To pay tuition at University of Texas, Julissa Arce would travel to San Antonio on weekends and sell funnel cakes.
Julissa Arce was offered work at Goldman Sachs investment firm the beginning of her senior year at the University of Texas in Austin. She worked her way up and over time became a vice president of that company.
While working at one of the premier investment firms in the U.S. could be challenging for anyone, Arce had an additional source of stress. Her visa to be in the United States had expired when she was a teenager and she was using fake papers to work.
“What if I got caught and what if I got deported?” said Arce. “What if all this went down the drain?”
Arce spoke at Lake Forest Academy the evening of Oct. 26 as the kick-off for a series of events and activities during this school year called the Head of School Symposium. The theme for the series of talks is “Immigration, emigration and migration: Culture, citizenship and conflict.”
Arce’s history in the U.S. started out typically enough. She moved from Mexico to San Antonio, Texas with her family at age 11. At age 14, her visa expired. Her family stayed in the United States.
She was accomplished in high school; playing basketball, taking AP classes, becoming a member of the National Honor Society. But the impact of being undocumented became clear when she started to apply to colleges.
“In the land of opportunity, the door was shut to me,” Arce said. “I was getting rejected because I didn’t have a nine digit number called a social security number.”
In 2001, Texas became one of the first states – along with California – to allow undocumented people to pay in-state tuition and attend college, she said. Arce attended the University of Texas in Austin. To pay for tuition, she’d travel to San Antonio on weekends and sell funnel cakes.
“I wasn’t allowed to open a bank account,” Arce said. “It was quite scary to travel on Greyhound buses with a knapsack full of cash.”
During her junior year at college, she saw a poster that said students could work on Wall Street for the summer and make $10,000. She applied to Goldman Sachs and was hired for the summer. She worked hard, remembered everyone’s name, came in early and left late. In September of her senior year she said she was offered a job with Goldman Sachs.
She bought a fake green card and other papers from a stranger. She moved to New York and started her job.
“I was just focused on working and my next raise,” Arce said. “I knew I had talent but if I went too fast, someone would notice.”
In 2007, her father became very ill. Both her parents had moved back to Mexico and Arce was worried that if she went to visit him, she might not be let back in the United States. She stayed in the U.S. and could not be present when her father died.
“That shook me to the core,” Arce said. “I thought, I really don’t want to be here anymore.”
At the time she was dating a man.
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“I told him I was going back to Mexico,” Arce said. “He said, don’t go, marry me! I said this is the worst proposal in the history of proposals. But I loved him and I said yes and married him.”
Married to a U.S. citizen, she then began what turned into a five-year effort to adjust her status.
“I had to pay thousands in fees and for lawyers and pay more fees,” Arce said. “It kills me when I hear people say why don’t you just make yourself legal, just get in back of the line like everybody else.
“My mom is in the waiting line,” she said. “For 20 years!”
In 2014, she was sworn in as a U.S. citizen. Arce left Wall Street and found work with Define American, a nonprofit that aims to “shift the conversation around immigrants, identity and citizenship in a changing America” according to its website, Recently she left Define American and is now writing a book about her experiences.
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