“We have a lot of illegal immigrant children here, It’s ridiculous that they wouldn’t get access to school. Sometimes we make special arrangements for these students but it works, they are here and they should go to school”.
My son’s teacher said this during a meeting we had in January because of some VISA-problems of our own. It turned out later that the teacher, Dr N, had been researching Mexican migration to the US and the political situation for undocumented children here for years. At the same time she is giving language-classes to undocumented children.
The number of people living without documents in the U.S. is estimated at 11.5 million. If the DREAM Act passes, hopefully by the end of this year, young undocumented individuals would get a “path to citizenship”. DREAM stands for Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors and would allow for as many as between 800000 and 1,6 million young persons who have been living in the US for five years and entered the country before sixteen years of age to stay legally. Applicants who meet the bill’s requirements would become so called “conditional non-immigrants” and elude the risk of being detained, prosecuted and deported. Further, if the Act passes the Secretary of Homeland Security would have the authority to adjust the immigration status for qualified individuals, allowing for an application of permanent residency.
The idea of regularisation is not new. For 12 years people have been pushing Congress to give undocumented youths legal status. In 2001 Representative Luis Gutiérrez initiated the regularisation-Act under the name “Immigrant Children’s Educational Advancement and Dropout Prevention Act of 2001”. At that time it was a compromise of all the immigration reform bills that failed to get through Congress since Reagan’s first immigration reform in 1986. Democrats finally passed the DREAM Act in the House in the beginning of 2011. It got 55 votes in the Senate but was blocked by Republicans. In the meantime 12 states in the US have their own versions of the DREAM Act, most deal with tuition for state universities (Texas, California, Illinois, Utah, Nebraska, Kansas, New Mexico, New York, Washington, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and Maryland).
People being pro the DREAM Act keeps saying that this isn’t an amnesty programme that would produce a variety of social and economic benefits. And it is a fact that the US-borders are as secure as they ever can be. Not many people are coming now – this has to do with the economic downturn as much as with border enforcement. The US has spent an estimated $ 90 billion over the past decade to secure the Mexican border; annual border spending tripled over the last decade (only last year 18 billions were spent on border control); the increased spending has helped curb irregular immigration (http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/us-spends-90-billion-border-security-drugs-keep-pouring).
An argument against the Act is that the Dreamers, i.e. potential citizens, are going to take American jobs. But according to researchers this will not be the case. Most undocumented persons are already part of the labour force here. Except for some competition for the lowest skilled jobs, which Americans don’t want according to industry, peoples’ jobs are “safe”. Plus, US economy depends on undocumented migrants – households headed by undocumented workers collectively paid 11,2 billion in state and local taxes in 2010. Critics further contend that it would reward “illegal immigration” and encourage further immigration, inviting fraud. Of the American population 52% support allowing police to stop and question anyone they suspect of being “illegal”.
Undocumented persons in the movement, the “Dreamers”, don’t consider themselves “alien”, they are “undocumented Americans”, they are the unapologetics. A journalist expressed the problem in the following terms, as he “came out” in Time Magazine last summer: “I haven’t become legal because there is no way for me to become legal” (see http://ideas.time.com/2012/06/14/inside-the-world-of-the-illegal-immigrant/). The idea to ”come out” has shown to be tactical for Dreamers. For years undocumented learned to be quiet, to live in the shadows, and that their status was to dangerous to discuss in public.
No more.
Today, young immigrants are trained to tell their stories to anyone who will listen. Two years ago Dreamer-groups began holding coming-out ceremonies where students defied the immigration authorities with signs announcing they were “undocumented and unafraid” (see these YouTube clips: We Are Undocumented America: Fighting for Immigration Reform in 2013: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2vW_mOzHwA Immigration Reform: The Fight to Pass the Dream Act http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iz2yr-vPOeo).
To conclude. “Coming out” seams to be a successful strategy here in the US, for the DREAM Act to come true. It also appears – especially in the states where many undocumented migrants have lived for a long time (Nevada 7,2%; California 6,8%; Texas 6,7%), that a strong argument for the Act is practical. Undocumented persons are in the US; they won’t go away no matter how effectively the deportation machinery becomes.
At the White house web page Obama talks about a broken immigration system (http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/fixing-immigration-system-america-s-21st-century-economy). He says ”The law should stop punishing innocent young people whose parents brought them here illegally and give those young men and women a chance to stay in this country if they serve in the military or pursue higher education.”
Dr N, our son’s teacher, doesn’t give much for the political discussions going on in the US regarding regularisation. Getting access to the process of regularisation will be extremely complicated but might be a good first step in the right direction.
Anna
PS: Presente <http://presente.org> is an organisation providing relevant information in this field.
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