“What’s your background?”
This is the question I inevitably hear at the beginning of any new semester or job. Dark hair and tan skin will often pique people’s curiosity about my ethnicity. I tell them I’m Hispanic – my father was born in Argentina.
“Oh, so do you speak Spanish?”
“Nope.”
Their response is always the same, a quizzical mix of disappointment and confusion. I can almost hear them thinking, “How can you look like that, and not speak Spanish?”
My father’s heritage has always been of interest to other people. They pepper me with questions – When did he move here? How did he get here? How did he learn English? – and from that point on, I notice a distinct difference in how they see me. I’m American… but different. American Lite.
On Wednesday, the Ellbogen Center for Teaching and Learning hosted a discussion about the book “Just Like Us” by journalist Helen Thorpe, the story of four young Mexican teens battling issues of immigration and American identity in Denver, Colorado. Thorpe followed the girls, two who are legal and two who are not, through their senior years and into college. What is dynamic about Thorpe’s subjects is that they are not your run-of-the-mill teenagers. They are each honors students, with exceptional grades, involved in their community and working to help provide for their families. In “Just Like Us”, the two young women who are in the country illegally must navigate the world of graduating seniors while also dealing with the difficulty of getting into college (most schools require a Social Security Card) while living every day in fear of deportation.
The discussion closed on the subject of what it is to be “American:” is it a birth certificate? Is it where you were raised? Who raised you? What makes someone “an American.”
By all intents and purposes, the two young women in Thorpe’s book are American. Their parents brought them here illegally when they were just babies. Raised in America, they went to public schools; they work, eat, sleep and live just as any citizen of this country does. But by our outdated and faulty immigration laws, they are not citizens and if caught, would be sent back to Mexico, a country neither of them has ever called home.
The problem with our immigration laws is it leaves no window for cases such as these. To hold a child responsible for his or her parents’ actions is ridiculous – that is why we have different sentencing processes for minors, because we recognize a child cannot maturely determine right from wrong. So why is there no legislation to protect these kids, who maybe were not born in the United States but are still children of America?
So I ask again, what makes a person American? Are these students less American than you or I? Is someone like convicted Bradley Manning (now Chelsea Manning) more of an American than Thorpe’s girls, just because he has a birth certificate but clearly does not value his country?
Wednesday’s discussion was thought provoking, but as I sat there listening to participates debate these hard questions, I realized something: people who are anti-immigration reform would rarely come to an event like this. Doing my best not to refer to an entire group of people with a broad statement, I can say with relative certainty that those who align themselves with anti-immigration reform would not be interested in the story of two illegal Denver teenagers and their struggle to be productive members of a society that would toss them out without a second thought. And therein lies my problem – how do we call this the land of the free, home of the brave when we punish those who display courage and value freedom more than most without even attempting to understand their plight?
People sympathetic to those girls’ stories are the people who show up, and they’ll also be the ones who read this article. People who can identify in a small way with the crisis of American identity and who’ve maybe never looked like a typical American. We come and we discuss and there are points raised we didn’t think of before, but in the end, everyone is nodding. Rarely are anyone’s beliefs being challenged because in a setting like this, we all believe the same thing.
There is legislation in the works to give illegal immigrants who came to America as children a path to citizenship. The DREAM act would allow permanent residency to qualifying individuals. They must have graduated from U.S. high schools, arrived in the country as minors and lived here continuously prior to the bill’s enactment for a minimum of five years. Despite being introduced in 2001, the bill has been stalled and failed in 2007 to get the required votes.
There is also DACA, also known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which directs U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to practice “prosecutorial discretion” toward people who immigrated illegally as children. However, the law does not bestow lawful immigration status, change the person’s existing status, nor provide a path toward citizenship.
While these measures are evidence that the country is progressing toward more understanding of how deeply defective our current immigration laws are, they are much too little, way too late. And how would we as a nation better understand these issues when we are too busy only informing ourselves on the side that we identify with? Social issues such as immigration reform may not win elections, but they will never be solved if we don’t collectively come together to debate, challenge each other and seek understanding. If two teenagers from Denver, Colorado are able to commit themselves to a country that doesn’t “count” them, perhaps we should show the same initiative and figure out a way for girls like them to call themselves true Americans.
