DREAM or NIGHTMARE? Why Congress Should Reject a Military-Only Version of the DREAM Act

by Stephen Yale-Loehr, a collaborator on the Green Card Stories book

Posted on Nation of Immigrators

First proposed in 2001 by Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Richard Durbin (D-IL), the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act would allow certain undocumented noncitizens a chance to legalize their status by going to college or serving in the military. Since then it has been introduced regularly both as a stand-alone bill and as part of comprehensive immigration reform bills, drawing bipartisan support each time in both the House and Senate. The closest it has come to enactment was in 2010, when it passed the House but failed to get through the Senate.

Congress has watered down the DREAM Act over the last decade.The original 2001 version would have granted permanent resident status (green cards) to any undocumented child who had been in the United States for at least five years, as long as they had good moral character and were attending a college or university.

By contrast, the Senate’s 2011 version of the bill would require individuals to have entered the United States before they were 15; have graduated from a U.S. high school or received a GED from a U.S. institution;be under 35 on the date of enactment; and have lived in the United States for at least five years. Prior versions of the bill did not include an age cap. Similarly, the current version of the bill would require beneficiaries to stay in conditional resident status for six years before they could get permanent green cards. Early versions of the DREAM Act would have immediately granted green cards to individuals who met the bill’s requirements.

The current version would also make applicants subject to more grounds of inadmissibility, deportability, and other restrictions. Some want to water down the DREAM Act even more.Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich say they would support a DREAM Act — but only for young immigrants who join the military. Representative David Rivera (R-FL) has introduced a bill along similar lines.

Problems with a military-only DREAM Act range from the practical to the philosophical. For example, Representative Rivera’s bill would require people to enlist within nine months; otherwise they would lose their eligibility under the bill. The bill fails to realize, however, that people can’t start the enlistment process until they are legal and have a social security number. It can take longer than nine months to complete the enlistment process, and the military services have annual quotas that get filled quickly when the economy is bad, forcing people into the next fiscal year.

In addition, some potential enlistees may fail to qualify for medical reasons. Suppose someone gets temporary status under the Rivera bill, tries to enlist, and turns out to be colorblind. Do we tell them, “Sorry, we are deporting you because you are colorblind. No refund of the immigration fees you paid to start the DREAM Act process”?

The call for a military-only DREAM Act also poses moral problems. It effectively tells undocumented noncitizens that they are only useful for war, not for improving our economy through their hard work or inspiring the next generation by teaching in our schools. Those professions are just as noble as fighting for our country. As a new book, Green Card Stories, points out, people who legalize their status help this country in a variety of important ways.

Proponents of a military-only DREAM Act also forget the economic benefits of enacting a broader bill. For example, A 2010 study by the UCLA North American Integration and Development Center estimates that the total earnings of DREAM Act beneficiaries over the course of their working lives would be between $1.4 trillion and $3.6 trillion. Similarly, a 2008 study from Arizona State University found that an individual with a bachelor’s degree earns approximately $750,000 more over the course of his or her lifetime than an individual with only a high-school diploma. In these tough economic times, we need the earnings of everyone in this country as much as we need their military service.

Langston Hughes once wrote:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? 


Or fester like a sore and then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over, like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?”

Politicians should watch out. Trying to dilute the DREAM Act may backfire on them and cause DREAMers to explode in widespread demonstrations and cries of outrage, if necessary to enact a true DREAM Act.

Miss Minnesota 2012: A Lao-American Refugee

by Laura Danielson, a collaborator on the Green Card Stories book

The Lamp Beside the Golden Door

Ask most folks in my home state to conjure up an image of Miss Minnesota and they will most probably come up with a tall, blonde, blue-eyed beauty who looks something like this:

This year, however, Minnesotans chose a woman named Nitaya Panemalaythong, who was born in a Thai refugee camp into a large family that had fled the war in Laos.

Although she’s not the first person of non-Scandanavian origin to hold the title, Nitaya is the first Asian-American immigrant.  Living in a home she helped purchase to house nine other relatives, Nitaya reports that she entered the contest in order to get a shot at the $45,000 scholarship money that is granted to the winner, enabling her to resume the college education she was forced to put on hold. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports that Nitaya experienced a life familiar to so many immigrant kids – acting as the family translator and working hard to support a large brood of extended relatives. Finally, with that prize money, she says, she can “focus on myself instead of worrying about everyone else.”

Even though I’m not normally a fan of beauty pageants I find this story delightful for a couple of reasons.  First, even though  Nitaya was initially told when she tried to get a job modeling that she didn’t have “the Midwestern look”,  it shakes loose a few of the stereotypes about what a Minnesota gal headed for Miss America should be. Second, on a larger scale it reminds us that even the American heartland has evolved to become a place rich with diverse immigrant stories.  Minnesota, in particular, has a large re-settlement community, with 25%-50% of its immigrants arriving as refugees (as compared with 8% nationally). Home to one of the largest Somali and Hmong communities in the country, Minnesota has made some remarkable demographic changes in the past couple of decades.

Of course, there are still some things that never change, such as Minnesotans’ passion for ice hockey. Nitaya, as Miss Minnesota, can be seen here doing her bit for the state by pulling on her woolies and cheering on the team.  Go Minnesota!

Over 5000 “Stolen” Children?

by Laura Danielson, a collaborator on the Green Card Stories book

The Lamp Beside the Golden Door

Even though I’m daily in the trenches and not much about immigration shocks me any longer, I’m stunned by the recent ABC Nightline report that a new method of punishment for undocumented immigrants has been devised – taking away their U.S. citizen children.  See:  Stolen Babies? Immigrant Mother Loses Four Kids  Didn’t we learn anything back in the 1950’s and 1960’s when thousands of Native American children were taken away from their families under the motto: “Kill the Indian, Save the Man” – causing decades of psychological trauma and necessitating the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978?

In a report released last year titled “Disappearing Parents”, Nina Rabin, an attorney with the University of Arizona’s Immigration Law and Policy Program argues that systemic failures in our federal immigration enforcement and our state child welfare systems have led to situations where parents are apprehended and placed into detention facilities and are unable to attend family court hearings to fight for custody of their children. In the Nightline case mentioned, Arizona courts terminated a mother’s parental rights to her four children, including the youngest who was separated from her mother at three months.  More than three years later the children no longer speak Spanish, are in foster homes, and are in the process of being adopted.

Ms. Rabin’s report, which draws upon dozens of interviews with caseworkers, judges and lawyers in Arizona alone, concludes that the Nightline case is not an isolated example but rather is systemic and frequently goes unreported and unnoticed because the parents are powerless to do anything. She quotes one juvenile court judge as saying,  “For me, there is just so much confusion. Nobody really understands how the [immigration] system works. No one understands it. The children certainly don’t understand it, their parents don’t understand it, their child welfare lawyers don’t understand it, we as judges really don’t have a sufficient understanding of the way the process works. . . it is such a mystery to everyone. It just seems like this big, amorphous mystery.”

Although the Immigration and Customs Enforcement folks argue that they are less likely to detain undocumented parents who have not committed any crimes, a report from last summer titled “Shattered Families”, prepared by the Applied Research Center, finds that an estimated 5100 children in 22 states  were in foster care after their parents were detained or deported.  Of those, some have been put up for adoption by American families, potentially creating heart-wrenching custody battles such as the one described here.  Although ICE says that such cases are “rare”, the ARC report concludes that at least 15,000 more children will face similar threats to reunification with their parents over the next five years.

An appellate judge in the adoption case mentioned above ruled that the mother had willfully abandoned her son and couldn’t offer him a future, and that her “lifestyle…of smuggling herself into a country illegally and committing crimes in this country is not a lifestyle that can provide stability for a child.”  Never mind that the crime in question was only immigration related and that the American adoptive father himself had pled guilty to a felony for possession of stolen property in his younger days.  Fortunately the Missouri Supreme Court overturned the decision and called the boy’s five year separation from his Guatemalan mother a “travesty of justice”, but the consequences for all concerned will be painful and enduring.

This raises the question:  how many undocumented mothers and fathers will be able to fight their way through our courts, particularly if they’ve already been deported to another country, live in poverty, and don’t have access to counsel?  And what are the long-term emotional consequences for their forceably separated children? Isn’t there another, more humane way of approaching the problem?

Of course there is.  Fifteen years ago these issues rarely arose because there were  more discretionary bases for fighting deportation.  Hard working mothers and fathers who hadn’t committed any crimes were rarely deported but rather were sponsored by employers or family members and paid a fine for their immigration overstays.  Or they were granted “suspension of deportation” by beneficent immigration judges who recognized the extreme hardships that their deportation would create.  Many such individuals moved forward to lead productive lives and become community leaders, teachers, and doctors, such as some of the individuals profiled in my book, Green Card Stories .  It is really time for us to put our heads together as a civilized society and figure out a humane and compassionate solution.  If we are sensible, bi-partisan and above all true to the basic tenets of our immigrant nation, we can fix our broken immigration system without breaking up families and destroying lives.