The Crime of Wanting a Better Life

There is a Mexican saying about America: “Aquí todo está mejor.” Everything is better here. My siblings and I grew up hearing this phrase over and over from my parents, followed by a lengthy talk about how lucky we were to have a deep sense of security, a great school district, and food to eat. Because we were young and couldn’t remember a lot about Mexico, we just took our parents’ word for it.

Along with the many seen, there were many unseen sacrifices my parents made to come here—their communication with family, their livelihoods in Mexico, their careers, their friendships. I remember when my mom received a call telling her that my grandfather had died and knew she would not be able to return. My parents were forced to leave the country they loved when they recognized our family would not survive. With hope and determination to work and earn, not take, they brought my family to Texas, the promised land.

As we grew older, things began to change. The passage of the Patriot Act disallowed my dad from continuing to work as a builder for a chemical plant. His spinal injury also worsened, and my mom began desperately taking a variety of jobs as a house cleaner and janitor.

My brother, sisters, and I did our best to try and fit in with our friends. We would nag our mom into buying us the latest and most stylish stuff, something that has since become one of my biggest regrets. Through it all, my parents remained selfless. Never earning enough to save, resorting to the cheapest forms of alternative medicine for their illnesses, and knowingly not treating severe medical issues.

Although life in America is significantly better for my family, it has its dangers and drawbacks as well. Our life in Houston became one of fear, a fear originally of deportation became an ever-present fear of any legal consequence. There is no way of measuring this significant stress and its impact on my family, or the permanent damage it has caused. But growing up, it became an integral part of my experience.

No matter how well I did in school or how close I got to my best friends, it seemed like all of my experiences were mixed with fear, secrecy, a sense of being undeserving, illegitimacy, invisibility, and a heavy form of guilt. We would hear the opinions at school, in the library, or among our friends’ parents: “They don’t belong,” “They don’t deserve,” or to my ears, “They aren’t as good.” You believe everything you hear as a child.

Discretion became key. It encompassed everything in life. Our formative years continued with this thing we hated about ourselves in the back of our minds. At home, although we barely got by financially my parents were determined to see us complete high school. In retrospect, this wasn’t even a reasonable goal. High school diploma or not, my siblings and I would only be able to take the minimum wage jobs my parents already had.

Everything changed when my older sister graduated as valedictorian of her graduating class and enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin. There were ways for us to enroll in college; there were people out there helping undocumented students. These thoughts blew my mind. One year later, I enrolled at Harvard. A year after that, my little brother enrolled at Middlebury in Vermont.

Now what? As the law stands, my siblings, other undocumented undergraduates, and I have only postponed our days of working in construction, restaurants, and whatever we find. Once we graduate, we will need to support my parents like they did for us all those years. I want nothing more than to help my community and my country, but survival comes first.

Why should Harvard care? As a model liberal arts institution that aims “to remove restraints on students’ full participation” in the Harvard community, Harvard has an obligation to advocate on behalf of its undocumented students so that they may “develop their full intellectual and human potential.”

The current system contradicts Harvard’s mission. Every year, Harvard accepts, aids, invests in, and graduates a small but consistent number of undocumented students. All have their own stories of triumph and despairs, stories in which Harvard will play a key role, and not only for four years. Each day that our country waits to give these undocumented students and their families a pathway to citizenship is one more day that we delay fulfilling Harvard’s best interests. Harvard has already picked a side in this argument, formally affirming its support for the DREAM Act, and it would not make sense for Harvard to abandon me, and the rest of its undocumented students now. It is in this light that we should view the UC referendum question four on “Harvard officially endorsing comprehensive immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship.”

Ultimately this isn’t an economic, political, or a specifically undocumented Harvard student issue. It’s a human issue, and one that I feel obligated to speak about as my own family continues to face abuse, discrimination, violations of rights, and inequality. It’s a question of putting education into action.

There’s a voice that tells me I do belong at this University—it’s the same voice that echoes Harvard’s ideals.

Join me in amplifying this voice. Vote yes on Question Four on the UC Referendum.

Enrique Ramirez ’16 is a Crimson editorial writer in Quincy House.