As graduation approaches, I began to sort through old handouts, graded papers, and books. I will be leaving in less than two weeks and it's impossible for me to send all of my memoribilia back home. It was nice to look back at all the memories of my classes. As I was sorting through old organization pamphlets, I noticed my handwriting one of them. It said:

Google Urbi Pariona.

It was indeed my own handwriting. But I could not remember exactly when or why I had written these words on it. Perhaps at one point someone told me to look up this person for a reason and I jotted it down to remind myself later. I never would have thought that I would actually do it three years later.

So I googled Urbi Pariona and found one news article in Spanish about her. She came with her mother from Peru in 2000. Initally, they had come legally--her mother was sponsored by a company that later went banktrupt. Because of this, her mother lost the work permit. However, they decided to stay in the country since they did not want to go back. At one point she realized that she would not be able to go onto college without legal status. In order to bring awareness about the issue, in 2006 she organized an art contest. She is now a legal resident after her long stuggles--her father was able to become a legal resident and sponsor his wife and daughter.

The link to the Spanish article is here. 

Some opponents argue that immigrants should take care of their own problems in their own country instead of leaving their place. Similarly, they point fingers at us who were raised here for the most part to "go back to our countries and fix them." But what does this all presuppose? It seems to me that the expectation is that we are responsible for changing and controlling our environments. Great reasoning!

This is why it's important to look at our immigration history. The first American settlers came from England to escape religious persecution. Subsequent immigrants came here because of political and economic instability. Should they be judged as well because they did not take the responsibility to make things better in their home countries? What's the difference?

I attest that my parents came to this country because my father couldn't find work. The lack of an education proved to be a huge impediment for him, since after he was fired from a factory that produced car parts, he was not able to find a viable job to sustain a family of four. Thus, he had no other choice but to come to the United States to find a better environment where he could work and send money back to us. All he had to do was to remove himself from an environment that prevented him earning a living. But that wasn't easy either.

So what do we say to those who come from places that are far worse? Consider the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Political instability encourages people to leave the state and immigrate to the United States. The North County Times features an article where Centelia Maldonado and a group of migrant workers inform their fellow Oaxacans about the harship of being an immigrant in the United States. They basically tell them that life is not easy in this country although it enables many to send money back home. Activisits are trying to create jobs back home in Oaxaca so that people won't feel forced to migrate. However, the article ends with the following about Oaxaca: 

Oaxaca City was the site of sometimes-violent demonstrations in 2006, when protesters seized the city's center for months and accused the governor of electoral fraud. The federal government eventually sent in police to clear the city of protesters, and Ruiz remains in office.

The conflict began as a teachers' strike in May, 2006, but quickly mushroomed into a broad protest against centuries of social and economic injustices.

People in Oaxaca have tried to change their environment because many can't possibly afford to leave their homes. I don't live in Oaxaca to determine how much progress has occurred in the past five years. But if people still emigrate from there significantly, it should tell us that not much change has occurred.

A question to fellow DREAMers and our readers: Taking into account that our immigrant ancestors came to America to escape their unstable environments, to what extent should we be responsible for changing our environments/places of origin?

As I pedaled away at the stationary bicycle this morning, I flipped through the channels to see what was on CNN News. At the moment, I was lucky to see the beginning of the mass Pope Benedict was leading at the Nationals Park. The CNN commentators were sure that the Pope would address various issues during his homily, including a Spanish version to the Latin American families present at the ceremony.

Pope Benedict, according to the Associated Press, urged the American government to adopt fair legislation for the millions of immigrants who are out of status. More importantly, he stressed that immigrants should be treated humanely.

Despite the peaceful advice from the Pope, Tom Tancredo slammed the Pope's call for fair immigration reform. He descredits the Pope's message by merely arguing that the main interests of the Pope is to increase church membership by using the issue of immigration. He calls the Pope's schemes "faith-based marketing." Nothing more is expected from Tom.

In my opinion, the Pope's call for reform during today's mass will certainly be noticed by most Christians. It's not just a scheme to increase church membership--many Christians do believe that a reasonable way to deal with the broken immigration system should be crafted.

One of the fascinating things I find about the topic of immigration is that as I learn about its history, I still see living examples today about how it will never cease to stop. People migrate and for different reasons. The pattern emerges to some scholars who have attempted to define the forces that compel people to migrate by push, pull, and means.

Push refers to forces that compel people to migrate such as natural disasters or political turmoil. Pull refers to the incentives that people perceive from their intended places of destination. Means is that by which immigrants are able to migrate. Pretty simple to understand, right?

The first immigrants that came to America were influenced by all of these laws. Apart from seeking religious freedom, Roger Daniels suggests that the people who colonized and deposed the people already living here were primarily interested in wealth. It was to such an extent that people like John Winthrop in 1634 said, "the natives, they are neare all dead of the small Poxe, so as the Lorth hath cleared our title to what we possess."

I don't think it's any shame to say that immigrants come to find a better life in terms of improving their economic status. Recently, BBC News reports of a woman by the name of Flor who has taken refuge in a church in Chicago. She is another Elvira Arellano, who also sought sanctuary only to be deported when she decided to go out and join protesters in California. Flor talks about why she came to this country. She mentiones how NAFTA affected her personally and that she desperately needed to find a job that would support her two children in Mexico. Thus, she decided to cross the US-Mexico border to accomplish that goal.

The Laws of Migration at work...

Learn more about Flor here. 

Even as a DREAMer student, I still feel that I am not acquainted with the rich history of immigration of this country. So I decided to look around for books on the subject and came across Coming to America: a History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life, written by Roger Daniels in 1990. I started reading the book to understand one way to examine the current state of the system.

From what I have learned so far, there is a distinction between the term migrant and immigrant. A migrant, for example, moves from one place to another that does not involve a political boundary. An immigrant crosses some form of political boundary, on the other hand. I have struggled to decide what term is more appropriate to use in political discourse, because as we have seen, discourse is manipulated. Hearing the opinion of a historian makes me more comfortable with both terms, since it describes a natural human behavior across times and cultures.

Up next--on the motivations for migration. 

What kind of opportunity should we be given to escape our legal limbo?

The question does not get redundant or old, since on a daily basis, supporters and opponents alike express their opinions and argument ad infinitum et ad nauseam. The only way to iron out our differences is through contructive dialogue.

Some outright believe that we should not be given any "rights" because there is a so called "back of the line" where we can apply for legal residency. However, we have clarified that issue in many of our posts so far. There is no back of the line to help us adjust status. I'll even say that there are people who want us to disappear and never return to this country again. I still fail to understand such resentment.

Most of the people I talk to believe that there should be a way for us to adjust status, since we have been living in this country such a long time waiting for that opportunity. The DREAM Act is the closest legislation that would allow us to do so. Yet many people oppose it on various reasons. I quote from the Miami Herald below to show one way people oppose the DREAM Act:

The state's priority should be to ensure that its university system can accommodate all qualified U.S. citizens and legal residents before considering enacting laws such as the Dream Act, which would allow children of illegal immigrants to attend state universities unconditionally.

The question is whether the system can ever accommodate "all qualified US citizens and residents." I can't deny that it is very difficult for all low income and even middle class families to afford a college education, especially in our era where earning a Bachelor's degree is almost essential to succeed as a professional. But I think that the DREAM Act addresses our specific issue--i.e. that we are not full members of society. We can't drive, we can't work, so we may just as well be at home twiddling our fingers.

So here is what people fail to understand: the DREAM Act primarily helps us to adjust our status. After that, we would be legal permanent residents eventually. So we would be included in that group of legal residents who should be given the opportunity to continue our education. This refutes the last part of the argument above--that we would be able to attend public universities UNCONDITIONALLY. There are conditions that must be met--we must adjust our status to be functional members of society. And to do so, one requires to have to wait even more until our cases are finally resolved.

Recently on a thread at the DREAM Act Portal, a fellow DREAMer asked about the estimated percentage of DREAM passing this year. It has not been the first time users sign up to answer this question. After other DAP users answer it, they usually stop posting instead of contributing in some way for the cause.

Do they just go back to sleep, to their normal lives? If so, then we are in trouble. It is said that about 65,000 of us graduate each year from US public high schools without much hope for further education. I know that if I had not been granted the opportunity to attend college, I would have probably joined many in the shadows, working under the table and forgetting about college for a while. Now, as a graduating senior, I realize the importance to continue one's education immediately after high school. Within these past four years, I developed my social, academic, and spiritual life in college. I would not have had the opportunity to do so if I I had worked for a while until I was in my late twenties. I wouldn't get the chance to live in a dorm, be part of clubs, and socialize with my peers because I'd just be seen as an older adult. In other words, the experience isn't the same once you grow old and then continue where you left off after high school.

But I digress. I would just like to see more relevant questions asked about the DREAM Act other than just the chances that it might pass this year. I'll be realistic and state that due to the focus on the presidential elections, there is a very slim chance for the DREAM Act to even reach the senate floor. Unless we have thousands of supporters actively pushing this legislation, we won't be seeing much this year.

However, that does not give us the excuse to stop our efforts. This is the purpose of this blog--to keep the memory of DREAM alive so that other students and supporters can be informed of what is going on and how one can help. This is what we can do, for now. 

I took a class two years ago about the rise of Christianity, where I learned that opposing second century Christian factions claimed the Apostle Paul, who lived near the end of the first century AD, as their own in order to crush one another. The "orthodox" church claimed Paul to demonize Gnostic Christian circles while the Gnostics used Paul to do the same. I am sure that this tactic is nothing new and continues to take form in other debates to our present world where the battle of ideas rage on, such as immigration.

Was Cesar Chavez a champion of immigrant farmworkers? Or, was he also a crusader against illegal immigration?

The New York Times and the New York Sun recently published stories about Amtrak and Greyhound citizenship checks. The opposition argues naturally that these types of activities are beneficial in order to enforce immigration laws. However, as Fash recently posted, citizens and permanent residents could be discriminated against whether it is through racial profiling or simply being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

According to Amtrak, ICE officials have the right to conduct random checks, anywhere in the US. Of course, ICE officers provide the most attention near border towns, especially along the US-Mexico border. 

In the New York Times article, a woman observes that checks have been increasing significantly these days; thus, this led immigrant rights activisits to protest these activities. "They [Amtrak and Greyhound] should warn people that this [random citizenship checks] could happen," she states.

So how would legal residents and citizens prove their status if their bus/train were stopped by ICE? For permanent residents, they ought to carry their "green" cards with them. However, there is no document that proves that one is a citizen, save birth certificates. Should American citizens now be compelled to carry their birth certificates when they travel? Or a better question yet--is there a better way to employ time and resources to fix the broken immigration system?

At times you might wonder why we tend to repeat ourselves about this issue. However, the opposition certainly does it--it seems almost as a creedal statement they proclaim without questioning why they believe that the DREAM Act is a nightmare.

Recently, the blog 'Til We Have Faces featured transcripts of stories of immigrants from a YouTube video. One of the comments posted an extremely long tirade against the DREAM Act. Since I wish to be clear, it is my purpose to address it piece by piece, starting with the closing statement.

The opposition states:

Some may think that there are unlimited seats available to fill in colleges. The truth is, for every admission of an illegal alien to college, an American student is denied because of the limited seats available. The last time I checked, going to college was not a “job Americans wont’ do."

First, I am aware that not everyone can go to college. However, let's get a reality check here. Colleges are not required to guarantee a spot for just any student. Different colleges have different criteria. I do know for a fact that most DREAMers have good grades and have done well in other aspects of their high school careers. Thus, while many universities accept them, most can't attend anyway because we can't pay tuition and other expenses. If universities deny American students with mediocre grades, they do so at their own discretion since they want students whom they know will succeed.

Another point that this quote claims is that everyone who supports our cause states that all immigrants are performing the jobs that American's won't do, such as agricultural jobs. However, whoever wrote this presupposes that there is only one homogenous group of people involved. The tactic is to assign labels to a group of very diverse people and label them all as criminals in addition.