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Personal Declaration

‘I am the face of illegal immigration,’ lawyer says

My family is Exhibit A in the current mean-spirited immigration debate.

Some in the U.S. Congress foment fear of immigrants and uninformed hatred against decent, hard-working folks. They need to read the Horatio Alger story again. I want you to consider my family’s story the next time you feel a nudge to fear immigrants.

My mom Leonidas, dad Nico, three sisters and I arrived in New York over 30 years ago. We came with tourist visas. We came because my father wanted something for his children we could not get in our home country: a first-rate education.

My father wanted freedom and to live in a country where hard work was the key to a bright future. He came exuberantly; the rest of us came reluctantly. My mother, my sisters and I cried for weeks, begging my father not to take us away from our large home and comfortable life in the Dominican Republic.

GREEN CARD GOAL

My father quickly began the immigrant dream, worked hard, opened his own business, hired employees and paid lots of taxes. He set up corporations and dutifully did everything that was asked of him in order to get the magic "green card."

My sisters attended private boarding school. My father haggled with the nuns over the tuition as one by one, my sisters were enrolled, or as they think of it, were involuntarily enlisted. Life for us became what my father thought it would be. He worked six days a week, and took a Sunday rest unless he and I had to go shopping and haggling in New York’s garment district.

And then suddenly, he died a little over four years after we had arrived in the U.S. I remember crying for weeks after his death and thinking: do we get buried along with him? What happens now? What we didn’t know then was that our immigration paperwork and the process my father had started died along with him. We later learned that we were "illegal aliens," a status we held for more than 10 years. Eventually, we applied for and became residents; five years later we were U.S. citizens.

By sheer determination and luck, we kids managed to realize our parents’ dream. My sisters and I have all attained advanced degrees in medicine, law, business and engineering.

The country with the lady holding the torch in the harbor shines a bright light to this day for those seeking precious religious, political and economic freedom. Yes, I know and realize that America cannot welcome all who want to come here and that we need to have secure borders.

NEED FOR ‘RATIONAL SOLUTION’

However, the fact is that most of those who are present here are decent, hard-working folks who currently have no legal way of entering the U.S. There is no visa work authorization category - there is no legal way for them to take the jobs they fill now, in a country with the world’s lowest unemployment rate. Surely, this land of immigrants can find a rational, reasonable solution to fix our broken immigration system.

My father did not live to see even one of his children graduate from high school and my mother passed away a semester before I picked up my law degree. The road was very hard at times, but the power of their dream fueled our desire and ambition. True to our parents’ teaching, we never asked for a handout; we worked hard and we got ahead. If my family’s story says anything, it is that immigrants add a lot more than they take away, a fact that is amply evident by the billions paid into Social Security by people whose names don’t match their Social Security numbers.

If Arizona Congressman J.D. Hayworth had his way, my family and I would have been deported the day my father died. We need to reject this way of thinking, which makes felons of neighbors, church members, nurses, teachers, sons and daughters, husbands and wives. I believe in the power of an immigrant’s dream to achieve great things: to learn a new language and become immersed in a new culture − and contrary to some reports, this is what is happening.