Editor’s note: José Ángel’s last name is being withheld to protect him from retribution based on his status as an undocumented immigrant.

They likely won’t gain it anytime soon. The Senate’s comprehensive immigration reform bill has stalled in the House, and a path to citizenship—or even legalization—for the 11 million or so undocumented immigrants in the country appears to be off the table for 2014. Republicans want to gain control of the Senate in the midterm elections, and House Speaker John Boehner recently cited a lack of trust in the Obama administration as a stumbling block.

On the first try he got swept up in a raid on a safe house in San Diego. The second time he made it to Chicago. It was April 1993. He had a $2,000 smuggling debt, and he spoke no English. Relatives in the south suburbs took him in and helped him get oriented. He bought a fake social security card on 26th Street, obtained a driver’s license and state ID, and quickly found work mowing lawns and washing dishes at a Mexican restaurant.

Within five years of arriving in Chicago, he was enrolled at Moraine Valley Community College. There, for perhaps the first time since he’d arrived in the U.S., he made a decision that had nothing to do with economic gain: to major in philosophy. “Maybe I should have studied something that would have been profitable,” he says, “but the whole idea of ideas caught my attention.” José Ángel had grown up with only two books in his house—a Bible and an atlas—and now he was reading ravenously. “It was like access to a secret universe,” he says.

Because José Ángel doesn’t have a travel visa, he can’t visit his family in Mexico without jeopardizing the life he’s worked so hard to build in the U.S. His mother and grandmother tried to visit him, but their applications for tourist visas were denied. (Mexicans without property or other financial assets usually have trouble convincing consular officials that they have a strong incentive to return.)

Like many undocumented workers who pay into the social security coffers, José Ángel received yearly no-match letters from the SSA, informing him that there was a problem with his social security number and that until he corrected it, the money taken out of his paychecks would not be put toward his retirement. The first time he saw the letter, the part about retirement money didn’t register—he wasn’t aware of the public benefits available to citizens. He just worried that he’d been found out. In later years he came to see the letters as the government’s tacit approval of his employment. “I thought, they may be keeping my money, but at least I get to keep working,” he says. Still, he knew he had to be cautious around his employer, and whenever there was talk of having him travel for work, he had an excuse at the ready—usually an ill family member.

By José Ángel (University of Illinois Press) Reading Sat 3/15, 7 PM Book Cellar 4736 N. Lincolnbookcellarinc.com