"I would love to be able to tell people, 'You know, I'm undocumented,' " she says, "because I think it would shock them. My accent is not too strong. I'm young. I'm going to school. They would never characterize me as undocumented. The problem is, I am."
City Limits Magazine
July-August 2011:
Remember Poverty? The Problem 1.5 Million New Yorkers Can't Afford to Forget
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Immigrants are often seen as a reason for New York City's high poverty rate. As the Manhattan Institute's Steven Malanga wrote in 2007, "New York has a far greater stream of foreign-born residents arriving each year, relative to its population, than does the United States as a whole. And 27 percent come without even a high school education. No surprise then, as Census data shows, that 30 percent of all recent immigrants are poor (though less so than back home)—an average of about 23,000 new recruits to the ranks of the city's poor every year."
Yet according to Census data, the poverty rate for immigrants is actually slightly lower (17 percent) than for New Yorkers as a whole (19 percent), while noncitizens were only marginally higher (21 percent). And the Economic Policy Institute has estimated that immigrants have a higher employment rate than native New Yorkers.
Of course, undocumented immigrants often elude Census tracking. And being employed doesn't mean being employed well. C.'s undocumented status turned out to mostly manifest itself in limiting the jobs she could apply for.
College offers a path
Without a green card or any hopes of getting one, she took whatever jobs she could: secretary, receptionist, restaurant cashier. She eventually started waitressing, which she says she likes best of all: "Behind the counter, you have to do a lot of cleaning, and you feel even more lower. It's bad enough to work in a restaurant, but it feels even more inferior to have to clean while your bosses are staring at you."
After four years of low-wage work, C. discovered that a 2001 state law would allow her to enroll at CUNY as an in-state resident, no questions asked, within five years of graduating from a New York high school. She promptly enrolled at Hunter and set out to figure out how to juggle schoolwork and enough paid work to afford her tuition—as an undocumented student, she's ineligible for TAP or Pell grants or even book money.
"Every semester, it's a puzzle," she says. "I've tried only school on my day off, but that doesn't work, because you're exhausted. I've tried going to school in the morning and working at night. That kind of works—it's just a very long day." This semester, she's managed to keep her course load limited to three days a week, which gives her two mornings a week for schoolwork before heading off to her 3-to-11 waitressing job.
It's homework, she says, that is the backbreaker. "I could take seven classes if it was just going there. The problem is the work." On days that she has no classes, she gets up at 9 a.m. and studies until she has to leave for work at 2 p.m., not returning home until after midnight; on school days, she reads on the train, on her lunch break, whenever she can squeeze it in. The MTA's proposed ban on eating on trains, she observes, would present her with major logistical problems: "That would really affect me," she says. "You're running all the time. It's hard to eat a sandwich when you're taking notes."
