Looking back later, Hareth would struggle to reconcile that first uneventful dinner at McDonald’s and those early months at school as she awaited her parents, with the radical changes that would follow in her life, eventually leading her onto the national stage. Hareth would grow up part of a generation of young immigrants often collectively known
as the DREAMers: kids raised in a country whose language and culture they identified with, whose pledge of allegiance they recited every morning in school—and yet a country that sought to render them akin to ghosts the moment they became adults, making it impossible for most to seek a college education, work legally, or have any official say in the political system. But these teens refused to become ghosts, to hide as their elders had. And ultimately, despite their immigration status, or in part because of it, many have become among the nation’s most politically engaged young citizens—in all but name.
Some, like Hareth, have fought for change overtly, sharing their stories with countless other youths and lawmakers, advocating for immigration reform. Others have taken a stand through the simple act of demanding to be recognized for their contributions to the country. Some have worked within the system, and some have pushed up against it. No one person has led the fight, nor have these young immigrants done it alone. But over the course of two decades, they have effectively shaped the debate over who should be considered an American, forcing the United States to recognize the millions of people working in the shadows to keep this country’s economic engine humming. They have demanded difficult conversations be had about the future of our country, and they have faced opposition in the nation’s most powerful Washington corridors. In truth, it remains to be seen how their story will end and how many will be forced to leave their adopted country before it does, but in many ways, the millennium is where their story begins.
HARETH AND HER GRANDPARENTS arrived in the United States just as the government began toughening sanctions against those who entered the country illegally or overstayed their visas. Soon it would become nearly impossible for most undocumented immigrants in the country to legalize their status. Even those who could apply to become permanent residents often had to go back to their home country, where, in a Catch-22, they generally faced a ten-year ban on returning. Hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, who in the past might have had another option to adjust their status, now faced the permanent threat of deportation.
In the fall of 2000, nearly a year before the Andrades arrived, Josh Bernstein sat tensely through a panel in a drab classroom at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, listening to lawyers describe the upswing in immigration cases. The Catholic Church had been helping children who had come to the United States unaccompanied, as well as immigrant children who’d been abandoned, neglected, or were fleeing abuse. If the children could document their cases, they were allowed to stay. The problem was the growing number who couldn’t provide evidence, who didn’t have witnesses lined up or police reports from their home countries. The speakers described children, many from war-torn Central America, who had been allowed to remain in the United States as their cases wound through the courts, only to turn eighteen, lose legal protection as minors, and likely face deportation back to countries they barely knew.
Josh ran a one-man shop in the nation’s capital for the Los Angeles–based National Immigration Law Center, a nonprofit group dedicated to helping low-income immigrants. The son of liberal Jewish parents who’d met on a picket line during the civil rights movement,6 Josh couldn’t help finding parallels between that struggle and the challenges facing undocumented immigrants in Los Angeles. Josh’s personal and political life had further intertwined in the 1980s, when he fell in love and married an undocumented woman from Mexico whom he had met at a local café.
In the last year, he’d been flooded with requests for help from desperate immigrants facing deportation. In addition to the unaccompanied-minor cases he received, there were calls from teachers and social workers about children whose families were intact but who were now coming of age and discovering that despite growing up in the United States, they had no legal status and could be picked up and deported at any moment.
Those kids who managed to fly under the radar through high school graduation found themselves unable to work legally, ineligible for instate college tuition, and unable to afford the tuition otherwise. In many states, they couldn’t even fill out the college application because they lacked the proper legal documents. Any work had to be paid under the table. It was as if, upon graduation, they reverted to being phantasms.
As the law center’s chief policy analyst, Josh worked to enlist the support of sympathetic lawmakers. With his round face, pale blue eyes, wire-rimmed glasses, and soft Valley-accented voice that seemed to turn every statement into a question, he seemed more suburban rabbi than immigrant champion, but his unassuming nature disarmed the lawmakers to whom he appealed.
There were certain things senators and congresswomen and -men could do: private bills they could file, simple phone calls they could make that could tip the scales for one specific child or another. But there were only so many of those favors to go around; it was like asking someone to inflate a thousand inner tubes with just his own breath. And as the case list grew, Josh found his contacts running out of air.
THINGS WERE GETTING BAD in Mexico. Land reform had enabled agribusinesses to buy up huge tracts of farms, sending many smaller growers to the cities or al Norte for work. The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement had enabled US corn producers to flood the Mexican market, providing increasingly tough competition for the remaining small farmers. Then came more blows—the devaluation of the peso and massive inflation—culminating in basic economic meltdown. Mexicans increasingly decided to seek their fortunes in the United States.
Among those headed north was Dario Guerrero. He and his wife, Rocio, grew up in merchant families in Guadalajara, where Dario’s parents owned a furniture store and Rocio’s parents sold construction materials. As an adult, Dario ran a small offshoot of the family business. Rocio managed a clothing shop up the block, taking their new baby, Dario Jr., to work with her during the day. Next door, her brother sold bathroom interiors. They tried to make it work even after the peso dropped in half and inflation jumped 50 percent.
But when the assaults began, Dario began to rethink things. First, they came to Rocio’s store and held a knife to her stomach as they grabbed her cash. Soon after, the girl in her brother’s shop next door was assaulted as she worked. Rocio heard the cries from the other side of the wall. Too terrified to react, she cowered in her own shop, praying she wasn’t next. The police were little help, arriving only if her husband took them a bottle of wine. As the economy grew worse, and people grew more desperate, nightly newscasts were increasingly filled with reports of kidnappings, once a hazard only for the wealthy. The financial crisis had set off a historic leap in crime.
In the spring of 1995, friends in Los Angeles invited Dario and Rocio to their wedding. Dario took that as a sign from the heavens. I don’t want to go back, he said. Maybe he was bluffing, but she couldn’t imagine life without him back in Guadalajara. Okay, she finally told him, I’ll stay with you. It was still relatively easy at the time to come and go across the border, and even more for young women, who didn’t fit the single-male-in-search-of-work profile. Rocio agreed to go back with little Dario and sell their belongings, then return once and for all.
In California, they quickly found a tiny apartment to rent right under a flight path of Los Angeles International Airport, just a bathroom and a living room. They slept on the living room couch. At night they cried quietly on the thin mattress, wondering if they had been fools to leave. They had spent their savings on the move, left a middle-class life, family, and friends. As much as they wanted to, they had no money to go home and were too proud to return with nothing to show for it.
But Rocio and Dario were lucky in one sense: they arrived shortly before the 19967 passage
of the pivotal immigration law that would make it more difficult to adjust immigration status—that official move from being an “illegal alien” in the eyes of the US government to a “permanent resident.” When they arrived, it was still possible to apply for Social Security numbers and obtain driver’s licenses. Dario wasn’t supposed to use the number to work, but, like many other immigrants, he did. He found work in construction, waking most days before dawn, kissing his wife and son good-bye as they lay in bed still asleep. Dario didn’t worry about life at home; Rocio took care of it all. He took extra work on nights and weekends to make ends meet. Sometimes he fell asleep at the dinner table. But before long, he had earned the trust of his employers and was managing some of the other workers.
By 2000, the couple had welcomed another baby, Fernando, and moved to downtown Los Angeles. Rocio had her hands full. Little Dario walked at nine months and was talking in fluent sentences at two and a half. You must put him in special enrichment classes, a friend said. He is moving so fast. But for that they needed more money. The family spent their few free hours together at the beach or the park, Dario Sr. often with a video camera capturing brief scenes of their lives. He meant to send them back as proof to his family in Mexico that all was well.
Instead, the tapes became his and Rocio’s family memories, preserving their life for posterity—just in case. The anxiety gnawed at him that one day their number would come up, that life was too short, that just by walking down the street with his wife and children, he was putting himself in danger of deportation. But he relaxed behind the camera; his worries about their future disappeared as he aimed the lens at the world around him.
One summer afternoon the family strolled through Elysian Park north of downtown Los Angeles. Dario brought his camera, and as they walked through the grass, he filmed the other families picnicking on the playground and on the nearby lawn. There was something comforting about so many familiar-looking strangers. As he filmed, Dario spun the camera around at the parents, children, grandparents, aunts, and uncles, chattering in a mix of Spanish and English.
“You are all afraid they are going to deport us,” he joked to his family back in Mexico, as he recorded. “[But look,] they’d have to deport the whole city.”8
JOSH WAS HARDLY ALONE in looking for a solution to the onslaught of immigration cases. In late 2000, advocates at the nonprofit National Council of La Raza, which would eventually become UNIDOS.US, and other advocacy groups were working on bills to provide in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants living in places like Texas and California, where it made the most sense for state lawmakers to protect educational—and economic—opportunity for so many of their de facto residents. It was a campaign rooted in part in the 1985 legal case of an undocumented girl known in court filings as Leticia A.9 She had won the right to pay in-state tuition to attend a California state university. Although her victory was reversed a few years later in state court, it had planted the idea of a special status that would better enable undocumented teens to pay for and graduate from college.
In Washington, Josh began to think maybe the federal government could step in. If they could just pass one bill for all the kids . . . he told a friend one afternoon. If the kids have been here five years, they could stay and go to college. He was half joking. The idea seemed so impossible. Yet as soon as the words left his mouth, they took on a power of their own.
He asked around and learned California Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein was possibly interested in such a bill. Maybe she would be his champion.
Between Christmas and New Year’s, Josh hunkered down in his cramped office along Washington’s H Street NW corridor, surviving on Coca-Cola and Chinese takeout, furiously writing and researching legal precedent along with fellow advocates. Feinstein passed on the proposal. But now Josh had a written draft, and he wasn’t about to let it go. He got word that Illinois Democratic senator Dick Durbin was interested in such a bill. Earlier in 2000, Durbin had been approached about the case of another undocumented immigrant student, a musical prodigy named Tereza Lee.10 Born in Brazil to post–Korean War refugees, Tereza had grown up in Chicago and was living in the country illegally. She had no legal status in the United States. Brazil had never granted the family citizenship, and Tereza had never even been to Korea. She was essentially a girl without a country. Durbin, whose own mother had immigrated to the United States from Lithuania at around the same age as Tereza,11 had been so moved by the girl’s case that he was eager to help. He was quickly earning a reputation as one of the Washington lawmakers most sympathetic to this burgeoning group of students. His staff began refining Josh’s initial proposal and working to get it onto the Senate floor.
For educators and immigrant activists, the Children’s Adjustment, Relief, and Education (CARE) Act,12 as Durbin’s bill was officially known, was in part about basic math. If the federal, state, and local governments combined invested roughly $130,000 in sixteen years of public schooling for each student,13 they might as well invest in another two or four years so the student could earn enough to pay taxes and help create a few jobs.
The advocates knew the immigrant education bill had to be bipartisan from the start to succeed. Utah Republican senator Orrin Hatch, moved by the story of undocumented students in his state who could not attend college, was also working on a version of the legislation. Days after Durbin unveiled his bill, Hatch proposed a similar one: the “Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act.” Soon the two senators combined forces, and the result quickly and forever became known as the DREAM Act,14 eventually spawning the moniker “DREAMers” for the young immigrants eligible for its protections. Josh and others sought out Representative Chris Cannon, a moderate Republican from Utah, to sponsor a version in the House, along with California Democratic representative Howard Berman.
For immigrant advocates, the bill was also about finding a winnable battle. The last half-decade had felt like one loss after another. In August 1996, as part of Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” Congress had cut health care and other benefits for legal immigrants, including pregnant women and children, through the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. A month after that, lawmakers approved the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which also limited many protections even for those in the country legally.
There had been a few small victories. Advocates had managed to block in the courts a 1994 California measure known as Proposition 187, which prohibited illegal immigrants from accessing public services, including public school. More broadly, they’d won back some benefits for Americans and legal residents under the Work Opportunity Act.
Still, they needed to show their colleagues that fighting for something (rather than simply staving off another catastrophe) was more than a “pie in the sky” strategy.
The inauguration of President George W. Bush seemed in many ways like the answer to the prayers of immigrants and their champions. The new president’s brother was married to a Mexican immigrant, and a month after taking office in 2001, Bush announced plans to visit Mexican president Vicente Fox. By July, Bush’s administration floated the idea of a new amnesty program for Mexicans15 and an expanded guest worker program for those harvesting the nation’s crops, tapping Secretary of State Colin Powell and Attorney General John Ashcroft to look into legalizing 3 million to 4 million Mexican immigrants,16 and possibly millions from other countries as well.
Yet the broader reform still faced many hurdles. Amnesty was becoming a dirty word with many Americans, who were seeing more jobs outsourced, and many labor unions feared expanding the US guest worker program would further decimate wages. Josh figured a small win for the students could lead to bigger gains and a way to build back confidence after the 1996 law that had made life tougher for many undocumented immigrants, even as the demand for their labor continued to grow. Such a win might even embolden immigrants to claim more basic protections (a theory that did not go
unnoticed by conservatives, even those who were sympathetic to the kids). He pushed on for the DREAM Act.
WHEN FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD Felipe Matos Sousa arrived in Miami on a plane from Rio de Janeiro in the winter of 2001, he wasn’t thinking about college, let alone how to pay for it—not yet. He had come to help care for his older sister Carolina’s toddler. It would be an extended vacation, his mother told him.
He wasn’t sure he wanted an extended vacation. But as Carolina drove him from the airport, he looked out the window, stunned by all the green. He couldn’t remember ever seeing so many lush leaves in a city—not outside the apartment where he was born near the Rio favelas, nor in the town where he and his mother moved when he was in elementary school. Even the industrial parts of Miami looked like the Emerald City.
Felipe had been eight when Carolina left for the United States, desperate to avoid the life of their mother, who worked as a cleaning lady, scrubbing toilets in private homes and at a local clinic. With an absent father, his older sisters often cared for him or he played alone. His grandmother’s death left his mother enough money to buy a little plot of land in Duque de Caxias, a small city bordered by Rio de Janeiro to the south. Slowly they built their new home, living for months with plastic tarps over the windows and door. They had no electricity and no running water much of that first year. Francisca Sousa Matos refused to let her young son feel sorry for what they didn’t have. One morning, as the two of them walked home from the bakery, she ordered him to give the baguette they’d bought to a boy begging in the street.
Why? Felipe protested. We are hungry, too.
Because the boy is hungrier, she replied. If you want to change the world, you have to work till your hands bleed and then work some more.
The Making of a Dream Page 2
