Uriel Casas

I’ve delivered this speech at high schools dozens of times. I decided to put pen to paper in a sort of speech and publish it. I have been mentoring young people for twenty years now. I am not sure what amazes me more; that virtually all of us struggle to determine what we want to do with our lives, or that it took me decades of teaching before I could understand my purpose. The key for each of us to understand what we are meant to do with our lives is to learn how to align three different components of our development. We need to discover what our dreams are, what our purpose is, and what is our Why.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is credited with the saying: Life is a journey, not a destination. The idea that the journey, not the destination is what matters resonates with me. However, recently I read an excellent book by Grant Cardone, where he makes a convincing argument that attaining your goals is what we should focus on regardless of how we get there. As I have learned in life, not only can opposing viewpoints be both true and beneficial, but more importantly the willingness to embrace contradictory values is critical to emotional intelligence.

With that stated, when I speak with teenagers I want them to understand that their dreams, and all of our dreams will change throughout our lives. Even the way we label them can shift. Whether we think of them as dreams, goals, our destiny, or something similar; I believe that the way they shape us is what is most relevant in our youth. Many teenagers dream of fame and wealth as adolescents, which is not a bad thing, but as our scope broadens our dreams narrow into specific goals. Whether we achieve any of our goals or not, eventually we all develop new dreams and new goals.

No matter how unfathomable a kid’s dream is, I always encourage them to go after it with all their resolve, courage, and grit. Learning to work hard is a journey that requires no particular destination. Hard work will eventually pay off for everyone willing to do it. We should also not be afraid to fail; on the contrary, we should develop a tolerance for failure early and often. Failure is one of mankind’s greatest teachers. Lastly, developing perseverance will separate us from the masses. Far too often people settle, stop having dreams, and never pursue their purpose. Life is hard; everyone knows this because it’s true for everyone. Even in ideal conditions, life is hard, and for many of us at times life seems impossible. Continuing to dream, working towards our goals, and attaining some of our desires will be a determining factor whether we are simply happy or not.

In the end, the dreams we attain will create the memories we most enjoy sharing with our loved ones, but the dreams we pursue and fail to achieve will develop the character we need to achieve our goals. We will take far more journeys than arrive at our destinations, but without all of the journeys, we will miss our destinations. The dreams we pursue are the first factor in understanding what we should do with each of our lives.

I like to ask high school students if the world is full of problems. This is a rhetorical question, as the world is overwhelmed with problems. Then I ask them, where do they think all these problems come from. For the most part, the challenges we face as a species are manmade. I am an undocumented immigrant, or an illegal alien, as some people like to label me. But who made me illegal? Am I illegal in the eyes of God? Does nature consider me illegal? Has the universe deemed me an illegal? I am only illegal because a series of men arbitrarily created laws and borders to separate neighbors and label us different, foreign, alien. While on an intellectual level, I can regard such labels as indifferent, in reality, they have had a huge negative impact on my life. I cannot escape the manmade problems of my kin.

Kids typically ask me, if adults created most of our problems why can’t we fix them? I respond by stating that a better question is why we created them in the first place. My answer to this question is as follows: most people on this planet are not fulfilling their purpose. Call it God, the universe, or destiny; every person on this good earth serves and has a purpose. The problem is most of us are not serving our purpose. The difference between our dreams and our purpose is that our dreams are meant to serve us, and our purpose is meant to serve others. Jim Carrey once said, “How will you serve the world? What do they need that your talent can provide? That’s all you have to figure out.” So many of us ignore our purpose that humanity suffers.

How do we discover our purpose? The best thing about our purpose is also the worst thing about our purpose. Our dreams and our purpose are almost identical. We can discover our purpose in this life. The problem is our purpose will be different enough from our dreams that we will not want to do it. My dream, what I choose to do with my life, and what I love doing more than anything else is to help others. The reason I love helping others is that it makes me feel so good about myself. In other words, helping others is not about them; it’s about me and how I like making myself happy. But that is not my purpose in this world.

I have more than one talent, but what I am truly gifted at is encouraging others. I remember the first time I learned that I was so disappointed, it seemed so passive and lazy to me to just encourage others. What I had to learn is that the reason I didn’t like is that encouraging others made my efforts about them and not about me. My purpose is different enough from my dream that I have to work at it every day to make sure I am not selfishly ignoring my greatest talent. The reward for fulfilling our purpose is that it helps us understand what we are supposed to do with our lives.

No matter how much we desire our dreams and are willing to fulfill our purpose without a Why we will not have the grit and resolve to see our dreams through. So what is our Why? Our Why is the external motivator that will give us the drive and perseverance to not give up when we encounter inevitable overwhelming challenges, but more importantly, keep our focus during the monotonous marathon that is our journey during the pursuit of success. I like to tell students this story when I explain how to discover your Why.

I wake up at 4:30 AM every morning for work. I do it because I know my hard work will pay off. Even though I love my work and my life, and I am happy; I still hate waking up early. I am not a morning person, I detest the mornings and I am miserable when I wake up. However, there was a time in my life when I was so excited to wake up in the morning that I sometimes would wake up before 4 AM. During this time in my life, I only got to see my best friend at 5 AM in the morning. She and I worked at the same gym and Monday through Friday we got to spend an hour together before the club opened at 6 AM. It was the highlight of my day. I used to hate weekends because we only did morning shifts during the week. The worst day of my week was Friday because I knew I would go three days before seeing her again. Fortunately, that’s not the case anymore, but the best way I can explain what your Why is, is to ask you: What is it in this world that would cause you to not only wake up at 4 AM or earlier every morning but so excited to start your day that you feel it is the best part of your day?

I am embarrassed to write this now, but I used to arrive at the parking lot 15 to minutes early because I did not want to miss one second with her. Every day when she pulled in she would ask me, have you been here long? I would always pretend that I arrived a minute before her. Your Why is whatever in life makes you act this way and keeps you acting this way throughout the years. I arrived at that empty gym parking lot for over a year before my immigration status forced me to leave that job. I would have continued to do for as long as my Why was there to motivate me. For most of us, our Why will always include other people.

The only way to determine what we are supposed to do with our lives is to discover and align our dreams, our purpose, and our Why. It will require us endless hard work, grit, and perseverance. But when we do we get a Steve Jobs, a Malala, a Mother Theresa. When we do the world is never the same, it is much much better.

Dedicated to my favorite Clemson Tiger. Go Get Em Lindsey! Don’t let life’s challenges get you down too long. “You’re going to make a wonderful adult.” Le Petit Prince

This week, through social media, I was exposed to an image of a Latino toddler who was crying behind what appear to be a cage. The image provided little other information and the multitudes of people who posted it, captioned the photo with outrage over the treatment of undocumented immigrants by the Trump administration.

After taking the time to look for the source of the image, I learned from https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/toddler-cage-photo/ that the photo had nothing to do with the Trump administration, nor was the child in a cage. For several weeks now I’ve seen many inaccurate attempts to accuse the Trump administration of holding immigrant children prison style conditions. And that’s where we are in America; people will not act until images and videos of horrific injustices are made visible to the country.

People are trying to shame the masses into outraged over the conditions immigrant children are being held captive in. For whatever reason, we need a literal visual of the terrible act before we can decide that an injustice has occurred. For years we knew that domestic violence was present in the NFL. It wasn’t until a video of Ray Rice striking his fiancée appeared that we took it seriously in our society.

Regardless of how horrific, or not horrific, the conditions these immigrant kids are living under, the conditions are not what is damaging these kids. The desperate angry arguments made by Samantha Bee and others are not depicting the real inequity that DHS and ICE are inflicting on these families.

The most horrific abuse these children are experiencing is simply that they have been separated from their parents. Even the degree of violence in which these kids are parted from their mothers is not as grave as the actual separation, and will not leave the same lasting impression. Every time one of us tries to shame others by using images of inhumane conditions, we demean and divert from the actual suffering these kids are living daily. We shouldn’t need breaking news or images to realize that Jeff Sessions’ actions have already gone far beyond cruel.

Because abuse and malice is not the worst thing a child can experience. The worst thing children can endure is separation and anxiety from being parted from their loving caretakers. My mother came to the United States one year before me. She left my brother and I with my father’s mother for an entire year so that she could prepare a home for us in what would become our new country. It broke her heart to see her 7 year-old son desperately cry for her as she left.

She chose to sacrifice a year away from her children so she could build a better life for us. What she didn’t know, and would not learn for several more decades is that she left her youngest son to endure a year of abuse and torture.

Over the next year my grandmother molested me dozens of times if not hundreds. My grandmother led me to believe that I needed to keep this secret so that no harm would come to my brother or my mother. Wess Stafford once said that children will endure an unlimited amount of pain to protect their loved ones. For my seven-year-old self, this statement was true. I endured what no child should have for a year with the promise that I would see my mother again one day.

On August of 1987, I was reunited with my mom as an 8 year-old boy. Despite the terrible things that I experienced, I only felt joy in being held in my mother’s arms again. I waited 27 years before I told her what had happened to me the year she left to help build our new life in America.

I waited because the abuse and malice I endured was trivial compared to the joy of having my mother back in life. The real suffering I endure was being separated from my mother for a year. And as a little boy I didn’t understand why we needed to be apart. I just needed my mother.

I am sickened by the idea that some, probably many, of these kids are enduring mistreatment from government officials or foster caretakers. But I know the anxiety from the separation of their parents is what is really causing damage and pain. These kids are not patsies for us to politicize our disdain for the current administration. They are children, who are currently enduring the worst thing a child can experience, the loss of their parents.

We shouldn’t need and image or a video of the conditions these kids are living in to know that what is happening is inhumane. I was raised to believe that Americans value family above any government, law, or policy. If we are not already outraged by what DHS and ICE are doing to these families, than no image should have the capacity to change our minds. We have already decided that these children and their parents are criminal and unworthy of compassion.

By allowing these families to be ripped apart, we’ve already lost the capacity to see them as humans or valuable. There is no point in trying to humanize their plight through images of poor conditions and inhumane treatment. By doing so we disregard the real pain they are suffering. If we are not already outspoken about what has happened to these kids, we have already demean the damage that they endure.

Whenever we are introduced to someone new, a label is used to describe who we are. I don’t like labels; I’ve carried one in particular that I don’t care for most of my life. I arrived in this country in 1987. Thirty-one years as an undocumented immigrant, it is a lifetime. Yet it has put me in the unique position to relate to both citizens and immigrants. I was 8 years old when I arrived; I had a typical American childhood. I assumed I would be going to college. Then reality hit, as an immigrant, I would not be allowed attend school. Thank God for Junior College, they’ll take anybody. I spend the next four years at Montgomery College; hiding feelings of shame, not asking anyone for help, not reaching out to others; feeling alone, scared, and worthless.

At that time people like me were called illegal aliens. Illegal alien is a powerful term, both hateful and a complete fallacy. By labeling immigrants as aliens, it made it easy to turn us into villains. Aliens are foreign, different, not from this land, easy to hate, easy to blame, and easy to discard. But we are not aliens, we are human; we are people just like you. As humans, we can still be labeled criminals, illegals, lawbreakers, bad hombres, not the deserving of sympathy. People that use these labels don’t understand our own immigration laws. I cross the border legally on a tourist visa, 6 months later my visa expired and I became something called out-of-status.  But as a minor, I could not break the law. It wasn’t until I turned 18 that I started breaking our immigration laws. My crime is similar to the crime of most DACA recipients. By overstaying our visas we commit a civil offense, not a criminal offense. Essentially my status is the equivalent of someone parking their car illegally but never getting a parking ticket. That is our terrible crime, a common civil offense.

Yet in my youth, the term illegal alien weighed heavily on me. The first time I considered suicide in my life was the spring of 2001. Most of my friends were preparing to graduate from college. I saw no path to a future, and I kept asking myself what am I going to do without a college degree? I stopped thinking of myself as a person, and I started thinking of myself as a number, an invalid number, just another Illegal alien. Instead of reaching out for help I decided to end my life. You know what I didn’t do? You know what never even remotely cross my mind? Move back to Mexico. This is my home and it never occurred to me to leave my home.

So one day I got to my car and decided to drive it into the Potomac River. When I failed to execute my plan I felt even more worthless even in that I was a failure. I don’t know how, but somehow my mother must have known. A few weeks later she drove up from Florida and dragged me to the University of Maryland admissions office. She started bothering everyone inside the Mitchell building. We were repeatedly told that we didn’t have an appointment and that we needed to come back another time. My mom refused to leave, I was humiliated, and I couldn’t wait to get out of there. Eventually, a kind admissions director stepped out of her office and spoke with us. My mother told her the entire truth and begged her for help. I thought this is the stupidest thing in the world. That admissions officer had no reason to help us. She handed me a Maryland application and told me to fill it out. When we got to the in-state status section, I ran into the problem that got me rejected every time I applied to a 4-year School. There were only two boxes I could check.  I either had to check a United States citizen box or an alien resident box. I qualified for neither. I needed an alien resident number to go to college. The previous summer my mom had gotten married and was now a legal alien resident. The admissions officer asked my mother for her alien resident card and told me to fill out her number on my application. Two weeks later I was admitted into the University of Maryland.

I was given an opportunity; I was given a chance to realize my dream. The road would be difficult I would have to overcome more challenges, but I was given a path to success. I would have to complete 70 credits and come up with $3500 in tuition every semester. I was advised that I should spread out my 70 credits over five or six semesters. However, $3500 was more money than I had ever seen in my life; I was going to find a way to do it in four semesters. Against my counselor’s advice, I got special permission to take 19 credits my first semester at Maryland. Over the next two years, I kept a full schedule of classes with no less than 17 credits per semester while working at least 40 hours a week at minimum wage. Living on my own I had a 45-minute commute to and from school. I had no access to loans, grants, or scholarships. I had to pay every dime of my tuition up front and in cash. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.

I want to tell you about the happiest day of my life because it wasn’t graduation day. The happiest day of my life was 5 weeks before graduation. The University of Maryland has something called the Terrapin payment plan. It allowed me to break up my tuition into monthly payments. In April of 2003, my grades were good enough where I knew I would graduate. I was about to place my final $700 payment on a credit card. I still remember walking into the Lee building, the financial building; standing in line waiting for that nice Filipino man to accept my final tuition payment. And I remember thinking, I did it, I did it. Even if it takes me the rest of my life to pay off that credit card, there wasn’t anything anyone could do to take my degree away from me. I had finished the race, I had kept the faith. The next month I walked with my class completely debt free.

When people hear my story they told me how remarkable that accomplishment was. They think it’s even more remarkable when they learn I am an undocumented immigrant. The funny thing is while I was going through it I never considered what I was doing to be particularly remarkable. For me, I had a goal and I could only focus on completing that goal. For me, success was the only option. I share this part story with you because it taught me one of the most important lessons anyone can learn. The only thing necessary for anyone to accomplish something remarkable something outside of the scope of what they believe they can do is to make success the only option. Tony Robbins once said when people are given the choice between success and death most people will choose success. In order to realize our dreams and accomplish incredible feats, we have to go after them believing that success is the only option.

This can be harder for citizens than immigrants. One of the wonderful things about America is that hundreds of millions of people have access to comforts most of the rest of the world can only dream of. These comforts make it difficult the risk our dreams.  As an undocumented immigrant, I have an unfair advantage because I don’t have a choice. I have an MBA from the University of Maryland and I can’t get a job as a sales clerk at Best Buy. If I didn’t build a business I wouldn’t have a job, I wouldn’t have a life. It’s not a fluke that so many entrepreneurs are either immigrants or the children of immigrants. For people like me, success is the only option.

This leads me to the second lesson my journey taught me. Immigrants are the key to the fulfillment of the American dream. I had a conversation once with the brilliant professor name Michael Yahuda.  Michael is a British citizen who was raised in Israel; he spent most of his adult life in England, and now lectures around the globe. Michael knows how much I love this country and how I believe America is the greatest country in the world. He once asked me why I had this opinion. I told him this is the land of opportunity, the Constitution; our system of government makes it the best place in the world to live. He responded if the Constitution is so great how come it has never worked anywhere else?  I ignorantly responded because no one else has ever tried it. To which he corrected me, many countries have tried and failed. I felt like a fool and lost the argument.

A couple years later I had a meeting with another friend name Joe Moore. Joe is a brilliant attorney and successful entrepreneur. I met with Joe a week before my story was published. I wanted my friends to hear it from me that was an undocumented immigrant, not read it in a newspaper. Joe is one of the last person’s I told. Joe was a strong Mitt Romney supporter. I didn’t think Joe would understand my situation. I couldn’t even look him in the eye as I apologized for who I truly was. He responded, what are you sorry for!? The anger and his voice shocked and also woke me up. What was I sorry for!? I had done nothing wrong. And at that moment I knew that I would never again apologize or feel ashamed of who I am. I am proud of the man I became. Then Joe said something the change my perspective. Joe said to me, Uriel America it’s not the greatest country in the world because the smartest people from around the planet come here. America it’s not the greatest country in the world because the wealthiest people from around the globe come here. America it’s not even the greatest country in the world because the most beautiful people come here. America is the greatest country in the world because the bravest people from around the globe come here. Joe said, think about a mother in South or Central America, a child in hand making the journey across several nations; including the entire country of Mexico with drug lords and crime. Only to arrive in a country where she doesn’t speak the language, she doesn’t know anyone and has no way of knowing how she’s going to provide for her family, with the sole purpose of giving her children a better life. America is the greatest country in the world because those courageous mothers, like my mother, have sacrificed everything so their children to build a future for citizens and immigrants in the United States.

The American dream is for both citizens and immigrants, but without a constant flow of new immigrants, that dream could die. It has been my experience that the American dream works best when immigrants and citizens reach out and help one another build the country. I have a small business. It is nothing special. I am a simple man, living an average life, in my small corner of the world. But my business does serve my community of Bethesda Chevy Chase Maryland. We are located about a mile From Walter Reed hospital, where our wounded veterans go to heal. We have partnered what’s a yellow ribbon fund to invite our veterans to heal their bodies and their spirits by learning the art of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. A few miles further away is the San Miguel School of DC, a Catholic school for underprivileged boys. San Miguel brings these boys to our academy to learn skills that they would otherwise not be able to afford. We also provide regular women’s self-defense seminars to teach valuable skills that will help the women in our community avoid becoming a victim.

We do these things for free because we believe it is the right thing to do. I’ve learned that doing the right thing is the most important thing I can do with my life, no matter the cost. Over the past two years, I’ve spoken to thousands of students about immigration and following your dreams, which has made me very public. Every day I look at the door and wonder if today is the day. If ICE will walk through my door, place me in handcuffs, and rip me away from life and my home.

However, doing these talks have taught one simple truth. As long as this country is the land of opportunity, immigrants like me will do everything we can to make America the greatest country in the world. We will fight, we will sacrifice, and we will endure, to keep America great; because for us, success is the only option.

I like Nate Boyer a lot. I was impressed and moved by his interactions with Colin Kaepernick. Nate is also an American warrior, who humbly served this great country and has my esteem gratitude and utmost admiration. I do appreciate his message of unity and his desire to bring us together. But yeah, no! It is about Trump.

I believe kneeling for the anthem is a flawed protest that I will not engage in. However, when Trump vulgarly used it to label peaceful protesters as miscreants, Trump drew a line, not others. I’m choosing to stand on the other side of the line.

Trump’s side has always desired a literal divide in a border wall, mass deportation, a Muslim ban, government interference in women’s birth control, “law and order” in black communities, deregulation of environmental protections, and silence from the media and other critics.

We’re not sure what more has to happen before nice white Christian folks accept that this bigot is perpetuating the divide, but no white person is telling us how to find common ground with the Nationalist Front and their sympathizers. Again, they’re not interested in cleansing other whites, at least not yet.

While most Kaepernick critics are not white nationalists, they’re also less troubled by a president who proclaims that there are very fine neo-Nazis in America than a president who calls black activist SOBs.

This is about right or wrong. I’m happy to have the side I stand on labeled the wrong side, as long it is the opposite side of white supremacists. The same way I’m happy to go to hell, as long as Trump supporting evangelicals are not there. We’re not finding a middle ground with those passionate about having us gone. We have had many face to face with them, and have seen their inability to overcome their fears as well as their vast capacity for hate.

There is no common ground between minorities and the Klan. Eminem said it best: if you’re still struggling to decide which side of the line to stand on. Please allow me to invite you to stand on the Trump side as we’re not interested in your neutral support. Eminem didn’t state it quite that way, respectfully, I rephrased it a little.

I realize for some, this perspective is outrageous, offensive, and fabricated. However, is it truly that repugnant and flabbergasting to believe that a country whose short history includes the genocide of natives, the enslavement black people, the denial rights to women, and countless other prejudicial atrocities; would still have many white supremacist waiting for a politician to promise them a return and realization of a dormant fearful hate?

If you’re still looking for a middle ground and compromise, please stand with Trump on the other side of the line. I never thought I would find something to appreciate about neo-Nazis. But I appreciate their directness and candor.

There’s is no middle ground for them. We’ve already looked them in the eyes, realized we are the scapegoats to their fears and have experienced their hatred. We’re not going to try to defeat their hate with an olive branch of love. We’re going to combat their hatred by doing the thing that infuriates them the most. We’re going to exist and live the best lives we can, or we’re going to die trying.