5 Weird Realities Of Growing Up With 'Illegal' Parents

To simplify the long and arduous legal talk, you must meet one of these qualifications to be eligible for immigration to the U.S.:

A) Already have family who are citizens

B) Marry a citizen

C) Have some extraordinary skill (the official term is "aliens with extraordinary abilities" ... so, basically just be an Animorph)

D) Be a refugee fleeing a country in a state of war or seeking asylum (and even that is not exactly a smooth process).

It's a little more challenging than deciding you would like a change of scenery and asking for one citizenship, please. Even if, by some miracle, you meet one of those qualifications, there's still the money, which most people living at the bottom rungs of society in third world countries don't exactly have lying around, and the lifetime of waiting it might take. That's not an exaggeration -- wait times can exceed 24 years. So, for some, it's a literal lifetime.

Even with DACA, the path of permanent legal status continues to be an unfinished road. I have two options if DACA ever becomes discontinued: I can marry a citizen, whose relationship with me will be carefully monitored, and face fraud charges if the marriage is not deemed valid enough. Or, I can return to a country I barely know. While returning to a home country may not seem that perilous ...

You see, I was born with a small birth defect pertaining to my legs, which could result in a possible elimination of spinal movement later on in my life. And after scouring multiple options near our small town, the only "solution" our wary doctors could come up with was to break my bones and hope that they would set properly after years of painful physical therapy. However, the very day I was to be put under for the operation, an American doctor stopped in for volunteer work and told my parents that there was a better, less horror-movie caliber treatment.

So, that, plus the routine dismemberments and mindless shootings, was enough incentive for my parents to bring me to a hospital in Georgia. This got me into years of (out-of-pocket) chiropractic care that resulted in a full elimination of possible disability.

The people screaming "go back to your country" don't realize what a death sentence that is in a place such as Guatemala, where a 12 year old was recently thrown to his death for refusing to gun down a random bus driver. And as much as I hear people say we're taking their jobs, I've never met an undocumented immigrant with a 401(k). In fact, regardless of their status, most immigrants only qualify for the most menial positions, even if they're highly educated, because foreign credentials are often not recognized. The result is that you are more likely to find an immigrant working under terrible conditions while picking vegetables than in your average office, even if that immigrant used to be an economist.

Now that I'm a little older and quite a bit safer, I come into contact with the police through community projects. Even now, it's hard for me not to tense up around them. When you've barely learned your ABCs, but you know that the policeman can tear your family apart over a red light, that fear is a little hard to shake off.

The thing is, this isn't just our problem. No Social Security number also means no health insurance, which means huge ER bills the few times we risk the hospital. We can't pay those, so the hospital eats the cost and passes it along to you. No financial aid for college means fewer educated people becoming independent. If undocumented immigrants can't get driver's licenses -- and maybe they have to drive for their jobs or they live in an area that is simply impossible to get around without a car -- they may not know the local traffic laws, which may cause accidents. Guess who ends up eating that cost? Not our nonexistent insurance companies.

I never knew why my parents didn't drive. We ordered taxis every two weeks for grocery shopping. I walked to school and worked every day until I was in high school (which is when my state joined the 13 that decided illegal immigrants could be trusted with non-farming machinery and enacted laws enabling us to get limited driver's licenses). While other kids bragged about their Disneyland vacations, I always wondered why neither I nor my parents had ever taken an airplane somewhere. I have been invited to Washington, D.C. and naval bases for my academic achievements and interest in engineering, and I've never seen more than pictures of those places.