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As a university professor who has lived in college towns for the last decade, I am accustomed to seeing the celebratory fabrics of graduation regalia undulate through the streets. Bearing witness to this recent graduation cycle, however, was uniquely bittersweet.
For nearly a third of my life, and nearly half of my life in America, I lived in fear of being found out. When I was 18 and about to graduate as a valedictorian with my pick of schools, I learned that I was undocumented. That I had been, for half my life at that point, undocumented. "The Social Security Administration (SSA) did not confirm that you are a U.S. Citizen," read the last page of my federal Student Aid Report. It was 2001, and the first iteration of the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act failed to pass. If the DREAM Act aged alongside me, it would be 23 years old now and graduating college.
June 15 marks the 12th anniversary of the passing of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an Obama-era program that provided temporary status and work authorization to some undocumented youth who arrived in the U.S. before the age of 16. It is a milestone, but a stopgap solution is still not enough.
The DREAM Act has been introduced in Congress a dizzying 10 plus times since. If every introduction of the DREAM Act were a year, it would be older than I was when I became undocumented. Currently, there is a new version of the DREAM Act before the 118th Congress, introduced by Senators Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), as well as two additional versions folded, one for worse, into larger bills. With three in the cycle, and with 72 percent of voters in 2021 in favor of the DREAM Act, something must give.
Election season is upon us and we must not allow our attention to solely be diverted toward even more provisional programs or deterrents. We must demand that our representatives support legislation that paves a more expansive and humane path toward citizenship for the estimated 11 million Americans living without legal status.
At this point, the eldest DACA recipients are in their early 40s. Asking them to renew their status every two years is a cruel and costly way to ask our family, friends, and co-workers to live. While citizens of this country apply for passports to travel overseas, DACA recipients must apply for "Advance Parole," as if they are prisoners of this country. More, the fate of the program is again under threat and awaiting its future in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. A few weeks ago, as a friend embarked on a trip to visit his country of birth, he prepared by organizing his apartment in case he is not allowed re-entry into the U.S.
Through the years, I have heard objectors call the DREAM Act an "amnesty" bill. After 23 years, all that's left to say in response is: And what if it is? On average, it takes someone three to five years to apply for citizenship after obtaining a green card. When I was 18, a nonprofit immigration lawyer advised me to pray or to get pregnant to resolve my immigration status. I turned instead to education and poetry, which provided me a haven and personal agency.
At 23, I became a green card holder during my first semester of my MFA after marrying my high school and college sweetheart. As a doctoral student, I simultaneously studied for my comprehensive exams and the naturalization test, trying to weigh which was more important when time and money stretched me thin. I took my Oath of Allegiance in a converted basketball stadium in Texas in 2011, almost exactly 20 years after arriving from the Philippines at the age of 8.
It is more than about time to pass the DREAM Act. As graduation often marks a pivotal moment in a person's life, I hope the passing of the DREAM Act may also be just the beginning of greater things.
Janine Joseph, Ph.D., is an associate professor of creative writing at Virginia Tech, a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, and a Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project. She is the author of Driving Without a License and Decade of the Brain: Poems, and is co-editor of Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
