A Wall Street Star's Incredible Journey from Mexican Undocumented Immigrant to Broker Alfonso Chardy - SacBee.com
go to original March 30, 2015

Julissa Arce was once a rising star in Wall Street, selling investment products to wealthy people from a desk at Goldman Sachs. But the secret she could share with no one gnawed at her.

She was an undocumented immigrant who could not travel to see clients beyond U.S. borders because her papers were fake. She was a driven stock broker, with a bright future in the investment world — but she was not happy despite the large amounts of money she was making. That’s because Arce lived in constant fear of being discovered, detained and deported to her native Mexico.

How Arce, 31, became an undocumented immigrant, soared to the rarefied levels of Wall Street high finance and then stepped forward to reveal her story. Now, Arce is traveling around the country talking to other journalists as part of a campaign to change how America views foreign nationals who have no papers.

...“We want to achieve a change in American culture as to how we speak of and how we treat immigrants,” she said during an interview in Miami last week.

Arce has joined forces with José Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist from the Philippines whose case caused a sensation in 2011 when he revealed he was an undocumented immigrant.

Arce is now development director of Define American, a group founded by Vargas to protect the rights of undocumented immigrants and reshape their image. One of its key campaigns is to convince news media outlets to call these foreign nationals undocumented immigrants instead of illegal aliens.

Read the rest at SacBee.com

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