There are people in the world who will tell you all of their greatest accomplishments within five minutes of meeting them. Carlos was not one of these people. He was sixteen when we met, stuck in that limbo between adolescence and adulthood, and he made it seem entirely charming.

The second oldest in a family of six, Carlos did most of the work on his family’s farm in the rural hills of western Honduras. Muscular and energetic, he was clearly accustomed to working hard outside. While we were visiting, he showed off for my friend Maureen and I by goading a turkey into charging at him, then catching it by its legs without getting so much as a scratch. When Maureen told him how much he’d grown since she’d been a volunteer in the village several years earlier, he blushed furiously.

Carlos was also a hardened criminal, according to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. At the age of 15, he and his uncle came to Connecticut to work. It took them over a month to make the nearly 2,000 mile trip. Traveling by bus, truck, train and foot, they made their way through Guatemala and Mexico. They crossed the Rio Grande at night and trekked through the desert of southern Texas. Moving north they began hopping freight trains, an incredibly dangerous way to travel, exposed to the elements and in constant danger of being thrown off, locked in an empty car or stranded in the middle of nowhere.

After arriving in Connecticut, Carlos lived in a tiny apartment with his father, uncle and a few other men from their community. They worked for a landscaping company, arranging stones to build decorative walls. After six months in the U.S., Carlos’s mother urged him to return to Honduras; he made it as far as Texas before being caught and deported home.

Not one to announce his accomplishments too loudly, it was only after we’d been talking for a while that Carlos told us about his epic. “Muy peligroso” he described it, in his understated way. But despite his nonchalance, his story was jarring. It is one thing to know intellectually that people undergo hardship and danger to come here looking for opportunity, but quite another to hear a child tell of the experience.

Because of their enforced invisibility, it is easy to forget the United States is filled with people like Carlos: young, ambitious, hard-working men, women and children who have taken similar risks for a chance to work in America. They did not come here to break our laws or disrupt our way of life. They aren’t looking for handouts or charity; only opportunity where there was little before. And we’ve created that opportunity by coming to depend on their willingness to work hard for low pay and little job security.

Carlos certainly would have been an asset to the United States had he stayed, just as the many others who’ve come here still are. And while immigration status is how we judge a worker’s right to be in the country, it’s a poor measure of the value it brings to our nation. The distinction between legal and illegal immigration is an accident of time and place; what matters is the effort one is willing to contribute. By taking extraordinary risks and sacrificing the comfort and security of home for the unknown U.S., workers like Carlos and his family have demonstrated such willingness.

To treat immigrants fairly, we need to do a few things. First of all, we must recognize that Carlos and those like him have made an investment in America simply in coming here eager to work. We could do this by creating an expedited path to citizenship for those that have helped the country grow. At the same time we need to acknowledge the hypocrisy of persecuting immigrants while we profit from their labor.

Geoff Jara-Almonte ([email protected]) is a third year medical student.