Commentary:
By Maria de los Angeles Torres

Last weekend, over 600 Dreamers, undocumented youth, called on the President and Congress to support a comprehensive immigration reform that would create a path to legalization for over 12 million immigrants. They have changed their focus from policies that could give them relief, to one that includes their families as well.

Catering to Dreamers had become a politically expedient way to address the immigration reform impasse. In a pre-election scramble to bolster the Latino vote, President Obama issued a deferment action for childhood arrivals (DACA), which delays for two years the deportation of young undocumented individuals without including their parents who are immanently deportable. In the wake of the election in which the Latino electorate overwhelmingly voted for candidates more likely to bring immigration reform, the Republicans, in an attempt to regain their support, introduced the Achieve Act, a plan that would give status to undocumented individuals who entered the US as children. It is similar to but a less robust version of the Democrats’ preferred DREAM Act, which offers a path to citizenship still only to young people.

Despite distinctions, all plans aimed exclusively at “saving” young people can result in family separations.

There are historical precedents we should learn from. In the U.S., at the turn of the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of children were shipped from urban areas to Midwest farms in what became known as the Orphan Trains. In reality, most were children of poor Catholic, Italian and Irish families whose parents were working long hours, forcing them to leave children at home. particularly during summer months. A few decades later, Native American children were also taken from their families and placed in boarding schools in order to “civilize” them. Their parents were deemed socially and racially inferior and thus incapable of raising their children right.

In the early 1960s, over 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban minors, myself included, were brought to the United States via a program dubbed Operation Pedro Pan. This initiative organized to save us from communism was a result of an immigration policy that gave minors blanket visa waivers but excluded parents. Adults were seen as potential security threats that needed special screenings. This two-tiered policy resulted in long family separations for most.

These programs are philosophically rooted in modernist nation-building rational projects in which children and young people are the keys to create future societies. Unlike adults, they can be molded into future, respectable citizens.

However, instead of being saved, these children and young people suffered family separations.

President Obama’s deferred action for childhood arrivals, the DREAM Act, and the Achieve Act, share disturbingly similar elements to these historical projects. By excluding parents, they deny children and young people the right to have a unified family, a sacred foundation of American society. Their parents are dismissed as incapable of raising them as they are labeled criminals, even though their border crossings are technically not crimes but rather civil infractions.

Young undocumented are exempt from this fictional criminalization since they were too young to have “committed the crime.” However, in order to be “pardoned” they must denounce their parents.

Using young people to justify a change in immigration policy may be a politically expedient way of advancing much needed comprehensive immigration reform, but it is one that can have long-lasting and devastating effects on their families — the institution that, after all, has delivered the superstar “Dreamers” and “Achievers” this country is willing to harbor.

In the years shortly after Operation Pedro Pan, Congress added family reunification as a cornerstone to immigration policy. It was a guideline that recognized the role of families in stabilizing the lives of young people, particularly young immigrants. The Dreamers have recognized this and are demanding that family reunification should once again be a goal in our immigration policies.

María de Los Angeles Torres is director and professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois in Chicago. She is the author of two books, The Lost Apple: Operation Pedro Pan, Cuban Children in the US and the Promise of a Better Future. (2004) and In the Land of Mirrors: The Politics of Cuban Exiles in the United States (1999). She is a frequent contributor to the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers. Currently she is a co-Principal Investigator for a study on “Youth Politics in the Age of Globalization,” funded by Chapin Hall and the Kellogg Foundation and was Co-PI for a National Science Research Foundation Project, “Civic Engagement in Three Latino Neighborhoods.” Dr. de los Angeles Torres can be reached at torresma@uic.edu.