You both know what it is to arrive. You both know the particular vertigo of a country that has its own logic, its own jokes, its own subtle hierarchies that nobody explains because everyone else absorbed them as children. You have both had the experience of saying something perfectly reasonable and watching people's faces shift in a way that tells you something was wrong, but not what. You are both, in some technical sense, immigrants.
This does not make you the same.
The friendship between immigrants from different countries is one of the more interesting relational experiments available. You have a genuine structural parallel — the outsider position, the translated self, the maintenance of an elsewhere that most people around you cannot fully access. But the contents of those parallel structures are not the same, and one of the most common failures of immigrant friendship is the assumption that they are. "We both know what this is like" is true. "We know the same thing" is not.
The country you left, how you left it, why you left it, and what the receiving country thinks of where you came from — all of this shapes the immigrant experience into something highly specific. A Nigerian-British woman and a Polish-British man living in London have both navigated Britishness from outside. But the racial dimension of one experience has no equivalent in the other. The colonial history between Britain and Nigeria has no equivalent in the British-Polish relationship. The ways in which each is read — physically, phonetically, documentarily — are not equivalent. To flatten these into a shared immigrant identity is to miss the actual person standing in front of you.
The friendship survives this — often thrives in it — when both people are willing to be curious about the specific. Not "you know what it's like" as a statement, but "tell me what it's like for you" as a question. The curiosity has to be genuine, which means tolerating the answer. Sometimes the answer will implicate your own privileges. A South Korean immigrant in the United States may have arrived with significant financial resources and a visa category tied to technical skills. A Haitian immigrant in the same city may have arrived with nothing, navigating a system explicitly hostile to them. Both are immigrants. The experiences are not commensurable.
What is genuine between immigrant friends from different countries — and this is not nothing, it is a great deal — is the shared experience of code-switching, of the particular loneliness of not having a native reference, of sending money or news or worry across a distance that most of your other friends do not navigate. The experience of your home country being reduced to a headline. The experience of people asking where you are from and then where you are really from. The experience of calculating how much of yourself to show in a given room. These structural similarities create a real bond. The bond is most honest when it does not paper over the differences.
There is also a specific pleasure in this kind of friendship that should not be understated. You get to learn an entirely different immigration story — a different country of origin, a different political or economic reason for departure, a different set of negotiations with the host culture. If you are paying attention, you learn something about your own experience by contrast. You discover which parts of your immigrant identity are particular to you and your country, and which parts are more widely shared features of the transit condition. This is clarifying in ways that friendships with people who have never migrated cannot provide.
The risk in immigrant-to-immigrant friendship is a kind of competitive suffering — comparing which immigration was harder, which country of origin was more dangerous, which host culture more hostile. This competition is ultimately pointless. Suffering is not a hierarchy that determines worth. But the impulse to compare is understandable: it is often an attempt to have one's experience recognized. The better route is direct: "This part of my experience was hard, and I haven't talked about it much." That is more honest than "I had it harder," and it actually invites the reciprocity it wants.
Some immigrant friendships also navigate the question of integration differently. One person may have chosen aggressive assimilation — adopting the cultural codes of the host country as completely as possible. Another may have chosen to maintain strong separation between their immigrant community and the host culture. These are different strategies for surviving the same structural problem, and they can create friction between friends who implicitly or explicitly judge each other's approach. The assimilated friend may seem like a sellout. The separatist friend may seem like they are refusing to adapt. Both of them are doing something rational in response to conditions that were not of their choosing.
The friendship that lasts is one that respects the autonomy of each person's immigration strategy, holds genuine curiosity about the other's origin, and does not require the shared outsider position to collapse into identical experience. You arrived from different places. You are navigating different versions of the same country. You may be here for different reasons and with different futures. All of this is material for a friendship, not an obstacle to one.