Undocumented : How Immigration Became Illegal (9780807001684) (23 page)

Then the family entered the netherworld of false documents, obtaining a doctored passport and green card (resident alien visa) and sending twelve-year-old Jose with a coyote—who, he was told, was his uncle—to live with his grandparents in 1993. The boy never knew of the extra-legal nature of these arrangements or that there was anything unauthorized about his presence in the United States.

Vargas’s experience coming of age, symbolized by his rebuff at the DMV, falls within what sociologist Roberto Gonzalez describes as the “transition to adulthood” for many undocumented youth. As Gonzalez explains, becoming an adult also involves a “transition to illegality” as “public schooling and US immigration laws collide to produce a shift in the experiences and meanings of illegal status for undocumented youth at the onset of their transition to adulthood.”
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These youth, while treated equally under the law during their childhood, are excluded from the rites of passage that lead most American youth to the adult world. They are left in a “developmental limbo.” The extremely low economic status of most undocumented families pushes young people to assume more financial responsibility than their documented peers, —but they are not, officially, allowed to work. At the same time, they are cut off from other stages in the transition to majority like learning to drive, registering to vote, undertaking postsecondary education, or opening a bank account.
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It comes as a shock that the society that nurtured them suddenly closes its doors. One student wrote, “I did not think to question the pledge of allegiance or the history that was being taught to us. . . . Looking back, I should have questioned the allegiance I pledged every morning to a country that rejected me.”
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YOUTH ACTIVISM

This generation of undocumented youth coming of age in today’s United States is historically unprecedented. Most undocumented adults are individuals who were raised in another country and came here as adults. They knew life in their country of birth, and they came here of their own volition (but, of course, under historical circumstances that they did not choose). Their experience of life in the United States is that of being undocumented.

Their children, who may be undocumented as well, have a completely different life experience. They were raised and attended schools in this country, where they were repeatedly told that this is a nation of immigrants, a country that treats everybody equally. They were taught that if they worked hard, they could attend college and get a good job. They were taught that they had rights, because that’s what the schools teach children in this country. They learned about Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and about Martin Luther King Jr. and struggles for racial justice and equality. At home, they were taught that their parents brought them here so that they could have a better life.

When Carola Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, and Irina Todorova studied several generations of immigrant youth and their experiences in US schools, they found that the immigrants of the first generation are the highest achievers. They are acutely aware of the sacrifices their parents made to provide more opportunities for them, and “these parental sacrifices propel many immigrant students to launch themselves wholeheartedly into their educational journey.”
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Learning that they are undocumented and what that means is an unexpected and unacceptable shock to many of these children. They never felt or knew that they were any different from their classmates. Consider these testimonies from students: “It’s almost like I am tied down to the ground with a ball and chain because I don’t have citizenship”; “It’s like someone giving you a car, but not putting any gas in it”; “They say you can accomplish whatever you want or set your mind to, but they don’t say that it’s just for some.”
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Just as this new generation of undocumented youth was finishing high school, the 1996 Welfare Reform Act and IIRIRA made it almost impossible for them to go to college. By prohibiting them from receiving public financial aid and depriving them of state residency, the acts effectively shut the door to higher education.
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These youth have been at the forefront of organizing for immigrants’ rights over the past decade. Access to higher education has been one focal organizing point for high-achieving students. At the state level, they fought for the right to be considered state residents and to attend public colleges and universities. At the national level, they fought for the DREAM Act, which would give them educational rights and also put them on a path to citizenship.

In Texas, Republican governor Rick Perry signed the first in-state tuition law in 2001, allowing undocumented students to be considered state residents for tuition purposes. California passed a similar law later the same year, and other states followed. As of mid-2013, fourteen states offered in-state tuition to qualified students who were undocumented.
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Some arguments about in-state tuition were strictly economic. Proponents explained that it would increase state revenues by allowing more individuals to enroll in state colleges and universities, while opponents feared that letting in the undocumented would reduce the seats available to citizen students. The number of students able to take advantage of these provisions has been small: as of 2005, there were 1,620 in the University of California and California State University systems and 5,100 in Texas, including the community college system, which accounted for about 80 percent of undocumented students.
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The Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation estimated that such a law would allow some 350 students a year to enroll in that state, again with the majority going to community colleges.
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In-state tuition has been a state-level struggle. Only the federal government could address the larger issue of status. The DREAM Act, proposed and defeated or abandoned numerous times at the federal level, would create a path to citizenship for certain undocumented youth. The different versions of the act vary slightly on specifics, but in general they address a population that has come to be known as the “DREAMers”: young people between the ages of sixteen and thirty who were brought to the United States by their parents before they reached the age of sixteen—that is, as children—who may have crossed the border (or remained in the country) “illegally,” but not through their own will or decision. The act would extend provisional legal status to such youth for six years. If they attend college or serve in the military for two years, their provisional status could be converted into a path to citizenship.
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(Other individuals and organizations object to the military service provision, arguing that it is trying to create a de facto military draft for young Latinos, since most would not be able to afford college tuition even at in-state rates.)
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The Migration Policy Institute estimated in 2010 (based on 2006–2008 figures) that there were 2.1 million undocumented youth who were potential beneficiaries of the DREAM Act. Almost a million of these were under the age of eighteen.
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The DREAM Act was reintroduced repeatedly in both the US Senate and the House starting in 2001, and included in S. 2611, the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act approved by the Senate in 2006 (later defeated in the House of Representatives), and S. 744, the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act passed by the Senate in 2013.

Many advocates saw the rights of DREAMers as a front line in a larger struggle over the meaning of undocumentedness. By placing a sympathetic face—a high-achieving high school student—together with the term and the status of undocumented, they sought to challenge the better-known image associating the status with criminality.

Still, there was significant debate in the movement over this tactic. By emphasizing the innocence of students who were brought to the United States as young children with no choice in the matter, did the campaign tacitly accept the guilt of these students’ parents, who had made the decision? Were the students being held up as exceptional, deserving, undocumented individuals, thus implying that other undocumented people were not deserving?

While some were wary of the way the DREAM Act seemed to skim off and privilege the most publicly acceptable portion of the undocumented population, most organizations believed that it was an opening to challenge the very concept of undocumentedness. Undocumented youth who grew up in the United States do not fit the profile that many citizens hold of the “illegal immigrant.” Many of these youth feel motivated to take advantage of their relative privilege as English-speaking, assimilated, and educated members of US society to fight publicly against anti-immigrant and anti-undocumented sentiment.

The DREAM Act both responded to and created an outlet for a huge upsurge in organizing by undocumented youth. Claudia Anguiano, who studied the history of undocumented student activism in depth, outlined three phases. From 2001 to 2007, “self-identification strategies were used to create a collective group identity that countered the negative dehumanizing typecast of ‘illegal aliens’ by identifying DREAMers as
exceptional students
.” During the following two years, “self-representation strategies worked to unite undocumented youth through the creation of national coalitional organizations and through self-identification as
undocumented and unafraid
.” Finally, during 2010, “activists utilized strategies of self-reliance and self-identified as
unapologetic DREAMers
. The strategies of intervention included the use of civil disobedience tactics to petition for the legislation.”
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In 2009, DREAMers founded the organization United We Dream to coordinate nationally and use the tactic of coming out or telling their own stories as a political weapon. “Leaders realized that encouraging young people to recount the stories of their lives in hiding and of their thwarted aspirations could be liberating for them, and also compelling for skeptical Americans.”
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Taking inspiration from the gay rights movement, many have themselves and encouraged others to come out and hold public coming-out ceremonies. Jose Antonio Vargas suggested, in his defiantly titled essay “Not Legal, Not Leaving,” that “we are living in the golden age of coming out.”
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Coming out can be a personal liberation, but it is also part of a larger project to insist on social and legal acceptance, which means fundamentally changing the legal structures of belonging in the country and challenging the beliefs that underlie and justify anti-immigrant sentiment.

DREAM activist Gaby Pacheco accompanied much of this process. Pacheco, like Jose Antonio Vargas and so many others, learned that she was undocumented when she went to apply for her learner’s permit. She had come from Ecuador to Miami with her parents when she was about to start third grade. She began to organize for the rights of undocumented students in 2004, founding Students for Immigrant Rights in Florida and working with the Florida Immigrant Coalition and
Presente.org
. “From four of us that used to meet to try to pass the DREAM Act, we now have 16 chapters throughout Florida. Students Working for Equal Rights is part of the United We Dream network, which is led by students and represents 26 states,” she explained.
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In January 2010, Pacheco joined three other immigrant Florida students for a fifteen-hundred-mile march to Washington, DC, part of the ongoing and increasingly public campaign to press for the rights of the undocumented. “They said they had concluded that the exposure to immigration agents on the walk was not much greater than what they faced in their daily lives. ‘We are aware of the risk,’ [one participant] said . . . ‘We are risking our future because our present is unbearable.’” ICE declined to comment on the issue.
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“Coming out didn’t endanger me; it had protected me,” wrote Vargas. “A Philippine-born, college-educated, outspoken mainstream journalist is not the face the government wants to put on its deportation program.” He also wanted to use his case to publicize the arbitrary nature of immigration enforcement. “Who flies under the radar, and who becomes one of those unfortunate 396,906 [who are deported]? Who stays, who goes, and who decides?”
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A year after coming out, he recounted his attempt to find out what ICE planned to do about him.

Amid increasingly visible activism and sympathetic media coverage, Congress took up the DREAM Act again at the end of 2010. Although it passed the House of Representatives, advocates could not muster enough votes to overcome a Senate filibuster.

Most Republicans opposed the DREAM Act in the 2010 vote, even some who had supported previous attempts. The House was about to be turned over to a Republican majority. For some DREAMers, it was time to shift away from a legislative strategy. “In a meeting after the vote with Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, Ms. [Gaby] Pacheco said she grabbed him and whispered in his ear. ‘You know the president has the power to stop deporting us,’ she said. ‘You know you could tell him to do this.’ Startled, Mr. Reid gave her a hug and walked away.” In early 2011, United We Dream decided to change its focus to the president. At the National Council of La Raza meeting in Washington in July, when Obama tried to explain that he could not bypass Congress to push for immigrants’ rights, DREAMers “erupted in shouts: ‘Yes you can! Yes you can!’”
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