Spare Parts

by Joshua Davis

  After the applause for Cape Fear died down, Merrill cleared his throat for the next announcement. “And second place goes to MIT,” he said into the microphone.

  There was a feeling of shock in the room. Cristian looked at Fredi.

  “MIT got second?” Cristian blurted.

  “So who won first place?” Lorenzo asked the table.

  Fredi realized that something extraordinary was about to occur. He leaned across the table and grabbed Lorenzo’s shirt. “Lorenzo, if what I think is about to happen does happen, I do not, under any circumstances, want to hear you say the word Hooters onstage.”

  “And the winner of the Marine Advanced Technology Education ROV Explorer-class championship goes to…”

  Merrill started drumming on the podium. A deep rumble rose up around the room as others joined in. Only nine months earlier, the Carl Hayden students hadn’t known what an ROV was. There was no way they could win.

  Merrill stopped drumming.

  The room fell silent, and Merrill leaned into the microphone.

  “Carl Hayden!” he shouted.

  The 2004 Marine Advanced Technology and Education Explorer class ROV championship was not going to a big-league university, or a team of seasoned competitors. It was going to four high school students who had simply hoped not to finish last.

  “Oh my God,” Allan said. He felt tears welling up. He grabbed Fredi and shook him. “Oh my God!”

  Lorenzo threw his arms into the air, looked at Fredi, and silently mouthed, Hooters.

  The students from MIT stood up and began to clap. Other competitors stood as well, and by the time the Carl Hayden team made it to the stage, most of the room was on its feet. The teenagers from Phoenix were getting a standing ovation. The audience roared their support.

  The kids from the desert had won.

  “WE BEAT MIT!” Cristian screamed out to the ocean.

  They had hiked a mile down the darkened beach. They couldn’t contain themselves inside the awards hall and had gotten out as quickly as they could. They didn’t want to be rude, but it was too much to handle without a little yelling.

  “We wo-o-o-o-o-on!” Oscar hollered into the night sky.

  “AHHHRGH!” Luis roared.

  He was so loud, everyone fell silent. The night was quiet—just the sound of the waves crashing softly.

  “I want you guys to know how proud I am of you,” Allan said.

  “From now on, you guys are the team that beat MIT,” Fredi told them. “You know what that makes you?”

  “What?” Cristian asked.

  “Badasses,” Fredi said, smiling.

  “Damn,” Lorenzo said, getting used to the idea. “I’m a badass.”

  Oscar couldn’t remember being happier, but his eighteenth birthday was only days away. It brought a significant decision for him. Once he turned eighteen and became an adult in the eyes of the law, his legal status in the United States would change. He was always at risk of deportation, but as a youth, he couldn’t be banned from reentering the country. However, if he was caught and deported after he turned eighteen and a half, he would be barred from returning to the United States for three years. If he was nineteen and a half or older and caught, the ban would increase to ten years. The law was meant to incentivize immigrant teens to return to the country where they were born.

  But, for Oscar, there was little to go back to. He remembered Mexico—he’d left when he was twelve—but there was nothing there for him anymore. His parents were in Arizona, as were his friends and mentors. It was hard to imagine walking across the border to Mexico in a week’s time when his entire life was in the United States. And fundamentally, he viewed himself as an American. He figured that he would eventually be able to convince the government that he was worthy of citizenship.

  Fredi took a picture of the kids standing by the shore that night. Oscar, Cristian, and Lorenzo threw their fists in the air. Oscar held up his index finger to signal that they were number one. Luis looked confused. On the beach around them, piles of shrimp had been washed ashore. There were hundreds that had been overpowered by forces beyond their control. Fredi took pictures of everything that night so nobody would ever forget.

  FOUR

  ON DECEMBER 16, 2004—five months after the Carl Hayden triumph in Santa Barbara—Russell Pearce took the stage at the Brookings Institution’s Falk Auditorium in Washington, D.C. The Arizona state representative had been invited to talk about policies affecting children in immigrant families. The session was titled “The Future of Children,” and Pearce expressed his strong belief that being too nice to immigrants wasn’t good for the country or even the immigrants themselves.

  “You don’t have a right to have compassion,” Pearce insisted. “None of us would do anything to harm children. But sometimes our policies, well intended, do much damage.”

  To Pearce, Arizona and the United States had become too hospitable to immigrants. They were flooding the country, illegally receiving welfare, and getting a free education at taxpayers’ expense. Many voters in Arizona seemed to believe that immigrants had come to the country to leech off the government. From this perspective, immigrants weren’t here looking for work, they were poor, lazy families that would contribute less than they received to the country. Pearce felt that policies needed to be put in place to discourage them from entering the United States.

  Pearce championed a solution. Just a month before his speech in D.C., voters in Arizona had passed Proposition 200, a bill that barred illegal immigrants from receiving public benefits, from welfare to education. The text of the proposition summarized the motivation succinctly: “This state finds that illegal immigration is causing economic hardship to this state and that illegal immigration is encouraged by public agencies within this state that provide public benefits without verifying immigration status.” Fifty-six percent of voters voted in favor of the proposition and it passed.

  Sheriff Joe Arpaio responded to the rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment among voters in Phoenix by forming civilian posses to hunt for illegal immigrants. Starting in 2006, the posses were made up of more than three hundred civilians who were encouraged to track down illegal migrants. They were told to identify cars that appeared to be carrying illegal immigrants, as well as houses where they lived. Though they were only supposed to turn the information over to sheriff’s deputies, many of the volunteers were armed. Both opponents and supporters of the posses saw them as a way of scaring migrants out of the country.

  Far from cooling down, the debate over immigration was only getting more heated. On May 15, 2006, President Bush ordered six thousand members of the National Guard to begin patrols of the U.S.-Mexican border. The intent was to buttress the Border Patrol’s efforts to capture immigrants and prevent migrants from crossing. “The reason why I think this strategy is important is because deploying the six thousand troops to complement the work of the Border Patrol will get immediate results,” Bush said. “And it’s time to get immediate results.”

  The question was: Would militarizing the border achieve the desired results? “It’s as if we expect border control agents to do what a century of communism could not: defeat the natural market forces of supply and demand and defeat the natural human desire for freedom and opportunity,” noted New York mayor Michael Bloomberg told Congress. “You might as well sit in your beach chair and tell the tide not to come in.”

  OSCAR WIPED the white gypsum dust from his face. It was a hot Tuesday afternoon in Phoenix eight months after the success in Santa Barbara. The half-built apartment complex in front of him was teeming with workers. He was wearing a leather carpenter’s belt slung with a hammer, and he lifted a four-foot-by-twelve-foot section of Sheetrock from a pile. He may have proven himself to be one of the most innovative underwater engineers in the country, but now he was just another day laborer.

  He had chosen to stay in the United States past his eighteenth birthday and now felt stuck: there was nothing for him in Mexico, and he was like
a ghost in the United States. He was running the risk of being banned from the country for years. Still, Oscar maintained a sense of optimism. As he trudged through the half-built units hauling hundred-pound sections of drywall, he studied the plumbing and electrical wiring. He wanted to make sure he was learning something.

  In the heat, when he let his thoughts wander, he thought about college. He dreamed that he would major in mechanical engineering, serve in the military, and go on to have a career as an engineer. It all seemed like a mirage, since he couldn’t afford the first step. He was making between five and eight dollars an hour, and a degree from Arizona State University would cost approximately fifty thousand dollars. There was no way he could raise that kind of money by sheetrocking.

  Cristian had a similar problem. He also dreamed of going to college, but his hopes flagged when the air-conditioning unit in his family’s trailer broke. Without AC, the trailer turned into an unlivable aluminum oven in the desert heat. His parents had to spend three thousand dollars of savings to buy a new unit—money that Cristian had hoped could be used to at least start college.

  After graduation, Luis started working two jobs. During the day, he filed papers at a Social Security office. In the evenings, he continued to work as a short-order cook for Harold Brunet at Doc’s Dining & Bar in Youngtown. It seemed unrealistic to expect that his life would change that much. He assumed that Santa Barbara had been nothing more than a blip, a brief glimpse into the opportunities that other people had. He tried not to think too much about it.

  * * *

  In April 2005, I published an article in Wired detailing the 2004 MATE championship in Santa Barbara. It was the first national coverage of the event, and the story provoked a variety of responses. Hooters called to invite the entire robotics team to a free dinner. (“That was hella cool,” Lorenzo recalls.) Many readers wrote to express their support for the Carl Hayden robotics program.

  “If the really long list of immigrant inventors who have made this country and the world a much better place is to stop here and now, we will also likely become the newest declining nation,” one reader commented.

  The Wired office was soon flooded by e-mails offering to help the four young roboticists continue their education. Individual readers eventually contributed more than $120,000 to a scholarship fund set up by the school district for these kids. This generosity opened up a world of opportunity for them. It now looked like college was within their grasp.

  The article also made the four Carl Hayden teens the faces of a generation of kids who were born elsewhere and had grown up without residency papers in the United States. In 2004, there were an estimated 1.4 million kids who fit this description. Despite their numbers, these children were largely invisible. Their families avoided publicity. After all, nobody wanted to invite scrutiny if it meant deportation.

  At first, the Carl Hayden team didn’t realize that their story would attract much notice. Nobody had paid attention when they first won the MATE competition, so they figured the Wired article wouldn’t change anything. But in the weeks following publication, additional media requests poured in. When ABC’s Nightline asked to broadcast their story, the teammates had a meeting in the robotics closet. Fredi and Allan explained that the show wanted to focus on their immigration status. They were being asked to talk about living illegally in the country on national television. It could lead to trouble for all of them.

  “If you were my own kids, I would tell you not to do it,” Allan said. “It’s too risky.”

  After discussing with their families overnight, the teens reconvened the next day. They agreed that if any one of them didn’t want to do it, they would say no to ABC. Cristian’s family was very concerned and didn’t want him to participate. He wasn’t convinced though. Cristian thought that it was important to speak out. Lorenzo and Luis agreed. They needed to talk about their experience. Otherwise, traditional stereotypes about immigrants would persist. Voters naturally fell back on their assumptions about what low-income Mexican migrants were like. Stories of migrants stealing or fighting made the news, but when Carl Hayden won the national underwater-robotics championship, no prominent news outlet covered the story initially.

  “We got a chance to say something,” Lorenzo said.

  “I agree,” Oscar said. “This is a Rosa Parks moment. It’s about more than us now.”

  They decided to do the broadcast.

  THE MEDIA ATTENTION prompted some to wonder if Santa Barbara had just been a fluke, a one-time accident of fate. Cristian and Lorenzo—who hadn’t yet graduated—proved them wrong. In 2005 and 2006, the Carl Hayden robotics team won the top prize at Dean Kamen’s Arizona FIRST competition in Arizona. They went on to the national championships both years and were a top competitor. They placed third at the 2005 MATE event and second at the 2006 event, beating MIT (again) both times. In 2007, MATE organizers held the event in Canada, in effect preventing the undocumented students at Carl Hayden from attending. To compensate, Fredi and Allan formed their own underwater-robotics competition, an event that continues to this day.

  More than anything, the 2004 underwater-robotics team inspired the kids that came after them. The robotics team swelled to more than fifty members, all of whom heard the tale of how Oscar, Luis, Lorenzo, and Cristian had succeeded with little more than their ingenuity and some spare parts. Now, when the team competed, the cheerleaders showed up. In 2008, the team won the national Chairman’s Award, the most prestigious prize at Kamen’s FIRST competition. Year after year, they consistently performed at or near the top of every division they entered.

  They also tried to get other kids excited about robotics. During the fall, before the year’s serious robot building got underway, team members fanned out to local elementary schools in West Phoenix. They brought old robots with them and gave demonstrations to the younger kids. In 2004, the Carl Hayden robotics team hosted a junior robotics competition in their gym. Within a few years, the event grew to include hundreds of young students and had to be relocated to Arizona State University.

  The team’s rising profile brought new supporters. In 2005, a group of businessmen in Oregon and Washington read the Wired article and decided to help. They formed a foundation that provided college scholarships for members of Allan and Fredi’s robotics team. Between 2005 and 2010, the foundation spent $720,000 and sent twenty-three kids to college. “Our country cannot afford to squander the talents of these kids,” says Peter Gaskins, one of the businessmen. “I’m just not willing to accept that this is the way it has to be.”

  The robotics program became a pathway to college. Robotics students won more scholarships than all of Carl Hayden’s athletic programs combined. “This team has transformed so deeply that expectations, dreams, and possibilities have expanded beyond what was previously unimaginable,” said John Abele, the billionaire cofounder of Boston Scientific, in announcing the top award at Dean Kamen’s 2008 robotics competition. “What was once a struggling school is now a soaring inspiration that demonstrates a passionate partnership … can unlock the dreams hidden within.”

  Fredi and Allan may have succeeded in giving their immigrant students new dreams, but often the reality was that those dreams were impractical. Many Carl Hayden students didn’t have Social Security numbers or green cards and couldn’t get normal jobs even if they did graduate from college. It kept Fredi up at night. He worried that his kids would drop out of the program if they felt that it wasn’t going to lead to better lives. In his mind, that led to a ripple effect of catastrophic proportions. Kids would drop out of school entirely if they didn’t see the point, crime would increase, society would lose great minds, and the next generation wouldn’t be prepared to take over the country. At least that’s what went through his mind late at night. He might be able to inspire and train extraordinary engineers, but the world didn’t seem to want them.

  ALLAN AND FREDI urged Cristian to apply to MIT; it seemed like a natural fit. But to Cristian and his family, Boston seemed t
oo far away, too foreign. His parents wanted to keep him close given his residency status. They felt better having him nearby. A private university also seemed forbiddingly expensive.

  Arizona State University was a safer choice. Cristian would qualify for in-state tuition and would be able to cover the costs with the scholarship windfall. Still, ASU was a difficult departure from Carl Hayden. Cristian found himself in lectures with almost four hundred students. His chemistry teacher stood in front of the lecture hall and read the slides he projected onto a screen. It was mind-numbing and infuriating, particularly because 10 percent of the chemistry grade was tied to attendance. It felt like the antithesis to four years of building robots at Carl Hayden.

  Since his parents hadn’t gone to college, he found it hard to share his feelings with them. Instead, he regularly stopped by Carl Hayden to talk to Allan and Fredi. “I’m not learning anything, but I have to show up anyway,” he fumed on one occasion. “It’s a huge waste of time.”

  “You have to jump through the hoops,” Allan told him. “It’ll be worth it.”

  Cristian stuck with it, but statewide sentiment was turning against him. When ABC’s Nightline aired their segment on the Carl Hayden kids, Arizona State Representative Russell Pearce explained to viewers that it was inappropriate to focus on a small group of students: “You can’t paint this picture of this sweet child over here that we all probably know. And all of us know somebody that’s here probably illegally that is a wonderful, wonderful person. You can’t take it to that emotional element and, and let that play. Because, look at the damage to America overall.”