking asylum from violence in countries including Colombia and Mexico, agreeing to appear in the series was at great risk to themselves. “Through the documentary, I learned that people are truly inspiring,” writes Gomez in her piece with Vogue Arabia. “These families have so much going on in their lives, yet they still find the strength to keep going.”

Her own family were immigrants—for Gomez, the story is very personal

Born 27 years ago in Texas, Selena identifies as a Mexican-American woman. “[I] am incredibly proud to be both. My family chose to leave Mexico to pursue the American dream,” she writes for Vogue Arabia. Selena’s aunt left Mexico in the 1970s, crossing over the US border while hidden in the back of a truck. “My grandparents followed, and my father was born in the US. If they hadn’t chosen to make this country their home, things would have been very different for me.”

America was, after all, built on immigration

The US, Gomez reminds us, was built on immigration, with the first British and European settlements starting around 1600. The issue has become much discussed during Trump’s presidency, with enforced changes to ICE and the extension of the wall that borders the United States and Mexico.

Gomez points out that how a country and its policies deal with immigration exemplifies how much compassion and empathy that country has. “One thing I have seen is that immigration goes beyond politics and political debates—it’s a human issue,” she says. While Gomez acknowledges this complex topic can’t be solved overnight, people’s stories need to be heard. You can listen to eight of those stories in Living Undocumented.

That change can, and must, be won together

While we may not all have the platform that Gomez has, we can all play our part. Regardless of the country we live in, we can and we must protest by writing to our local government about amendments to policies and voting for the changes we want to see. “I want these immigrants and refugees to know that there are people fighting for them,” adds Gomez at the end of her feature. “There are people who will listen to them, and there are those who are ready to fight the change.”

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Living Undocumented, produced by Selena Gomez, is streaming on Netflix now. Read the full interview in Vogue Arabia’s April 2020 issue, out now, alongside further first-person testimonies from Diane von Furstenberg, Rita Ora, and Prabal Gurung

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