Just One Thing Missing

Martha doesn't like to talk about her future anymore. She'd wanted to go to med school, become an OB-gyn. And she's exactly the kind of kid everyone roots for. She grew up in a poor, mostly immigrant neighborhood in East Los Angeles, where most people didn't graduate from high school, and nobody talked about college. But Martha got into UCLA. She couldn't believe it: UCLA.

She majored in chemistry, threw herself into six-hour lab sessions, ran a volunteer organization on campus. But the fact is, she can't become a doctor. She can't work at all in the United States, not legally anyway. She’s an undocumented immigrant; her mother brought her here from Mexico when she was nine. So now she’s a waitress, earning minimum wage, working off the books, and it may be the best job she can hope to get.

A bill called the Dream Act would offer conditional citizenship to those few kids, like Martha, who grow up in the United States and make it to college, or the military. If they get a degree, or finish their service, they become full citizens. Since it was proposed in 2001, the Dream Act has gathered powerful supporters from both the left and the right. But it keeps getting bogged down in immigration politics.

This piece aired as part of the April 7, 2007, edition of "This American Life." It is a radio follow-up to "The Invisibles," an award-winning article about the sad, inspiring, surreal lives of undocumented students at UCLA, and the bipartisan push in Congress to accept these kids -- raised as Americans from a young age -- as citizens.

Listen to the radio segment using the player above, or download it as an MP3 file at the bottom of this page.