Amid a history of failure, dreamers struggle to stay hopeful
Jessica Flores | Intersections Contributor | 5-10-2010 | Comments |
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In a sea of 60,000 people, drummers thump to chants of “Si Se Puede!” Thousands of American flags whip the warm air. Organizers with megaphones pump up the stream of people. And a small group of college students once again walk in downtown L.A., carrying signs with the message that consumes them: Pass the DREAM Act.
This year’s Immigration May Day march, in many ways, has been a year in the making. While others around the nation rally for immigration reform in the wake of Arizona’s anti-immigration law, the demonstrations are nothing new to these students. The group of about 20 DREAM Team L.A. members, who call themselves “dreamers,” first gathered last May, following the introduction of the DREAM Act to the House of Representatives.
“From the first day, I thought this was going to be a long-term thing,” says Ed, recalling the meeting of Cal State, University of California and community college students. Ed, 25, whose name has been changed for this article, rests on his bicycle at the end of the march’s route. He sports a Pancho Villa-style mustache that gently curls at the tips and wears an American flag that forms a rectangle hanging around his neck. He feels American--he grew up here—but he’s not.
He’s not sure he ever will be.
After a year of events aimed at getting national attention for The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act-- the bill that would legalize some students like Ed---exhaustion and disillusionment have set in.
Arizona’s bill that requires police to arrest people who can’t produce legal documentation is propelling immigration to the forefront and renewing hope that Congress will take up the issue this year. While some dreamers believe they are now closer to a bill that would erase their fears of deportation, others are waking to a different reality.
“I can’t put my life on hold to keep helping the movement, every single year, every single month, every single day,” says Ed, who wants to transfer from East L.A. College to the University of Southern California next year, but says he has postponed his educational goals to advocate for the DREAM Act.
In the last year, the dreamers have held news conferences outing themselves as undocumented students, walked 18-miles through downtown L.A. to put the spotlight on the DREAM Act and had countless meetings about what to do next.
Nancy organizes dreamers in "coming out" day.
“These are the kinds of things we have to do on top of being a student, on top of having to survive,” says Nancy M., who has emerged as a leader in DREAM Team L.A.
Still, there’s no sure sign Congress will pass the Dream Act this year. The bill would provide a path to citizenship for students brought to the U.S. before the age of 16, who are pursuing college or the military and who prove “good moral character,” among other requirements. Ed and Nancy both fit the profile, and they are frustrated waiting for it to pass.
“This is the last campaign for a lot of us,” says Ed just a week before May Day. “We know that if it doesn’t happen in May, then we are all screwed and the last year was a waste.”
They’ve seen their hopes crushed before.
The bill has floated through Congress for the past 10 years and in 2007 it was narrowly defeated, just eight votes short of the 60 needed to overcome a filibuster. The hopes for legalization for some 65,000 undocumented youth who graduate American high schools every year, again, were put on hold.
Ed thought that was his chance for legalization. So did Nancy. “I’m going to have this degree from this great university that I can’t use,” says Nancy who’s graduating UCLA with a B.A. in Chicano Studies. She wants to be a lawyer, but can’t get internships in the courts without a social security number.
By all measures, she’s done everything right. It’s how she got to the U.S. that blocks her pursuits. Border smugglers brought her and her mother over when Nancy was just two.
In fifth grade, Nancy entered an essay contest and won. She wrote about the Mexican-American reporter, Rueben Salazar, who was killed in 1970 when a police officer’s tear gas bomb pierced his head during a march against the Vietnam War. He was from East Los Angeles, like her. Already politically aware as a young girl, Nancy wrote an impassioned essay explaining Salazar’s role in the Chicano movement.
She received a letter explaining that she needed to send in her social security number to receive the savings bond award. But when Nancy told her mother about the award, her mother didn’t greet the news with her 11-year-old’s enthusiasm. Instead, she looked at Nancy and dashed her hopes. “You don’t have papers,” Nancy recalls her mother saying.
From then on, she knew when kids or teachers in classrooms talked about “Illegals” and “Aliens,” those foreign words identified her.
Ed always knew about his status. When he was seven years old his aunt and uncle took him from Mexico to the U.S., pretending that he was their legal son. At some point during the trip across the border he fell asleep. He awoke in California and hasn’t been back to Mexico since.
“They said you can’t tell people you don’t have papers,” said Ed.
And growing up, he never did.
Nancy takes a riskier approach. She openly speaks about her undocumented status in school. “When someone says “illegal,” you have to stand up and say, ‘we are undocumented,’ as an undocumented person, you have to humanize the issue,” says Nancy.
Just a few weeks before the Arizona law passed, Nancy and a few others organized a group of students to claim their status in a “coming out” day.
L.A. college student sports a t-shirt to support the DREAM Act.
Nancy awoke that day with butterflies in her stomach, at once putting aside her looming college finals. She understood how historic this day would be for her and the other students. “We’ve never come out and said we are undocumented and we are not afraid. We’ve always said, ‘the dream act, it’s important,’ but never so bluntly as ‘come get us or listen to us,’” she says.
On that day, about twenty undocumented students stood firmly on the steps in Pershing Square, looking proud and fearless. They wore gray, black and red shirts with the words “undocumented” branded across their chests, and carried signs with the familiar message: “Pass the DREAM Act Now.” News cameras captured each of the young faces.
Ed was among the crowd, wearing a black version of the shirt. Nancy stood in front of the group, wearing a fitted red version of the shirt. Holding a megaphone in one hand and a stack of manila folders containing DREAM Act petitions in the other, she balances the papers in her arms, and begins to hand them out to groups of students, instructing them to go out into the streets and get signatures to support their cause.
Unlike in Arizona, Los Angeles police abide by a rule that prevents them from asking for legal documentation from people, even from people with their status bolded on their clothes. As students file back in from the streets, Nancy eagerly greets them and stretches out her arms to collect the petitions.
“How was it? Did they say anything about the shirts?” she asks. “There were a lot of people that just brushed us off,” says a tall girl with multi-colored bracelets stacked on her wrists.
Staying positive, Nancy just laughs and tugs at her shirt, “But we look so cute!”
At the end of the day, the group sits in a circle on the manicured grass and passes around the megaphone. Nancy listens as each student shares many of the same emotions. They feel liberated to just claim their undocumented status, many explain.
Nancy nods her head and lowers her brow. She picks at the grass, appearing absorbed in her thoughts.
She should have been legal by now.
It’s a thought that has surely flowed through her mind time and again, since she started campaigning five years ago. Even so, she’s found a way to keep achieving. She just got accepted to UCLA Law School.
In California, hundreds of people like Nancy and Ed pursue higher degrees without having to apply to school as international students and pay international fees. California’s Legislature passed AB 540 in 2001, which treats undocumented youth in California like residents. They are allowed to pay in-state college tuition for state schools, although they are not granted financial aid or federal and state loans. Ten other states have similar laws.
But for Nancy, the educational opportunities in California will only take her so far. “As I’m going into law school, there’s just a lot of uncertainty. I think the worst thing is, if I graduate from law school, what then? I can’t work,” she says.
During the time Nancy and Ed have been advocating for a path to legalization, other advocacy groups have successfully countered their message.
“You may give legal status to students, but then you’d have more illegal immigration to come,” says John Wahala, assistant director for Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based think tank that supports tough immigration laws. He thinks any amnesty, even for these students, is sending the wrong message to the thousands who apply to come to the U.S. legally.
Under federal immigration law, undocumented students would have to go back to their countries of birth to apply for documentation and wait for a period of three to 10 years. But if they leave, there’s no guarantee they’d be allowed back into the U.S.
“We advocate a position of attrition through enforcement,” says Wahala explaining that the position means making it impossible for undocumented people to conduct a normal life, compelling them to return to their home countries.
It’s the exact type of goal supporters of Arizona’s SB1070 hope to achieve. Wahala thinks the Arizona law is proof that federal immigration reform will fail. “In general, it’s very unlikely that they’ll get an immigration amnesty passed. I think the sentiment in Arizona is more indicative of the American people.”
Ironically, Wahala suggests that Americans would more likely accept a small-scale amnesty for students because Americans are more sympathetic to young people who grew up here. Still, that sympathy doesn’t seem to matter much in politics.
“I think even though the American public as a whole seems to be more sympathetic to these students and their experiences, the political sphere certainly isn’t,” says Olga Medina, who specializes in immigration policy at National Council of La Raza.
Immigrant rights groups, such as NCLR, have been lobbying Congress for years to pass Comprehensive Immigration Reform, an immigration overhaul that would include the DREAM Act. They also supported the DREAM Act as a stand-alone bill in 2007. Yet even with many Republican legislators and President Bush’s support then, the DREAM Act failed to get enough support from members of Congress.
Ed blames the failure partly on the very groups who advocate for immigration reform. He thinks The DREAM Act would be within reach if immigrant rights groups stopped focusing on overhauling the whole system and put more weight behind the DREAM Act’s small-scale amnesty.
“All the regular immigration rights organizations, their responsibility lies somewhere else. They support us when we have events, but they are not committed to the DREAM Act,” he says. And feeling abandoned by established immigrant rights organizations is making him fed up with the cause.
For now, he’s still in the movement, trying to balance both advocacy and his education.
On May Day, he missed out on marching with the dreamers. He spent the morning at USC interviewing for a journalism scholarship and joined the marchers at the end of their mile-long rally.
A few dreamers stand in a circle off to the side, wearing their high school and college graduation gowns as if affirming their commitment to succeed. Behind these dreamers, Nancy sits on the street curb, and for a moment gets some rest in the shade. She had spent the day before organizing a rally at UCLA to protest Arizona’s new law.
“CNN was there!” She says excitedly, another signal that the movement it getting attention.
Then she gets quiet, looks into the distance, with swollen eyes and a faded smile. “I’m just tired,” she says.
It’s the feeling Ed knows all too well. But on this day, a blanket of signs and a mass of people raising their voices for immigration reform surround him, providing him some hope that the momentum for change is there.
No reform, No reelection!
Obama, no more separate families!
Stop the Raids!
Pass the DREAM Act Now!
He’s sure the DREAM Team efforts in the march-- coordinating security for the event and publicizing it to their networks--helped make national waves for immigration reform.
“I’m proud that for a ragtag group of students who got together, we are still together and making pretty big impact,” he says.
He’ll probably still leave the movement, though. If he gets into USC next year, he’ll just focus on school. He’s looking for someone else to take the campaign forward, for the next fight in Congress.
“Maybe somebody from a high school, or someone that hasn’t been involved in the movement, to take those positions over and keep the movement going, so I can take care of my own stuff and when I’m finished, I can come back and still contribute.”
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