Dispatches, United States
Undocumented Immigrant Youth Support DREAM Act By Coming Out Of The Shadows
May 5, 2011 By Eline Gordts
“Children of undocumented immigrants are incorporated in this country through education,” Roberto Gonzales, assistant professor at the University of Washington, explains. “They mix with their American and non-American friends, accumulate experience, learn the language. Their teachers foster the expectation that if they work hard and are bold enough, all of their dreams are within reach.Yet once graduated, undocumented students tend to find themselves with as narrow options as their parents once had,” Gonzales said.
The Dream Act would offer undocumented young adults who grew up and went to school in the United States a perspective on conditional citizenship when completing two years of college or military service. The bill was drafted in 2001 by both Democrat and Republican senators, who argued that children should not be punished for their parents’choice to immigrate illegally. The current version of the bill would allow undocumented youth to pay in-state tuition to study at American colleges, receive work authorization during their studies and would make them eligible for conditional nonimmigrant status after ten years.
President Obama has repeatedly voiced his support for both the Dream Act and comprehensive immigration reform, most recently in his commencement address at Miami Dade College on April 29. Yet only a few days earlier, the president reiterated that he would not halt deportations of undocumented immigrants. With 392,000 undocumented immigrants deported in the fiscal year of 2010, deportations under the Obama administration outnumber those of any prior administration.
Facebook, twitter and DreamActivist.org
Undocumented students first organized in the months leading up to the vote on the Dream Act in 2007. Mainstream movements for immigrant reform acted as a voice for the students at that time, yet few of them felt truly represented or heard. “Before the vote in 2007 the exposure was minimal,” explains Juan, Communications Director at DreamActivist.org, an online network of undocumented students. “There was really no representation and no information.” Juan started DreamActivist.org, a website that provides undocumented students with information on legislation, college applications, or pro-immigration organizations. The site quickly turned into a networking platform for undocumented students nationwide.
Yet as the Dream Act was up for vote again in December 2010, Juan and others at DreamActivist.org felt that the bill was still not taken seriously. They launched a series of national disobedience actions, “even though we figured at that point that if we were arrested, that would be the end.” Their biggest action was a sit-in in front of the office of Sen. John McCain, and while activists did get arrested, no one was deported.
Other undocumented youth organizations organized similar events.There were sit-ins in California, Minnesota, Illinois and Georgia, as well as in front of the offices of Senators Harry Reid (D-NV) and Charles E. Schumer (D-NY). In Kentucky and New York, Dreamers called a hunger strike. In March 2010, thousands gathered on the National Mall to rally for immigration reform and the Dream Act. By then, a national network of undocumented students had emerged, who kept each other posted on their lives and the Dream Act through blogs, facebook and twitter.
“I saw it as a power move,” Juan says of those days. “We were raised never to talk about our status, to be scared as hell. No one was talking out loud, and just like me there were thousands who don’t know, who are afraid, who don’t have a voice ultimately.”
Melissa Garcia Velez, who was at the rally in Washington last year,described the importance of the Dreamers-movement in similar terms. “It was such a relief coming out,” she says. “I finally felt like I didn’t have to hide that aspect of my life anymore. I didn’t even think about being afraid, I was just overwhelmed by the strength of all these students, the power of saying those words.”
The Dreamer movement’s burst of momentum in 2010 raised awareness of the bill, according to professor Gonzales. “As the students took more ownership of the movement, they challenged a lot of the frames that were previously created by advocates,” Gonzales said. “The earlier discourse put the innocent children against their parents, arguing that you can’t punish children for their parents’ mistakes. But it pushed the debate into an issue of who gets what in this country.” Gonzales said.
Many undocumented students today stress that neither they, nor their parents, are to blame.“It’s not a choice we made,” says Garcia. “It was our parents’ and they made it envisioning a better future for us, an education. They were often unaware of what was coming, they lacked education. If you want to understand why people immigrate, you also need to understand why they leave,” she said, positing that global immigration policies and free trade agreements between the United States and Latin-America drove her parents and many of their generation into poverty.
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