Sue Burns doesn’t shy away from telling her life story, even the less-than-perfect parts.
It’s something you would discover if you got to know her.
If you did, you’d be treated to her charming British accent, and she’d tell you about herself – starting with the fact that her biggest dream, as a kid, was to come to America.
She imagined the streets here paved with gold, a country where every day was like a Hollywood movie. The United States, in her mind, was everything her hometown, the English port city of Hull, was not.
Growing up poor, life was tough for Burns. She and a sibling were raised by a mother who supported the family on a teacher’s salary. Hull, in Yorkshire, was insulated, a city with a small-town mentality where, according to Burns, “everybody was in everybody’s business.”
The customary trajectory for most Hull girls: Marry, settle down, have a few babies.
But Burns didn’t want to be ordinary. “That was never a life that I wanted.”
What did she want?
“More than what I had,” says Burns, 35. “I didn’t want to be tied down to a situation that I saw my friends tied down into – married, with kids, on welfare… I was just always wanting to go somewhere different, do something different.”
It’s a familiar dream, one that’s launched millions of people around the world to seek better lives here in this country.
So Burns landed in Orange County in 1999, working a succession of jobs as a receptionist, office manager, and executive assistant. She dabbled recently in a work-from-home e-commerce venture, but with the recession, it never quite took off. So she’s searching for a new job.
That’s America: You work hard. You try. And if you fail, you try again.
Today, Burns is proud that she’s come this far: She has her own apartment in Costa Mesa in a tranquil complex complete with a gurgling creek that winds its way past her doorstep. She owns a car, has two cats, and loves that she can drive to the beach or the mountains whenever she wants.
But that’s not her whole story.
Did I mention that she came to Orange County on a tourist visa, and, when it expired, she didn’t return to England?
She was, in short, an undocumented immigrant.
She lived under the radar until 2006, when she received a work permit, (followed by her driver’s license). In 2008, she got legal permanent residency, the so-called green card.
Though some of her friends knew about her immigration status from the start, it took Burns several years before she told others. And when she did tell them, their reaction surprised her.
“There were hardly any negative comments,” Burns says.
Burns also noticed that law enforcement treated her differently. When she was apprehended for driving under the influence in 2004, she told the officer that she was in the country illegally. But he didn’t make an issue of it.
DUI ticket? Yes. Fines? Yes. Alcoholics Anonymous classes? Yes.
Deportation? Nope.
But about six years ago, as the debate over illegal immigration began to heat up, Burns noticed that some of her friends became especially vocal about other undocumented immigrants, especially those who were Latino. “‘Damned illegal immigrants,” she remembers one friend saying, “send them all back where they came from’.”
She’d protest, pointing out that she was in the United States illegally too. “Yeah, but you’re different. You’re white and English and you pay your taxes,” Burns’ friend told her.
This didn’t sit well with Burns.
“I don’t like racism in any form. (Latinos) are only doing the same thing I’m doing. My friends would say ‘That’s different,’ but they could never justify it. Or if they’d try to justify it, they’d say ‘Yeah, but there’s not 12 million of you living off the state.'”
Their defense of Burns may seem like a contradiction, but on one level it makes sense. Her friends knew her as an individual. They understood her dreams, they saw her sacrifices, including a decision not to fly back to England when her mother died because Burns hadn’t yet received a green card.
“The last time (my mother) came out here, we knew she was dying of cancer… She said to me ‘When I die, don’t do anything stupid. It’s your future now,'” Burns says. “…We knew that would probably be the last time that we’d see each other.”
At least one study suggests it’s easier to tell someone to “go back where you came from,” when you don’t know them.
A 2006 survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that native-born Americans who live among large immigrant populations hold more positive views of immigrants, and that “exposure to and experience with immigrants results in a better impression of them.”
This doesn’t mean that their concerns about illegal immigration disappear. The same survey found that those same native-born Americans also rank immigration as a big problem.
So what’s the solution? To be clear, I am not an advocate of people coming here illegally. Neither is Burns. But she says she does understand why it happens: “It’s so difficult to do it the right way that I don’t blame them for coming in illegally.”
She also doesn’t believe it’s feasible to deport the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants, as some people advocate. Instead, she hopes the United States can give these immigrants a chance to pay for a path to residency.
She hopes undocumented children are given a shot at college through the Dream Act, a piece of legislation with supporters and detractors across the political spectrum that would make it easier for some young immigrants to get citizenship and access to higher education.
And, once a week, Burns goes on an immigration-oriented Web site and offers advice to those applying for residency, giving them the benefit of her experience, or as she puts it “I just try to give people hope.”
“Everybody’s got an opinion on immigration, but nobody’s willing to make any suggestions. Those people who say ‘deport them all,’ they’re not willing to listen to reason,” says Burns.
Maybe, however, they’ll listen to a friend like Burns.
Contact the writer: at ycabrera@ocregister.com or 714-796-3649 or http://twitter.com/Ycabreraocr
