After her husband goes missing, a young mother assumes he's been deported and decides she must find work of her own.

A landlady says a tearful farewell to one of her Mexican tenants, who must leave due to an expired visa.

After fleeing Germany in the wake of World War II, two immigrants struggle to adjust to a new life of labor and hardship on an American farm.

After a death in the family, a son travels with his father to his rural Mexican hometown to settle the estate. The town is littered with all the abandoned houses, roads, and people left behind that didn't migrate to big cities; a fate which his father fears will be his if he does not immigrate to California like his brother.

An Italian man recounts how his father came into money upon arriving in the United States but spent and then lost it all when his factory caught fire. Despite his Papa’s veritable financial ignorance and dangerous pride, the son asserts none of it was ever his father's fault.

A Russian immigrant who lives in Cuba gets the chance to move to America with his girlfriend, and must consider the life he will leave behind.

When a Croatian immigrant arrives for his first day at a New York City pork processing plant, the dehumanization of his work and the petty squabbles of his colleagues become overwhelming. Even so, nothing could have prepared him for the ferocity with which their dissatisfaction soon erupts into violence.

The 15-year-old daughter of immigrants works as a keeper for a rural cottage with her parents. She observes the family who takes over the cottage for a week.

Just before an American college student is set to leave for the airport after visiting her extended family in Ethiopia, she realizes her suitcases are too heavy. A fight breaks out between her relatives about what items should travel with her at their behest, versus which ones deserve to be left behind.

When a sick father tells his son a new story of how he came into the United States from Mexico, different from the one the whole family was familiar with, an argument ensues between mother and father about the true history of their family.