Dear Reader,
While Jasmine’s story of being a top student who discovers she is an illegal immigrant is not my story, it is very close to my heart and my experiences.
The National Scholarship Award in the book is a fictional creation, inspired by the Westinghouse Prize, the Presidential Scholarship and National Merit Scholarship programs. (In high school I won both the Presidential Scholarship and National Merit awards.)
My family moved to the United States in 1985, when I was thirteen years old. My father had a business/corporation visa that allows its owners to apply for a green card after three years. During this process, however, our family was scammed by a shady immigration attorney (and sadly, a friend of my father’s) who never filed our paperwork with the INS. My father decided to file the paperwork for adjustment of status on his own, without a lawyer’s help.
While we were waiting for approval, I was a senior in high school and applying to colleges. We were unsure if I would qualify for financial aid. My family was here legally, but we did not yet have our green cards either. My parents assured me that they would find a way to afford college no matter what, but we were hoping that I would qualify for financial aid.
Jasmine’s anxiety, ambition, and determination are based on my own high school memories, and her passionate love for her country is rooted in mine.
Like Jasmine, I was accepted to several elite colleges whose offer of acceptance did not include financial aid. I was starting to get very nervous, until the glorious letter arrived from Columbia University granting not only admission but an incredibly generous financial aid package. Because I was not eligible for the Pell Grant (a federal grant that covers the neediest students), the school offered a privately funded grant.
Columbia is one of a handful of schools in the nation that offers financial aid to its students regardless of their citizenship status. It is without a doubt the single most important factor that changed my life and made me who I am today. I am here because of the generosity of wealthy patrons at my private school that funded my education at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, and the equally generous and far-reaching policies of my alma mater.
I have my US citizenship today because of the help of friends connected to congressional leadership and because I fell in love with an American guy. I was over the age of twenty-one when my parents received their green cards, which put me once again in a legal gray area (this loophole is now closed, and people who were brought into this country as children but are adults when the approval comes through now also receive green cards).
After my husband and I married in 2002, I applied for a green card. However, when our approval came, we had moved from New York City to Los Angeles and never received the letter with the date of my interview. My file was marked “dead.” After I waited for a few more years and asked around for help, one of my best friends from college with ties to a local congressman asked the congressman if he could help pull my file. I was interviewed for my green card in the congressman’s office, the equivalent of being moved to the top of the VIP immigration line. Two years ago, I finally became an American citizen, after twenty-eight years in this country. I will be able to vote for the very first time in this presidential election.
I hope you find Jasmine’s story enlightening and moving, and that I have done justice to the story of the struggle so many millions of people experience in their journey to become American.
Thank you,
Melissa de la Cruz