Most people want to feel like they belong, but for refugees and immigrants, that feeling was even more important. “Young refugees and immigrants...were caught between the world of their parents and the new world of their friends and classmates” (105) and had to choose whether they would compete for the approval of their peers or their family . A young boy on the Fugees football team refused to cut his hair because his classmates thought it was cool and ended up getting kicked off the team (111). Other young refugees in Clarkston gave in to the lure of gangs and found themselves in a cycle of violence and crime, simply out of a sense of belonging and safety. “Gangs…promised both belonging and status” (105) and provided a way to become American, despite all the trouble and anguish into which they put their members. As adolescents between worlds, young immigrants experience a heightened sense of liminality when a person "becomes neither here nor there" (221), and struggle to discover who and where they are.