The Campaign for an American Dream (CAD) is starting to make some buzz on the West Coast, as four young undocumented residents prepare to walk from San Francisco to Washington D.C., in an attempt to raise awareness along the way about the DREAM Act and Immigration rights.
The DREAM Act is a piece of legislation that would allow undocumented youth to get on a track to citizenship by going to college or being in the military. Many young people find out that they are undocumented years after they have moved to the U.S., and then realize that their pathways to becoming employed or continuing their education are blocked. Jose Antonio Vargas is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who revealed that he was undocumented, and became a spokesperson for the undocumented population. You can watch his statement of support for the Campaign for an American Dream on their website.
The four walkers are between 22 - 26 years old, and from different parts of the U.S. They are converging in California in the next couple of weeks where they will participate in a day of lobbying in Sacramento and a protest at Travis Air Force base. Then they will make their way across the country for an estimated seven months. The walkers depart on March 10 and plan to arrive in D.C. in late October.
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This story was originally published on L.A. Youth.
Author's name not given to protect their identity.
I’ve always worked hard in school because I want to go to college and be successful. But because I’m not a citizen, my hard work could be for nothing. My parents don’t have the money to pay for college and I can’t get federal financial aid because I don’t have a Social Security number. In October, Governor Jerry Brown signed the California Dream Act, which will allow undocumented students like me to get financial help to attend public colleges in California. This made me feel hopeful for my future. However, the state Dream Act doesn’t provide a path to citizenship. Even if I graduate from college, would I have to work in a low-wage job? Will my status prevent me from obtaining my dream job as a journalist?
New U.S. Census Bureau numbers show that between 2007 and 2010, the number of California school-aged children who live in poverty increased by 30 percent, according to the Mercury News. Living in poverty can have a huge impact on a student's school performance.
The article reads:
The trend could have far-reaching and long-term effects. Educators and researchers say that when children come to school hungry or without a stable home, they often struggle to focus on their work and fall behind. Some kids, after a prolonged period of instability, develop what early childhood experts call "toxic stress," which can trigger long-term memory loss and other cognitive problems, as well as hypertension and other stress-related diseases.
Susan Yee, director of the Oakland High's Wellness Center in Oakland, CA said that while it is very difficult to measure the effects of poverty, her whole staff notices the extra pressure. “We’ve seen a lot of students who are in transition, so homeless or definitely seeming like they’re in need of resources...I’ve also just heard a lot of students talking about how their parents have lost their job and that’s increasing stress on them, and their interpersonal relationships are strained because everyone is stressed out,” said Yee.
One big red flag for the staff at the wellness center, is a student’s attendance. According to Yee, “It’s almost a perfect correlation-- students who are going through a significant amount of issues and their attendance being really poor. It makes it really hard to address because we’re a school-based health center, so if they’re not here, we can’t see them,” she added.
Yee also mentioned that the economy has made it extremely tough for students who are undocumented immigrants, or whose parents are undocumented and have to leave because they cannot find work. "So there is a really tough situation of the students staying here by themselves and being abandoned because their parents are not able to find any work... It’s the political climate as well as economic climate,” she said.
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The following commentaries aired on KALW's Crosscurrents.
Youth Radio spoke with three young people who recently made the decision to go to college. They all received a scholarship from the East Bay College Fund, a scholarship program that awards students $4,000 each year for four years, and provides them with a mentor and financial training. Each student interviewed faced unique challenges, but decided that college was a priority. Eliezer Guerrero, 18, spoke with us before California Governor Jerry Brown signed this most recent DREAM Act, and since he is undocumented, will now be eligible for more student aid.
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ELIEZER GUERRERO: My name is Eliezer Guerrero. I’m 18 years old. I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, and then I moved to Oakland, California, three years ago. While I was in high school I was very eager to know that there were possibilities for people like me to go to college, especially since I saw my sister not being able to go to college due to her no legal status.
The first thing I did was to look how much they cost, so I made a budget, like budget planner. From there I saw the difference between San Francisco State and Dominican. I found out that SF State is less cost, for about the same education. Transportation is pretty expensive and travel from Oakland – it’s $8 a day, which is a lot of money.
I just have a list of everything I will be required to do in school, like to pay for tuition, books, the meal plan, if I there’s any emergencies, if I get hurt playing sports, pay for the insurance. That would really help me. That would be a good strategy.
In total my siblings – we’re seven. There were times when while I was in 12th grade when I would have to wake them up and make breakfast for them, and make sure they went to school clean, take a shower. Most of the time, my mom takes care of my siblings. I do have time to study. In order for me to study I would have to stay after school at SF State in study hall or the library in order for me to have a quiet space.
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Robyn Gee, Turnstyle News
The presidential campaigning has brought the debate about immigration reform into hyper focus recently. But for some, the debate is too narrow, focusing only on DREAM Act legislation when around 50 percent of undocumented youth don't finish high school, according to Pablo Paredes, founder of the organization 67 Sueños (67 Dreams). Paredes said that focusing on the DREAM Act as the main narrative in the immigration reform debate leaves out 67 percent of undocumented youth.
His group, based in the Bay Area in California, is small and he works with just seven students at Oakland public schools between the ages of 15 - 18. Four of them are undocumented, and the other three come from "mixed-status" families. Their goal is to change the immigration conversation from focusing only on the exceptionally talented immigrants who "deserve" legalization, and instead acknowledge that every undocumented young person deserves a path to legalization. In California, the DREAM Act has moved along further than any other state in the union, and just recently passed part 1 of a state DREAM Act.
Paredes and his group organized a huge public art display in San Francisco on the wall of a building in an abandoned lot and Turnstyle spoke with Paredes about the project.
Turnstyle: What does 67 Sueños stand for?
Paredes: 67 Sueños is a group that supports the radical notion that every undocumented person, whether they go to college or not, has a dream worth pursuing. We focus on youth who are not on the pathway to college, to create pathways for them to legalize.
Turnstyle: Where did the idea for the images in the mural come from? Did famous artists help?
Paredes: We gathered stories. Stories are an important way to change dialogue and legislation. We partnered with NPR’s StoryCorps. They have a project that tries to tell stories of Latinos. They were very excited to tell stories of undocumented youth especially those not on the path to college. We did 21 interviews with undocumented youth out of Oakland public high schools... Even if they have trouble in high school, they still have rights. We thought how do we get these 21, 40-minute interviews in the news, and use them as a way to launch our work? We kicked around ideas and focused on the idea of public art. Everyone likes the idea of a mural, they don’t have to pay to see it and everyone has access to it. We listened to each interview. We sat there and picked out themes, struggles, and dreams that were most common and that captured the migrant experience in these communities. We ended up with a 15-page brainstorm of stories. We gave this brainstorm to a very talented artist, Pancho Pescador. He rendered our vision and our brainstorm into a cohesive piece of art. The artist was also undocumented when he came to this country, so he’s personally connected to the issue and he works with Oakland youth. He really understood.
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Originally published and broadcast on Minnesota Public Radio.
By Brenda
Editor's note: MPR News has agreed not to use Brenda's last name because she fears deportation.
A Minneapolis teen who was carried across the U.S.-Mexico border a dozen years ago hopes Congress will pass the federal DREAM Act so she can live and work legally in the country she considers home.
The Democratic-controlled Congress plans to make one more attempt to pass the Development, Relief and Education of Alien Minors Act -- the DREAM Act -- this week. If passed, it would give children of immigrants not legally in the United States a path to citizenship if they graduate from high school and complete two years of college or military service. It has support among many Democrats, but most Republicans oppose the DREAM Act, saying it amounts to amnesty.
Brenda tells what it's like to live in the United States illegally.
NO TIME TO BE A TEENAGER
When people ask me where I'm from, I say Minnesota. I am from here. I came from Mexico when I was 7. I was carried over the border. It was nighttime, and I remember the narrow path along the cliffs, and a rattlesnake.
I'm 19 now. I live in Minneapolis with my mom, my stepdad, my older brother and his son, and my little brother and sister. I help take care of the little kids, and I work second shift in a factory. I don't have a lot of time to be a teenager or to have fun.
I had to leave high school a month before graduation this spring, because my family needed help paying the bills. My mom brought my brother and me here because she was a single mother and she saw a better life for us here.
"Maybe not for me," said my mom, "because I had to work, work, work. But I liked that every day you used to come home and learn more English every day at school." People say immigration is a mistake. But I thank my mom for bringing me here.
"In Mexico, I was a cook," said my mom. "Here I became a janitor. I was proud to be [one]. But it ended." My mom was one of 1,200 janitors who lost their jobs in a "silent raid" at ABM, a janitorial service company in Minneapolis last year. She didn't have the right papers so she lost a job she'd had for 12 years. That had a big effect on our lives. I want things to change for families like mine. We've been here a long time. We pay taxes. But we're invisible.
In March I took a bus from Minnesota to Washington D.C. to attend a big immigration rally. As we walked to the National Mall near the Capitol, Latino roofers called out to us, "We can't be there, we have to work, but lift up your voices for us." At the rally, President Obama had a videotaped message for the crowd.
"I pledge to do everything in my power to forge a bipartisan consensus this year on this important issue," the president said. "You know as well as I do that it won't be easy, and it won't happen overnight."
I've been waiting for this. Every time on the news they say, "Oh, they're going to start working on immigration reform." But then we hear, "No, something else came up." So I have to get -- I'm sorry for the word -- really crappy, bad jobs.
I used to work for this restaurant, and the lady made me work long hours for low pay. I used to clean tables, take orders, clean dishes, clean bathrooms, clean the floors and back again. I told her, "I can't do this." She told me to take a day off. I took it. And she never took my calls again and never paid me for all that work. Equalness is everything.
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There is nationwide debate around the rights of undocumented youth as they apply for college. On November 15, the California Supreme Court upheld the law that allows undocumented immigrants to be eligible for in-state tuition at California state colleges and universities. The California law currently requires a student to attend an in-state high school for three years to be eligible for in-state tuition.
Recently, the Georgia Board of Regents ruled against undocumented students, deciding that in 2011, illegal students will not be allowed into their university system.
States are rapidly taking this issue to court and arriving at different conclusions. While the California ruling is likely to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, it is unlikely to be accepted because of the impact it would have on other states. Texas and Nebraska are among those that have similar laws. In-state tuition can save California college students as much as $12,000, according to the New York Times.
Kris Kobach argued the California case on behalf of the legal citizens who reside outside of California and are denied reduced tuition, claiming that this is unfair. Both Kobach, as well as University of California professors, and legal scholars were quoted in the New York Times saying that this case is definitely not the last we will hear of the issue.
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A Board of Regents news release explained that USG institutions will verify the lawful presence in the United States of every admitted applicant out of concerns that academically qualified, legally documented Georgians were being denied admittance to institutions. Five institutions had to turn away qualified applicants this past year: Georgia College & State University, Medical College of Georgia, Georgia State University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Georgia.
Regent James Jolly, who chaired the Residency Verification Committee, told the Board of Regents, “These new policies do strengthen our ability to ensure proper tuition classification for all students – a process and a commitment the System has undertaken and met since being formed in 1931.” According to Daniel Costa, Immigration Policy Analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, policies like these are likely to show up in states that have seen a drastic demographic change. “It’s hard to tell whether the policies are due to cost issues or xenophobia. It’s an educated guess to say that we will probably see these policies in states with large influxes of immigrants.” He said that in 1990, the immigrant population in Georgia was 7.9% and by 2008, had grown to 12.5%. Costa explained that the fiscal impact of the immigrant population is different on individual states than it is on the federal government. “The net fiscal impact of immigrants on the federal level is positive. However, at the local and state levels, immigrants are a financial burden largely because of the cost of education. This could be why states are more upset than the federal government.” In the long run, Costa sees policies like this one being a cost to the economy. “If you think about it, if many college-age students are kicked out of college, they will earn less and be less educated. The will contribute less to the economy and end up costing us more in the long run.” Read more...
“So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.” - Christopher Reeve.
In today’s world, it's when we summon the BILL, that dreams are realized.
Students currently referred to as DREAMers have a special vision in mind: a world where students are granted legal citizenship in the United States.
A New York Times article reported last week, “The Obama administration, while deporting a record number of immigrants convicted of crimes, is sparing one group of illegal immigrants from expulsion: students who came to the United States without papers when they were children.” These are youth who would be protected and given citizenship under the DREAM Act (Development, Relief, and Education of Alien Minors Act).
The DREAM Act Portal website says, “Over three million students graduate from U.S. high schools every year. Most get the opportunity to test their dreams and live their American story. However, a group of approximately 65,000 youth do not get this opportunity; they are smeared with an inherited title, an illegal immigrant. These youth have lived in the United States for most of their lives and want nothing more than to be recognized for what they are, Americans.”
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To find out what Arizona's new immigration law means for national organizing efforts, Youth Radio spoke to Community Empowerment Coordinator and attorney Renee Saucedo, from La Raza Centro Legal.
In Arizona, walking to the corner store, or simply driving, can lead to arrests for undocumented immigrants. Bill 1070 gives authorities in the state of Arizona the right to detain, arrest and report a person to immigration, if they suspect the person is in this country illegally. It also makes transporting an illegal immigrant a crime--and that includes giving someone a ride.
Attorney Saucedo said she and her colleagues got to work as soon as Arizona's Governor Jane Brewer signed the bill. "Immigrant advocates of course were horrified by the passage of this law. But some said, at least this might push the debate around passing some kind of immigration reform or legalization law."
But according to Saucedo, it's up to immigrants to change the course of the national conversation. She says anti-immigrants' voices are much louder right now and "if our communities--mainly immigrant communities--organized and demand that a legalization law passed as a solution, then I think it's very possible."
