Yesterday, my grandmother became an American citizen.

My entire life I’ve been reminded what a wonderful, incredible privilege of birth I gained being the first in my family born in America. I heard the stories, watched my siblings struggle navigating the immigration maze and remember moments of my childhood playing tag inside the waiting rooms at the immigration offices. Like this article mentioned, my family arrived to the US via my father’s political asylum, but it was far from a smooth path to citizenship. And yesterday, after years of paperwork and meetings and filing and then refiling documents again and again it was made official and now my entire family in America can call themselves American.