Undocumented Quotes

“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.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“What I saw in Flint was a microcosm of the way the government treats the undocumented everywhere, making the conditions in this country as deadly and toxic and inhumane as possible so that we will self-deport. What I saw in Flint was what I had seen everywhere else, what I had felt in my own poisoned blood and bones. Being killed softly, silently, and with impunity.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“Home is not something I should have to earn.”
― Jose Antonio Vargas, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen

“Man-made borders shouldn't matter more than people.”
― Romina Garber, Lobizona

“But it’s not just those early years without my parents that branded me. It’s the life I’ve led in America as a migrant, watching my parents pursue their dream in this country and then having to deal with its carcass, witnessing the crimes against migrants carried out by the U.S. government with my hands bound. As an undocumented person, I felt like a hologram. Nothing felt secure. I never felt safe. I didn’t allow myself to feel joy because I was scared to attach myself to anything I’d have to let go of. Being deportable means you have to be ready to go at any moment, ready to go with nothing but the clothes on your body. I've learned to develop no relationship to anything, not to photos, not to people, not to jewelry or clothing or ticket stubs or stuffed animals from childhood.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“Humanity is not some box I should have to check.”
― Jose Antonio Vargas, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen

“I am a one-trick pony, unable to comfort with anything other than grades.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“The jet-fuel smell thick in the air, the flame and smoke surrounding you, you can only get to 011 and that's enough to make you foreign, to make you other, to make you Mexican. You take out your wallet and put an ID between your teeth so they can find you when it all collapses. Your flesh may burn but your teeth will remain and the ID will be there. It's a fake ID. Nobody will ever know you died. Nobody will ever know you lived.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“Dear America, is this what you really want? Do you even know what is happening in your name?”
― Jose Antonio Vargas, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen

“What we're doing - waving a "Keep Out!" flag at the Mexican border while holding up a Help Wanted sign a hundred yards in - is deliberate. Spending billions building fences and walls, locking people up like livestock, deporting people to keep the people we don't want out, tearing families apart, breaking spirits - all of that serves a purpose.”
― Jose Antonio Vargas, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen

“There are white moms who threw stones at the little girls in Little Rock and there are white moms who wish Andres and Omar and Elias and Greta's mom will be deported too.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“As an undocumented person, I felt like a hologram. Nothing felt secure. I never felt safe... I've learned to develop no relationship to anything, not to photos, not to people, not to jewelry, or clothing or ticket stubs or stuffed animals from childhood.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“Listening to quiet, miserable voices is in his job description.”
― Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star

“What [undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children] did qualify for, according to human rights experts, was refugee status -- something President Obama was careful not to give them.”
― Jose Antonio Vargas, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen

“I am an undocumented transfer student to UCLA. This university has always been my dream, but being here has been on of the hardest experiences of my life. I do not receive financial aid, and I do not meet any of the requirements to receive any kind of scholarship because I do not have a Social Securty number.”
― Eileen Truax, Dreamers: An Immigrant Generation's Fight for Their American Dream

“In my family we do an exceptional job pretending that everything is OK.”
― Susan Kuklin, We Are Here to Stay: Voices of Undocumented Young Adults

“It was ironic, really, that the only reason I became eligible to adjust my status was because I married a U.S. citizen. I laugh when I think about the many times my mom told me, 'You have to be independent. You have to make your own money. Don't depend on a man!' I did. I made my own money. But I still needed a man to save me from my illegality.”
― Julissa Arce, You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation

“Researchers have shown that the flooding of stress hormones resulting from a traumatic separation from your parents at a young age kills off so many dendrites and neurons in the brain that it results in permanent psychological and physical changes. One psychiatrist I went to told me that my brain looked like a tree without branches.

So I just think about all the children who have been separated from their parents, and there's a lot of us, past and present, and some under more traumatic circumstances than others--like those who are in internment camps right now--and I just imagine us as an army of mutants. We’ve all been touched by this monster, and our brains are forever changed, and we all have trees without branches in there, and what will happen to us? Who will we become? Who will take care of us?”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“Undocumented revelation is a lost revelation.”
― Sunday Adelaja

“Laws ostensibly directed at undocumented immigrants inevitably affect the treatment of lawfully present immigrants and citizens who share the ethnic, racial, or national origin characteristics of undocumented immigrants.”
― Pratheepan Gulasekaram, The New Immigration Federalism

“I knew when the medical profession could not diagnose me correctly that I probably had a new and undocumented disease.”
― Steven Magee, Magee’s Disease

“I suspected I had a new and undocumented disease and I was not surprised to find a rare disease was part of it!”
― Steven Magee, Hypoxia, Mental Illness & Chronic Fatigue

“The government wanted the people of Flint dead, or did not care if they died, which is the same thing, and set in motion a plan for them to be killed slowly through negligence at the highest levels. What I saw in Flint was a microcosm of the way the government treats the undocumented everywhere, making the conditions in this country as deadly and toxic and inhumane as possible so that we will self-deport. What I saw in Flint was what I had seen everywhere else, what I had felt in my own poisoned blood and bones. Being killed softly, silently, and with impunity.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“I thought I could write something better, something that rang true. And I thought that I was the best person to do it. I was just crazy enough. Because if you're going to write a book about undocumented immigrants in America, the story, the full story, you have to be a little bit crazy. And you certainly can't be enamored by America, not still. That disqualifies you.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“Before visiting Staten Island, I'd never met a day laborer. To me, a city girl who knew undocumented men mostly as restaurant workers, day laborers seemed like an almost mythical archetype, groups of brown men huddled at the crack of dawn on street corners next to truck rental lots and hardware superstores and lumberyards. Historically, legislators and immigration advocates have parted the sea of the undocumented with a splintered staff—working brown men and women on one side and academically achieving young brown people on the other, one a parasitic blight, the other heroic dreamers.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“I'm attending a monthly meeting at Colectiva Por Fin on my first night on Staten Island. The room is small but as more men come in, it seems to double and triple in size. On the wall, migrants are celebrated through art that strikes me as deeply annoying, mostly the word "migrant" reconfigured as butterflies. I fucking hate thinking of migrants as butterflies. Butterflies can't fuck a bitch up.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“The first hour of the prayer session consists of the group of faithful men and women on their knees beating their chests and crying out to god for forgiveness. I look at them intently. Some of them seem for real but overall it's super performative. I do not pray to god for forgiveness, because I believe I have nothing to apologize for and he might have to explain a couple of things to me, so I just sit there, moping, angry, but still trying to radiate positive vibes because I'm not going to be the person who is ruining faithful migrants' experience of community. I respect the role of god in the lives of people who suffer but basically only in the lives of people who suffer.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans