“Letters from Immigrants” is a series of testimonials gathered by Chaos+Comrades. The series aims to create a deeper understanding of the immigrant experience and humanize the millions of people who come to the United States in search of a better life.
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is an Obama-era law that protects undocumented immigrants from deportation and gives them a legal right to work as long as they arrived to the United States as children. Recipients of DACA are referred to as DREAMers.
Chris, the author of this letter, is a DREAMer.
Dear Reader,
My mother started her journey in Chiapas, Mexico when she was several months pregnant. She and my father made their way north but my mother’s anxiety was so bad that she gave birth prematurely. I was born in Mexico City before they got to the U.S. border and they had to go back to Chiapas to leave me with my grandma and my four siblings. When I was two weeks old, my father restarted his journey to the U.S. and a few months after that, my mother followed him: once they were there, it took my parents almost six years to be able to bring all of us to the United States. I remember riding piggyback on my dad’s shoulders as we crossed the Tecate dessert. He kept telling me we’d be fine, that everything would be OK if we could make it. Along the way, I remember he prayed with my mom a lot because they were worried that my sisters would get raped or kidnapped.
My parents started doing janitorial work since they arrived in the U.S. in 1989. Growing up, I’d help out with their janitorial work and I remember asking them why we were the ones cleaning the offices where other people worked. My dad would say that it was because we don’t have a social security number so we had to be landscapers, housekeepers, farm laborers and restaurant workers. I wanted to work in the tech industry and kept thinking, “what’s the point of being in the United States if I can’t work in the places I want to?” I thought that working at a job you didn’t like at a low wage for an average of eight hours sounded pretty miserable.
But then DACA was implemented and I was given a social security card and a work permit. I remember the moment I received my work documents in the mail. It was like having a birthday. At that point, I could have a job anywhere and buy a house; although DACA recipients don’t qualify for first time home-buyer programs, the program allows us to buy a house and have a social security number. The only downside is that we had to put a large down payment of 30 percent, since DACA recipients are always in limbo since our work permits could be taken away at any time. Our work permit is only valid for 2 years and some businesses refuse to hire DACA recipients while some banks don’t even give home loans to DREAMERs because they don’t want to invest in someone whose status could be at stake.
The reason we are called DREAMERs is because the program gave us the types of opportunities we used to only dream about. DACA allowed us to stop fearing that we would randomly be called into the office at work and be notified that our social security didn’t match our names and be fired. We finally have the opportunity to go to college and apply for state grants that we didn’t qualify for before. There are all these invisible obstacles that just make a DREAMERs’ lives harder but it also makes it harder for us to give up because our parents made too many sacrifices for us to not make something of ourselves in the U.S. Still, sometimes I can’t help but feel that I live in a golden cage. While DACA allowed me to live legally in the U.S., I am still not allowed to travel to other countries because the DACA program does not let us re-enter the country once we leave.
There is a lot of negative propaganda going around the Internet against DREAMERs, including data that says how many of us had gotten DUIs and criminal chargers in order to convince Americans to support the Supreme Court and cancel the DACA program. But amidst the negative propaganda, people never talk about the high percentage of the DREAMERs who are doing extremely well for themselves and their communities. I find it sad when the President uses the DACA program as a bargaining chip for funding the wall. Over and over again I hear him tell Congress that he will give DREAMERs citizenship for 3 years if he gets funding for that wall. I pray for the day the DREAM ACT passes because that would give us a pathway to citizenship and we would never lose sleep again wondering if our work permit will be taken away from us. I clearly understand now what America’s original DREAMER, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., meant when he said that a right delayed is a right denied.
Love,
-Chris
Cover Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
