Keywords: immigration, illegal immigration, undocumented worker, immigration rights, immigrant, immigrant success, diversity, DiversityInc, brain surgery, Hopkins

"I feel I am paying back to this society and this country for all the opportunities I was given," said Dr. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa, 40.

Quiñones-Hinojosa, now a resident in Bel Air, Md., immigrated illegally from Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico, with his parents in the mid-1980s when he was 19. Quiñones-Hinojosa worked as a farm laborer in California's Central Valley, living in a truck camper for the first year. He and his family moved to Stockton where he first enrolled in English classes and then general-education classes at San Joaquin Delta College. While at Delta, the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 granted him permanent amnesty into the country. A few years later he received a scholarship and was admitted into University of California, Berkeley. There, he found his love for medicine.

Now his days aren't filled with picking food or hiding from immigration officials. He spends his time helping fix people's brains as a neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins University. "I spend most of my time, literally, in people's brains," says Quiñones-Hinojosa . "I don't really think much about anything else." His work has been featured on the ABC documentary series "Hopkins."

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