What do you hear when you listen? Is it joyful noise, or sounds shattering your imagination, solitude, search for peace of mind, and thoughts of future happiness?

I was born in a once vibrant, integrated Ohio town known for two highly productive steel mills publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. General Motors owned the nearby car assembly plants that rivaled Ford’s Detroit industry. There was an exceptional university, symphony hall, museums, well-resourced city libraries, a lively downtown hub, and one of the largest historical parks (other than New York’s Central Park) in the Northeastern part of the country. Neighbors were family. Life moved with dreams of what could be.

But change crept in like a virus killing everything in its path. Demise started in the early 1960s. The mills shut down, a day called Black Wednesday. It was no longer profitable to manufacture steel in the U.S. All other vital industries from General Electric, to Goodyear followed suit to produce overseas. Every employee was eventually laid off, as operations completely shut down. My town spiraled into an unlivable decay. Schools closed, and the downtown became a deserted shell of unoccupied buildings. Vandals gutted vacant homes, one tree-lined street after another was full of torn down houses. Gangs, drug lords, and a Mafia presence drove a stake in the heart of the town. People fled and didn’t look back.

The heading featured in the Saturday Evening Post, March 9, 1963 issue called my home—“Crimetown USA” with an in-your-face subtitle: “Youngstown has had 75 bombings, 11 killings, and no one seems to care.”

Fast forward to today’s immigrants fleeing into the U.S. They’re escaping their country for the same reasons people left my hometown. Does it make it anymore justified that Ohio is in the United States?

I was able to leave Ohio by airplane and land in Los Angeles. No one arrested me. I had no papers other than my ticket. My aunt met me, and I picked up a life full of dreams in a city with opportunity for college, a career, and all the dreams I could hold. Palm trees, the Pacific Ocean, and my aunt’s neighborhood of well-preserved, stucco homes was the joyful noise I heard. My options were endless, not buried beneath the dust of a decayed town.

As I read about California nowadays, being pushed and pulled against targeted groups of people who want to celebrate holidays, birthdays, weddings, family, and seek a better life to support themselves, there’s a realization that all humans want a chance to live and bring their children into a world void of everyday violence and poverty.

Myself and families from different countries have sought out Europe to hear sounds of hope. It is said that we are the lucky ones. But I tell you, it takes courage to plant roots in a country where the culture and language are not your own. Yes, I’m fortunate because I was not arrested when I landed in Portugal. In fact, I’ve not had any difficulty like the immigrants wanting a better life in America.

And yet, there are those, in spite of their hometown hardships, who choose to live where they know the feel of the stones beneath their feet. They couldn’t imagine life anywhere else. I pray they hear again joyful noise.