As soon as I snapped the photo, I knew it was one I would want to share with the world. 

As Liberty High School seniors played a final song with their high school band, I’d captured a photograph of one senior in particular from behind. The watching crowd was made up of mere specks in the distance; the focus of the photo was on the simple statement written in a teenager’s scrawling handwriting across the top of their graduation cap. 

“I am an immigrant’s daughter. My only desire is to make my parents’ dream of their little girl being something big a reality.”

As a mom, the sentiment moved something deep inside of me. 

It’s every parents’ dream that our children will see what it is that we hope most for them, will stretch the wings we have created for them and fly high enough to touch the sky. 

But it was as a great-granddaughter that the immigrant’s story wrapped up in this simple statement felt particularly touching. 

As luck would have it, just days earlier I’d come across an obituary for my great-grandmother, a woman I never got to meet, a German immigrant who had come to this country in the early part of the 20th century when she was just 15 years old. 

In today’s America, we don’t allow 15-year-olds to drive (at least not in most states). They can’t drink, vote or join the military. They can’t sign contracts, use the meat slicer in the grocery store deli or apply to find their adopted parents (if they were adopted). 

But 100+ years ago, my 15-year-old great-grandmother was setting up house in a new country, learning a new language and creating a whole new life as a wife and eventually a mother. 

Since discovery of this item tying me to the past, I’d been thinking of what it must have been like for a 15-year-old to leave the only home she’d ever known to travel halfway across the world to a country she’d never visited, to a place where people spoke an entirely different language. I’d been thinking of the life she and my great-grandfather built for their three children, a life that paved the way for my grandfather to then build a life with my grandmother for their own seven children, a life that gave way to my own. 

When I decided to share this photo on social media, I hoped others would be as moved as I was by this child’s tribute to her parents. 

I’d hoped they would take a few moments to think of those challenges that most immigrants face in the pursuit of a dream, often a dream for their children.

Then another student shared the photo to their own Instagram Story and added their own words. 

My original image and that added text were screenshot by someone else, creating a new version of the original, which quickly began to spread around Sullivan County’s social media circles.

It was on a friend’s Facebook page where I first saw this version of my original post, and where I made the mistake of reading the comments. 

Because some people refused to see a beautiful tribute from a child to her parents, refused to see the sacrifices of two parents doing everything to support the dreams they had for their child, refused to see the triumph of a child’s achievements on her graduation day. 

Instead they saw only an opportunity to hate, a chance to attack a child about whom they knew nothing aside from the color of her skin and the fact that her parents had come from a place other than the US. 

The great-granddaughter in me was heartbroken. 

The mother in me was enraged. 

The American in me was ashamed. 

Perhaps seeing a child of immigrants achieving an academic milestone and paying tribute to her parents for their sacrifices does not move you as it did me. 

If it does not, I challenge you to look back through your own family’s history. Save for the direct descendants of those enslaved and brought to America and the direct descendants of Native Americans who first peopled our land, we are all here because of immigrants just like my great-grandmother who sacrificed to build a dream for their children. 

Those dreams and those sacrifices are why it is we are here today. 

Would they be proud of the you that you are today?