The Undocumented Americans (One World Essentials)

by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Being deportable means you have to be ready to go at any moment, ready to go with nothing but the clothes on your body.

One of the bogeymen of the right, in this country or any Western country, is the image of the sick immigrant—the supposed strain on the healthcare system, the burden on emergency rooms and taxpayers.

I am their interpreter and advocate.

So long as I kept myself alive to keep him alive, we’d be all right.

I am a professional immigrant’s daughter.

It’s up to us to honor our parents’ sacrifices by doing better than they did, by having better lives than what we saw growing up. I’m here to tell you that the best way to do that is through an education,”

The twisted inversion that many children of immigrants know is that, at some point, your parents become your children, and your own personal American dream becomes making sure they age and die with dignity in a country that has never wanted them.

At some point in the video he says Americans treat their pets better than they treat immigrants, which I cannot dispute.