Undocumented : How Immigration Became Illegal (9780807001684)

by Chomsky, Aviva

  She then attempted to cross the border illegally to reunite with her family, but was caught and returned to Guatemala. Now, legal entry became even more complicated. Reentry after deportation is a felony, punishable with jail time, and one of the Obama administration’s priorities for deportation is those who reentered after being deported. In Mexico, Sandra “says she feels so hopeless about her life that she has thought about ending it. ‘I just want to be forgiven,’ she said, sobbing on the phone. ‘I feel I am about to go crazy, I miss my children so much. They are all I have. I cannot go on without them.’ Back home in Stamford, her children are suffering too. The youngest cried constantly, the eldest became angry and withdrawn. Though their plight is documented in thick files that include testimony from psychologists and counselors about their need for their mother, appeals for humanitarian relief were denied.”26

  The case of an undocumented Ecuadorian immigrant who was detained with her fifteen-year-old son illustrates the contradictions as different government agencies pursue conflicting goals. The mother had lived in the United States for four years and had a one-year-old daughter born here. She sent for her fifteen-year-old son, who was detained crossing the border and placed in DUCS custody. Following DUCS policy, she was called and her son was released to her. “I received a call to come pick him up,” she explained from her prison cell, “so I left my daughter with my friend who lived next door, and took a bus to Arizona to get him. I picked up my son and we went straight to the bus. At the bus station, I was approached by some officers and they detained both of us. I have been here for nine months without seeing my baby girl. She was only one year old when I left her with my friend. I don’t know what is happening with her.”27

  When parents disappear into the immigration system like this, they run the risk of losing custody of their children.28 Courts may terminate parental rights after parents are deported or detained. In the criminal justice system, prisoners have guaranteed certain rights and access to services. Immigrant detainees, though, fall into a sort of constitutional and legal netherworld. The circumstances of their detention often make it impossible for them to comply with requirements for retaining custody of their children. Relatives who could care for a child in the parent’s absence may be afraid to identify themselves because they too are undocumented. From the perspective of child welfare services, the system of detention and deportation can create insuperable obstacles to the goal of enabling parents to care for their children.29 “In the child welfare system, immigrant parents are at risk of losing their children without the same constitutional due process protections in place that other parents receive.”30 An unknown number of those children are being put up for adoption against the wishes of their parents, who, once deported, are often helpless to fight when a US judge decides that their children are better off here.

  In a 2007 case, an undocumented Guatemalan woman was arrested during a raid at the chicken plant where she worked in Missouri. While she was in detention, her six-month-old son was taken from her custody and put up for adoption. The judge ruled that “smuggling herself into a country illegally and committing crimes in this country is not a lifestyle that can provide any stability for a child.” Her parental rights were terminated and the infant was adopted. Although the Missouri Supreme Court overturned the judge’s decision in 2011, that ruling was in turn overturned by a judge who ruled that she had “effectively abandoned her son.” The mother was deported, leaving the child with his adoptive parents in Missouri.31

  LEARNING TO BE UNDOCUMENTED

  Other undocumented children, some of the most politically active today, were brought or sent here by their parents at a young age. The United States is now raising a generation of children without documents, and the legal proposals to address their status, ranging from in-state tuition to the DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act, reveal the discomfort that their existence poses. “They are Americans in their heart, in their minds, in every single way but one: on paper,” President Obama declared.32 As one undocumented student put it, “I breathe, eat, and live in America and have done so since I can remember.”33 The president’s remarks remind us that a person’s birthplace is an almost entirely arbitrary fact. Should it really be used to determine his or her subsequent life chances?

  Children, of course, don’t usually know much about status and immigration law unless their parents choose to explain the status issue to them. Generally their main interaction with state authority is through school, and since 1982, schools have been required to treat all children equally, regardless of status. In that year, the US Supreme Court’s Plyler v. Doe decision struck down a Texas law that allowed local school districts to deny entry to children who lacked legal documentation and withheld state funds for their education if local districts did choose to enroll them. The court ruled that to deny children access to education not only violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, but would impose an unwarranted, lifetime hardship on them and bring no benefit to the state.34 Thus, children may never confront the issue of documentation in their daily lives.

  Most citizens become aware of the importance of identification documents when they are teenagers and apply for a driver’s license or for their first formal job. For the first time, they may be required to dig up a birth certificate or a Social Security card to prove their citizenship status. Jose Antonio Vargas, an undocumented immigrant from the Philippines, described the shock that many undocumented youth experience when they first become aware that there is something about their legal status that divides them from their peers. Vargas joined and propelled a growing movement among undocumented youth to break the silence, come out of the shadows, and openly challenge the system that excludes them.

  In the summer of 2011, Vargas published a daring exposé of his own life story in the New York Times Magazine. He began by recounting how his mother sent him, at age twelve, to live with his grandparents in Mountain View, California, and how he struggled to learn English and excel at school.

  One day when I was 16, I rode my bike to the nearby D.M.V. office to get my driver’s permit. Some of my friends already had their licenses, so I figured it was time. But when I handed the clerk my green card as proof of U.S. residency, she flipped it around, examining it. “This is fake,” she whispered. “Don’t come back here again.”

  Confused and scared, I pedaled home and confronted [my grandfather] Lolo. I remember him sitting in the garage, cutting coupons. I dropped my bike and ran over to him, showing him the green card. “Peke ba ito?” I asked in Tagalog. (“Is this fake?”) My grandparents were naturalized American citizens—he worked as a security guard, she as a food server—and they had begun supporting my mother and me financially when I was 3, after my father’s wandering eye and inability to properly provide for us led to my parents’ separation. Lolo was a proud man, and I saw the shame on his face as he told me he purchased the card, along with other fake documents, for me. “Don’t show it to other people,” he warned.35

  The Philippines offers a particularly convoluted case of the meaning of immigration, citizenship, and documents, since it was a US colony for the first half of the twentieth century and Filipinos were unilaterally deemed to be US nationals who could travel freely to the mainland until 1934. (The category “national” was created early in the twentieth century to apply to people who lived in newly acquired US territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific. They were essentially stateless people, with no country and no citizenship.) Tens of thousands of Filipinos were recruited legally to the United States through nursing and military exchange programs after that, while the United States maintained an enormous military presence there. Vargas’s migration was a product of this history, as well as the twists and turns of US immigration law.

  In the Philippines, Vargas’s great aunt married a Filipino American who was serving in the US military, starting a family chain of migration. Using the family preferences built into the law, she petitioned for h
er brother and his wife (Vargas’s grandparents), who entered the country on immigrant visas in 1984 and later became naturalized citizens. The grandfather then petitioned for his two children. Citizens, however, can only sponsor children who are unmarried. Vargas’s mother was single; she and her husband had separated almost a decade earlier. But fearing that immigration would consider the petition fraudulent based on her previous marriage, the grandfather decided to withdraw it.

  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.”36 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.37 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.”38

  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.”39

  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.”40

  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.41

  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.42

  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.43 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.44

  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.45 (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.)46

  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.47

  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.”48