Native Chicagoan reporter’s American Dream could’ve been a nightmare

The baby was born at a hospital on the Near West Side on a brisk September night.

The nurses swaddled him in a sky blue cloth before handing him to his mother. Instinctively she pulled his warm, delicate body to her chest.

The father looked on proudly.

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“Will he play futbol?” he asked himself. “Maybe he’ll become a lawyer? Or maybe he could be doctor. Here, he can be anything he wants. He’s an American.”

Or was he? Times had changed. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which once declared that all persons born in the U.S. are U.S. citizens, had been rewritten or revoked. Before that revision, had they been asked to sign a birth certificate it would have read:
Birthplace of Mother: Mexico. Birthplace of Father: Mexico.

Instead all they got was a phone number from some of the nurses. They can help immigrants like you get resources, the nurses said. They might help you stay in the country.

They might help you keep your son.

The new family took refuge in Little Village, where the boy’s grandparents gave him besos and bendiciones.

The boy was not sent a Social Security card. The boy learned Spanish. The boy learned English. He took his first steps at 9 months old.

In first grade he pledged allegiance to the flag. “E Pluribus Unum” was written on a mural in the hallway at Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy. His dad drove to Indiana to buy fireworks for the Fourth of July.

The boy excelled in school and never missed a day. Other students poked fun at him. “You don’t belong here,” they’d sneer. “Your family is gonna get deported.”

The family couldn’t get welfare. His father worked in construction and landscaping, his mom cleaned apartments and sold clothes at a flea market. Still, at Christmas there was a brand new PlayStation under the tree.

By the time high school applications came around, he was a star student. A woman visited his classroom and talked about scholarship opportunities to attend some of the best boarding schools in the country. There was a school in California that caught his eye, but he’d have to board a plane and face a security checkpoint.

They’d find him, and interrogate him in a cramped windowless room. He might never see his family again.

He decided to stay in Chicago and was accepted to Whitney Young High School. He knew there’d be no money for college. He would have been the first in his family to attend. But the Free Application for Federal Student Aid form asked for a Social Security number.

When he turned 18 he celebrated with a party at his grandparents’ house. His grandfather had always talked about the American Dream and the promise of America. It’s why he uprooted his family from Mexico.

“I did it for you and your cousins,” he’d say. “So you can have a better life than I did.”

That was before it turned out the American Dream was a ticketed affair, and the country decided no tickets were left for families like theirs.

The young man lived on the margins after he graduated, accepting any job he could, taking his pay in cash. He feared being pulled over, and trembled at the thought of being accused of a crime. He was constantly on the lookout for “la migra,” dreading that one day he’d hear a forceful pounding on his family’s door, and there’d be nowhere for them to hide.

This is my story.

Or rather, what my story might have been like had I been denied citizenship because I was born to undocumented parents. What might have happened in an America where something like President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting birthright citizenship was the law of the land.

In reality, my parents, who are both from Puebla, Mexico, signed my birth certificate at the old Cook County Hospital. I still have the Social Security card they received in the mail. I enrolled at Whitney Young, but I got that scholarship and flew to California without fear. I was able to receive financial aid to help pay for college and became the first in my family to graduate. Later, I was the first to earn a master’s degree.

Birthright citizenship allowed me to live out the American Dream, just like it has for the children of other immigrants for more than a century. Stripping that chance away from future generations is not American. I know because I am an American.

Emmanuel Camarillo is a Sun-Times reporter.

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