Immigrant a Graduate of the U.S. System

Ann’s graduation robe hangs from the door of her Long Beach studio apartment, and she’s counting the days. After a 10-year odyssey, she’s scheduled to graduate Friday from USC -- unless she gets arrested first.

The political science major, whose walls hold 15 framed academic achievement awards, is an illegal immigrant.

“I would like to share my story with you,” Ann wrote to me in an e-mail.

Most illegal immigrants don’t graduate from schools the caliber of USC, as far as I know, so I was intrigued by Ann’s case. Especially since she wrote to me in the middle of a heated national debate about illegal immigration.

Ann, who asked that I not use her full name, grew up in a tropical island nation in the Atlantic and came to the United States legally. But she ran into trouble, she said, when she transferred from Compton Community College to Long Beach City College.

She said she was exhausted by the federal bureaucracy while trying to straighten out her visa, so she gave up and decided to carry on as if she were a legal resident.

It was a brazen thing to do, but Ann’s mother wasn’t surprised by her daughter’s fierce determination.

“She got it from me,” said her mom, who is in L.A. for the graduation.

Ann’s father was killed in a car accident at 28, leaving her mother with five children to raise alone. Her mother became an accountant, going to school part time while working to provide for her family.

Not that Ann’s mother endorsed her daughter’s decision to stay here illegally. In fact, Ann says, her mom urged her to come home before she ended up being deported.

It was like talking to the wall.

Living under the radar of federal authorities proved to be surprisingly easy, in part because Ann taught herself to speak English with hardly a trace of an accent. Her life of deception got a boost when, in what she assumes was bureaucratic incompetence, she was granted a Social Security card that enabled her to work.

Having a Social Security card opened up new job possibilities, and when she applied to Long Beach City College as a resident, no one was wise to her. As a “resident,” she also caught a break on the higher tuition fees charged to foreign and out-of-state students.

Ann’s plot to get an American college education was humming along just fine until the day a rebuffed suitor, who had been bugging her for months, assaulted Ann with a knife. She was horribly injured, with multiple cuts to her face. But it turned out to be one more setback that only strengthened her resolve.

When she finished school in Long Beach, she applied to USC. Not only was she accepted, but she also was awarded a scholarship that paid half her tuition.

At that point, a touch of American greed seemed to be rubbing off on her. Ann applied for additional financial aid, and the jig was up when USC discovered she was undocumented.

No financial aid for illegal immigrants, she was told, even the merit scholarship she’d been awarded.

“Come on home,” Ann remembers her mother telling her.

But still, she wouldn’t give up.

Ann consulted two immigration attorneys, both of whom offered the same sure-fire strategy.

Marry a U.S. citizen, they said. That’s the quickest way to become legal, and people do it all the time.

A couple of friends offered to tie the knot with her, but Ann wasn’t willing to take the deception that far. Instead she took a year’s leave and worked three jobs, saving up money to pay her own way at USC. She worked as a hotel operator, an office assistant and a traffic and weather announcer for an AM radio station.

“It was 76 hours a week, seven days a week,” she said.

Ann hung her academic awards on the wall so that when the alarm went off at 5 in the morning, she was reminded why she had to roll out of bed.

When Ann returned to USC with money in her pocket, no one asked questions about her immigration status. As she saw it, the policy seemed to be that if you could pay, you were in the clear.

School officials I spoke to didn’t dispute that, saying there was basically a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on illegal immigrants. If a student applies as a “citizen” or “permanent resident,” no one asks for a birth certificate.

“We take the students at their word when they apply ... and don’t go any further than that,” said Dixon C. Johnson of the USC Office of International Services.

With work and school, Ann spent up to four hours a day on buses and trains. She began as a journalism student and switched to political science, hoping to work as a foreign correspondent for TV news and then go into politics back home.

As graduation day approached, the news was suddenly dominated by the subject of illegal immigration. Civilian posses are springing up, Congress is considering ways to crack down, and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger gave two thumbs up to the border-watching Minuteman Project.

For a class assignment, Ann interviewed a Minuteman and a U.S. Border Patrol agent, each one telling her it was long past time to get tough on illegal immigration. She didn’t tell them her story.

I told Ann there are legitimate concerns about national security, social costs and the impact of illegal immigration on wages, not to mention the argument that illegal means illegal.

“I understand the concerns,” she said.

It also seems to me that with a little diligence Ann could have gotten her visa mess straightened out and avoided many of her problems.

Still, she feels insulted by the suggestion that she and every other illegal is here to grab all the free benefits they can get without making a contribution.

This is a land of unprecedented riches, Ann argued, with much of that wealth built on the backs of immigrant labor, both legal and illegal. And yet people doing grunt work for low pay are being characterized as an infestation and a detriment, often with racial overtones.

Do Schwarzenegger and his Brentwood neighbors ask for the green cards of every gardener and nanny in their employ, she wondered?

“I’ve always paid my taxes,” she said. “And when I pay a dollar for something at the store, they take out my 8 1/2 cents, same as everyone else.”

After celebrating her graduation with family, first thing Ann plans to do is find an immigration attorney who has a solution other than marriage. Then she wants to go to grad school.

Something tells me she’ll find a way to get in.

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Reach the columnist at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at www.latimes.com/lopez.