The Birth of the DREAMer

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2 The Birth of the DREAMer

Before 2001, “DREAMers” did not exist as a political group. There were hundreds and thousands undocumented youths facing a unique set of problems resulting from their position of being “in-between” coun- tries.1 As children, they went to school in the United States, played in the streets, watched television, rooted for their home teams, navigated fash- ions, and developed aspirations to move on to bigger and better things. They absorbed the feelings, dispositions, tastes, and values of America through the everyday interactions that made up their childhood.2 They were certainly immigrants, but most felt and knew themselves to be of this country. This feeling of being home in the United States, of being “normal” Americans, was disrupted as the children transitioned into early adulthood and tried to pursue activities like applying for a driver’s license, opening a bank account, looking for a job, and submitting col- lege applications.3 Each of these activities required demonstrating proof of residency, a process that precipitated difficult and recurrent discoveries that they did not formally belong in this country. One youth described this type of experience:

I came to the US when I was six, but I didn’t know about my status until I was seventeen. My senior year at high school I tried applying for the FAFSA [Free Application for Federal Student Aid], and that’s when my parents

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EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) – printed on 7/17/2020 11:45 PM via CITY COLLEGE OF SAN FRANCISCO AN: 713555 ; Nicholls, Walter.; The DREAMers : How the Undocumented Youth Movement Transformed the Immigrant Rights Debate Account: ccsf.main.ehost

48 The Birth of the DREAMer

finally had to tell me about the lack of the social [social security number]. I didn’t really have an idea. I had no idea what was going on. I had no idea why it was happening to me. There was this overwhelming feeling of being so alone and so, like just “aarrrgh.” All of your hopes and dreams are being taken away for no particular reason, and you can’t know who to blame. There is nobody to blame and there is nobody you can appeal to. It’s just this whole sense of being lost, inside and out. You are so lost. I was so lost. I was really just going through the motions. I was seventeen years old, and I ended up in that space, and I don’t know. It just happened.4

In addition to being cast out of the national community, the “hopes and dreams” that many grew up with were suddenly “taken away.” This sud- den experience produces a trauma and consciousness that is shared by many undocumented youth and that is different from immigrants who migrated to the United States as adults.5

These common experiences have made undocumented youths a sociologically distinct group of immigrants, but they did not exist as a political group before the 2000s. There were no labels to mark the group’s political existence (“DREAMers”), there were no common argu- ments and stories to express a singular political voice, and there was no infrastructure to foster political connections and consciousness between dispersed youth. There had been several campaigns to win in-state tuition for undocumented youths in the 1990s, but these campaigns were mostly led by state legislators, administrators, and rights associations. Undocumented youths only played residual roles within them.6 Their nonexistence as a political group at the start of the decade stands in sharp contrast with their major political presence after 2010 when DREAMers emerged as a central player in immigration debates and became a driving force of the immigrant rights movement.

This remarkable development over such a short period of time stems from early efforts to pass the national DREAM Act. During the early 2000s the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) and Center for Community Change played instrumental roles in raising the issue in Congress, developing a strategy to push for the DREAM Act, crafting a representation of undocumented youths and their cause, and repre- senting them directly to political officials. Given the lack of experience

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The Birth of the DREAMer 49

of undocumented youths in national-level activism, immigrant rights associations possessed the resources needed to transform the grievances of undocumented youths into a legitimate political voice in the public sphere.

Operating in a rather hostile and xenophobic environment, the leading associations of the early DREAM campaigns needed to craft representations of undocumented youths that would convince liberal and conservative audiences alike. They stressed the youths’ deep cultural and social ties to the United States and their ongoing contributions to the country. By representing them as virtuous Americans, immigrant youths would be transformed from threats to the national community into sources of economic, civic, and moral rejuvenation. Although this strategy was successful in building public and political support, activ- ists and advocates confronted a new dilemma because of it. By stressing the attributes, such as cultural assimilation and being college students, that made undocumented students into “good” and deserving immi- grants, those who failed to possess these same attributes were by default less deserving. Crafting a compelling message was extremely important, but developing a method to “stay on message” was just as important. The leading associations also developed an infrastructure to train and discipline undocumented youth activists to stay on message in the pub- lic arena. These training sessions helped inculcate youth activists into the DREAMer discourse and shape their views and feelings concerning their undocumented status and their position in the country.

The process described here helped transform thousands of differ- ent undocumented students into the political group of the DREAMer.7 It was a group that bore a common label, infrastructure, and goals, but it was also a group with common subjective and emotional dispositions. As individual youths became DREAMers, their common subjectivities, identity, and emotions fueled commitment to their cause.

Undocumented Youths as the Exceptional Immigrant The large immigrant rights demonstrations in 1994 were a messag-

ing debacle. In the demonstrations against California’s punitive Propo- sition 187, marchers carried flags from Mexico, Central America, and

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50 The Birth of the DREAMer

other immigrant-sending countries. To the immigrant rights activists the display of flags was empowering and reinforced their ties to one another. But to their opponents, the flags were seen as defiantly foreign.8 Anti-immigrant forces used images from these demonstrations to bol- ster their arguments that immigrants represented an existential threat to the country. Having learned the lessons from these demonstrations, immigrant rights advocates looked to craft a message in the 2000s that stressed assimilation over distinction and conformity over difference. American flags were now widely disseminated at public demonstra- tions and flags from other countries were pushed out of sight. The move to embrace American symbols and silence displays of foreignness and otherness has been a central plank of the movement’s representational strategy.

This strategy has strongly influenced how national immigrant rights associations represented undocumented youths and their cause. Lead organizations believed that if they were to gain support from con- servative and liberal publics alike, they needed to establish a direct con- nection between undocumented youths and core American values. The authors of the original piece of federal legislation developed the DREAM acronym (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act) to create a direct connection between the cause and core national values associated with the American dream. Rather than being a foreign threat to the country, these immigrants were presented as the exact opposite: extensions of the country’s core historical values and a force of national reinvigoration.

The immigrant rights associations leading the DREAM cam- paign crafted a discourse of undocumented youths that rested on three main themes. These themes have intersected to form the “master frame” through which undocumented youths and their cause would be repre- sented in the public sphere for years to come.9

First, it has been important to embrace American symbols and mark the group’s distance from foreign symbols. One DREAM activ- ist remarks on the importance of American symbols in representing themselves and the cause, observing, “We have brought in the Statue of Liberty into the recent campaign. Why? Because this is important to remind people what we stand for as a country.”10 They not only stressed

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The Birth of the DREAMer 51

national symbols like flags and the Statue of Liberty but also national values. Another DREAMer adds, “The key values that we stressed were fairness, hard work, and self-determination. Those are our key values that we always try to come back to. Like, ‘The DREAM Act is a policy that supports fairness and rewards hard work.’ These are key American values. We were talking about the values that this policy supports.”11 The emphasis on national symbols and values has been aimed at win- ning over the support of a broad and sometimes hostile public. “Yeah, that whole spiel about being ‘good Americans’ is strategic messaging.12 The aim of it all is to gain support from people in conservative places.”13 The flip side of stressing national conformity is to stress distance with “foreign” symbols:

That is something we all agree on. You can never have a Mexican flag waving at your rally. One time we said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to have a rally showing our different flags, you know, flags from Mexico, Korea, Honduras, etc.” But then we said, “No, we have to be careful because we’re in Orange County [a very conservative area of southern California] and people are going to take it the wrong way.” We thought it would be nice to celebrate the fact that we are from all over the world but we didn’t want to risk it.14

Stressing the qualities that make these youths wholly “American” re- quires the use of overt national symbols (for example, flags, statues of lib- erty, graduation gowns, and so on) and rhetoric. Demonstrating national belonging has also encouraged the display of tastes, dispositions, tacit knowledge, and accents that would be considered distinctly American by natives. They have been shown to engage in the same activities, eat the same foods, cheer the same sports teams, and embrace the same as- pirations as any other American in their peer group. They are cheerlead- ers, they love the Lakers, they speak perfect English, and they dream of becoming middle class, just like any “normal” person. By stressing their American cultural attributes, they demonstrate that they have internal- ized American values and that these values are inscribed in bodily dispo- sitions. To use Norbert Elias’s term, they have deployed their “national habitus” in strategically purposeful ways.15 For many early supporters of the DREAM Act, their qualities as “de facto” Americans made the youths exceptional and deserving an exemption from the country’s ex-

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52 The Birth of the DREAMer

clusionary immigration laws. “These children are de facto Americans but their hopes are being dashed on a daily basis.”16 Demonstrating national identification has been a means for this “other” to reveal its “normalness” and common humanity with the native. It allows them to present them- selves not as breaking with or “threatening” the norms of the country but ensuring continuity.

Second, in addition to stressing the attributes that make undoc- umented students “normal” Americans, DREAM advocates have also drawn attention to their most exceptional qualities. They are indeed “normal” American kids, but they are also the “best and the brightest” of their generation. The former director of the California Dream Net- work explained:

This message comes from the facts because that is their experience. Many of these students are going to school and succeeding in spite of terrible barriers. The only strategic part is that we have focused on the crème de la crème, the top students, the 4.3, the valedictorian. We have always been intentional of choosing the best story, the most easily understood story, the most emotion- ally convincing story. So, we have always been intentional but that story also runs true: young person comes, realizes they are undocumented, faces terrible constraints but does good anyway because those are the things their parents taught them.17

The image of the straight-A immigrant student rebuts the stereotype of immigrant youths as deviant and delinquent. Moreover, because these students are the “best and the brightest,” they stand to make an impor- tant contribution to the country. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has drawn on this line to justify his support of the DREAM Act. “The students who earn legal status through the DREAM Act will make our country more competitive economically, spurring job creation, contrib- uting to our tax base, and strengthening communities.”18

Third, the stigma of illegality has long been used by anti-immi- grant groups to undermine the legitimacy of immigrant rights claims. DREAM advocates and supporters have sought to cleanse youths of this stigma by absolving them from the “guilt” of having broken the law. The youths cannot be considered fully “illegal.” They did not “choose” to cross the border and therefore cannot be held accountable for breaking

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The Birth of the DREAMer 53

the law. A DREAMer in the 2007 campaign argued, “I didn’t ask to come here, I was brought here. With kids like me, you’re truncating their future.”19 The phrase, “no fault of their own” became a standard talking point used by DREAM Act advocates in various campaigns. This talking point has resonated widely with the media and national politicians. “The bill could pass the Senate because it is intended to benefit young people who grow up in the United States and are illegal immigrants as a result of decisions by their parents.”20 This theme has shown to be extremely resilient and continues to be used by leading officials and politicians sup- porting the DREAM Act. The secretary of homeland security reiterated this point in her support of the DREAM Act in 2010. “The students who would gain legal status under the bill have no fault for being here in the United States because they were brought here when they were children by their parents.”21 Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid employed a simi- lar argument to voice his support of the bill: “If there is a bipartisan bill that makes sense for our country economically, from a national security perspective and one that reflects American values, it is the DREAM Act. This bill will give children brought illegally to this country at no fault of their own the chance to earn legal status.”22 Another DREAM Act supporter, the president of Arizona State University, argued that passing the act would be a way for these youths to vindicate their “innocence”: “There are thousands and thousands of students who were successful in public school, who did everything right and didn’t do anything wrong on their own. The bill is their pathway to innocence.”23

These themes highlight the attributes that make this group excep- tional and deserving of legalization. By countering stereotypes, the themes cleanse the youths of the three main stigmas attributed to undoc- umented immigrants. The undocumented youths are normal Americans (and not irreducibly foreign), the best and brightest (and not free-riding welfare cheats or terrorizing gang members), and bear no fault for their immigration status (and not truly “illegal”). One longtime activist notes, “Everything is pretty clear-cut. We know what we need to say and we need a solid image. We’re basically debunking all the stereotypes, pro- moting ourselves as people with good character—to counter all the bad stereotypes of immigrants. You don’t want to give the media any rea- son to be against us.”24 While these themes structure the representations

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54 The Birth of the DREAMer

of undocumented youths, advocates transmit variants of these themes through an emotionally compelling “storyline.”25 The storyline main- tains that undocumented youths were brought to the country as chil- dren (no fault of their own), learned to become good and hardworking Americans, have overcome major barriers in the pursuit of the American dream, and were now not allowed to realize the dream because of their immigration status. By connecting the personal difficulties of individu- als to a very public storyline, activists have been able to articulate their argument in an emotionally compelling way.

This representation has been crafted for the primary purpose of pro- ducing an exceptionally good front stage persona of undocumented youth in an inhospitable political environment.26 The more the campaign sought to convince conservatives in hostile areas of the country, the greater the need for clear, simple, and sympathetic representation of these youths and their cause. A former organizer of United We Dream notes:

Yeah, we need to stick to the DREAM Act talking points that have been in place for ten years. You know, no fault of their own, best equipped, positive for the economy, and of course the pro-America thing. You have to say these things because we are trying to reach people in Iowa, Missouri, Utah, and North Carolina. If you want to reach these people, you have to stick close to these talking points because they work really well with people in these places.27

Producing a good front-stage persona of the DREAMer also requires si- lencing utterances, acts, and symbols that would raise doubts about their legal innocence, contributions to the country, or loyalty to America. The backstage complications and identities of real immigrant youths, their complicated national loyalties, sexualities, conduct, and so on, could not be allowed to seep onto the public stage because they would complicate the core message and imperil the cause.

After establishing youths as an exceptional and deserving group of immigrants, advocates argue that it would be an injustice to deny them the right to stay, live, and thrive in the country. They have done every- thing right and played by the rules. In spite of their efforts to overcome enormous hurdles and be good and contributing members of society, they are denied the legal right to stay in the country. The DREAM Act is about fairness and justice because it provides people who have fulfilled

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The Birth of the DREAMer 55

their part of the bargain an equal chance to realize the American dream. Denying these exceptional youths, these de facto Americans, the right to stay in the country would not only be a profound injustice but it would also be moral lapse of the country. President Obama drew on this argument to express his support of the DREAM Act: “It is heartbreak- ing. That can’t be who we are. To have kids, our kids, classmates of our children, who are suddenly under this shadow of fear, through no fault of their own.”28 What makes the case of these youths morally shocking for President Obama is that these are “our kids” who are forced to live in the “shadows of fear” due to factors that are “no fault of their own.”29

DREAM advocates have not only won over strong supporters among traditional allies, but they have also won over the support of some traditional adversaries. As a candidate in the 2008 Republican presiden- tial primaries, former Governor Mike Huckabee spoke sympathetically of the youths and their cause, “In all due respect, we’re a better country than to punish children for what their parents did.’’30 Even more telling, the director of the anti-immigrant association Numbers USA was will- ing to cede ground when it came to undocumented students, saying, “I could support legal status for some young immigrant students. However, I would do so only if Congress eliminates the current immigration system based on family ties and imposed mandatory electronic verification of immigration status for all workers.”31 During the 2012 Republican presi- dential primaries, Governor Rick Perry justified Texas’s policy of granting in-state tuition to undocumented youths on moral grounds: “If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they have been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart.”32 The effort to create a compelling repre- sentation of the youths as exceptional immigrants has in fact swayed some leading conservative figures to recognize the attributes that make them deserving of an exemption from restrictive immigration laws.

Differentiating Between “Good” and “Bad” Immigrants The representation of undocumented youths and their cause has

presented advocates and DREAMers with an important dilemma.

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56 The Birth of the DREAMer

Stressing the attributes (normal Americans, best and the brightest, no fault of their own) that made undocumented youths into excep- tional immigrants who deserve legalization helped make their cause a legitimate political issue. However, those not possessing such attri- butes (for example, unassimilated, recent arrivals, adults, poor and low skilled, “criminals”) could be seen as less exceptional and there- fore less deserving of legalization. Moreover, demonstrating belong- ing in America has been coupled with efforts to distance themselves from the stigmas associated with the general immigrant population. The process of de-stigmatizing undocumented youths has therefore contributed to differentiating between “deserving” and “undeserv- ing” immigrants.

The representation of undocumented youths has rested on the effort to stress the group’s assimilation into the American value system and its break from the cultural and moral worlds of sending countries. During the 2007 campaign, one DREAM activist noted, “All I’m hearing now is that I’m Colombian, but I’ve never really been there. I have no memories of the country where I was born and I do not speak articulate Spanish. They are taking me from my home in America and sending me to a dangerous country that I don’t even know.”33 Arguments like these have stressed that youths are wholly assimilated and that the countries of their parents are as foreign and other to them as they are to any “normal” American. The director of United We Dream maintained, “Maybe our par- ents feel like immigrants, but we feel like Americans because we have been raised here on American values.”34 Differentiating youths from the countries of parents helps reinforce a message of national conformity, but it also reinforces dominant representations of these places and their peoples as other, foreign, and incongruent with the American value system.

DREAM Act advocates have also sought to cleanse undocumented youths of the stigma of “illegality.” They have argued that youths cannot be held accountable for their legal status because they did not choose to migrate to the country. However, in making such an argument, the assumption is that those who made the “choice” (parents) are culpable for crossing the border and staying in the country “illegally.” Claiming

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The Birth of the DREAMer 57

innocence for youths has inadvertently come at the cost of attributing guilt to parents. This has allowed youths to be cleansed of the stigma of illegality, but it has also reinforced the stigma for parents. The double- edged nature of this rhetoric has continuously been reflected in public expressions of support by liberal political officials:

∙ ‘’It’s [current immigration law] penalizing children for mistakes that were made by their parents.’’35

∙ “It’s unfair to make these young people pay for the sins of their parents.”36

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