As a means for border-crossing, a passport can serve as our ticket to the American dream. Yet, like a lottery ticket, the passport is part of a system that is rigged against us: It make us blind to the deception that the American dream truly is. In the series, A Passport Is a Lottery Ticket, I overlay each face of the Philippine and U.S. passports over handmade paper embedded with lottery tickets.

Political, ecological, and socioeconomic hardships have long pressured generations of Filipinos to find work abroad. My mother was among the third wave of Filipino immigrants to the United States in the 1970s. She was among thousands of Filipinos that generation who pursued the American dream, the belief that anyone can succeed economically through hard work. As the prevailing aspiration that drives international migrant labor, the American dream is migration as a means of survival that plays into the hands of global capitalism. Global capitalism exploits the disadvantaged and impoverished by extracting their labor under the promise of social mobility through migration. However, by risking community and connections, migrants gamble for an uncertain opportunity for a better life. In other words, crossing borders is a bet on one’s life.