I Told Harvard I Was an Immigrant

8/11/2019 I Told Harvard I Was an Immigrant

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I told Harvard I was an

undocumented

immigrant. They gave

me a full scholarship.



When I discovered my status in high school, I

was worried I wouldn't be able to attend

college at all.

After I arrived home from soccer practice, the phone rang.“El Camino,” my mother said as she handed it to me,referring to a nearby community college. I was taking

engineering courses there, OFFERED in conjunction with my high school, but the woman from the registrar’soffice had a problem: The social security number I hadprovided to receive college credit did not match my name,and if I couldn’t provide a valid number, I’d have to payalmost $2,000 for the classes I’d taken.

Why, I asked my parents, had my Social Security number been rejected? They told me they had given me my little brother’s number. It was a simple explanation, taking nomore than 10 seconds in Spanish:

“Son, we overstayed our visa when you were three. Youdon’t have a social security number.”

I hadn’t known until then I was undocumented. I was 16, ahigh school junior, with big ambitions. Was I going to haveto give them all up?



* * *

My friend Oscar, too, learned he was undocumented at the

beginning of high school. He liked to remind all of us in between soccer games. When I found out about my ownstatus, I told him he was no longer alone. “You shouldprobably do some research,” he replied.

So much of what had happened to me finally made sense.I’d never really needed a Social Security number before El

Camino, and whenever I asked if I could visit family inMexico, my parents told me I had to wait for my “papers”to sort themselves out with the government. The few timesI asked if I could get a job, my father took me with him tosweep the floors on his construction sites.

None of these, obviously, were long-term solutions.

We spent the summer between junior and senior yeareducating ourselves about what it means to be anundocumented Mexican living in America. We knew that we couldn’t legally be employed, we couldn’t re-enter thecountry if we left, and we couldn’t apply for a driver’slicense in California. Gradually, we also learned that

getting to college was going to be a much more difficultendeavor than our guidance counselors had explained.

It was possible, we learned, to be admitted to most publicand private colleges regardless of our legal status. But



paying for them was a different matter. At the time, there was no way to receive FINANCIAL AID to state schoolsunless you had a Social Security number. A few private

institutions offered varying amounts of money to admittedstudents, from small stipends to a full ride. Oscar and Idecided that no school was worth bankrupting ourfamilies, so we set our sights on the narrow band of “need- blind” private schools — ones that dispensed as muchmoney as students needed could prove they needed —including all of the Ivy League universities.

A few private institutions would also pay to fly in poor highschool seniors trying to decide if their school was right forhim or her. I qualified. These were mostly small liberalarts colleges, but they gave us a chance to leave Los Angeles and discover what college would be like. I visitedfive schools — MIT, College of the Atlantic, WilliamsCollege, Wesleyan University, and Washington and Lee

University — each time waiting until I could tell aFINANCIAL AID officer in person about myimmigration status. All but two schools, MIT and Williams(which worried about losing federal grants), told me toapply anyway.

This broke my heart, because walking around MIT

convinced me to become an engineer. I knew immediatelythat it was the place for me. It was massive andoverwhelming, and I wanted nothing more than toconquer it. But the FINANCIAL AID officer told me onthe last day of my visitors’ program that I could not legally



be admitted. He was sorry, he said. (Over the previous year, I had spent hours on hold with every school on theUS News and World Report’s 50 best universities asking

about my conundrum. If there’s one thing I’d learned bythen, it’s that everybody was always sorry.) Here is the e-mail he later sent me:

For [undocumented] students, the only way we can admitthem at this time is as an international student. They would then need to leave the US and return through an

international border. In my time at MIT, though, no one in your situation has enrolled at MIT. I’m afraid that ouroption endangers students, as it requires them to leave theUS and then attempt to return. Note that, upon leaving theUS, there is no guarantee that these students could thenreturn. Thus, Dario, I cannot personally recommend thatone in a similar situation apply to MIT.

My dream crushed, I left the office in a daze and started walking down Massachusetts Avenue. Without reallyplanning it, I found myself in the middle of Harvard. SinceI was there, I found the Admissions and Financial Aidoffice and walked in to tell them the truth, too. An officeragreed to see me. My meeting was brief, but it suddenlyreversed all the self-doubt: “If you are admitted to Harvard

College,” she said, “we will meet your full financial need without regard to your legal status.” Not only would theyfollow the too-good-to-be-true need-blind policy I’d readabout, but they didn’t care about immigration status.



* * *

A few weeks later, Oscar and I sat down, college

applications in hand, to share what we had learned on ourtravels. We created a Web site for other undocumentedstudents with everything we had learned by e-mail, phone,and in person. We got to work on our applications. Although we were undocumented applicants, most schoolsstill asked to see some proof of income so they coulddetermine our financial-aid award. Thankfully, my parents

had filed taxes since the year we arrived; I sent our latestreturns.

I applied to every Ivy League school, the University ofChicago, Georgetown, Wesleyan, Washington and Lee, andCollege of the Atlantic. On Jan. 11, as I sat in the librarydoing research for a government class project, I got a callfrom a Massachusetts area code. The Harvard AdmissionsCommittee had voted to send me a likely letter ofadmission. (Oscar later got a call from Cornell.) And theygave me a full ride. This meant I wouldn’t have to worryabout student loans or quarterly tuition payments; that Ialways had a place to stay away from home; that I couldtravel every semester, on Harvard’s dime, back toCalifornia; that my parents would never have to worry

whether I’d finish school. Those are luxuries few people,documented or not, ever have.

I used to think that being undocumented was adisadvantage to me. I used to mourn the fact that I was



different. But ultimately I realize that it was because of,not in spite of, my identity — as an undocumented Chicano— that I was been able to do what I did. Being something

different in the socioeconomic fabric of the United Statesgave me the perspective I have.

Still, I realize that my privileges and challenges are rare inthe undocumented community. There are students whoseparents have never filed a tax return and so cannot provideproof of income to qualify for SCHOLARSHIPS . There

are students who are here without their parents. There arestudents who do have to hold down a job if they want to goto college or even high school. (Harvard’s slogan at the bigHarvard-Yale football game during my freshman year was“We are the 6.2 percent” — the admit rate.) Mostundocumented immigrants are not nearly as lucky as I’ve been. And with the immigration stalemate in Washington,it’s unlikely that life for those in the shadows will become

easier anytime soon.

Something I do share with them is clarity on one point:The opportunity to one day join the 6.2 percent (or the 1percent, or even just the 100 percent of legal residents wholive without fear of deportation) is worth crossing the border for.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/09/24/i-told-harvard-i-was-an-undocumented-immigrant-they-gave-me-a-full-scholarship/

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I Told Harvard I Was an Immigrant