By Dr Ala Sirriyeh
‘I’m in America because disco died. It took until 1989
for disco to finally die in the Philippines. My dad’s job was installing and
maintaining the sounds systems for all the discos in Manilla. He said I can’t
like support us. We’re going to try to move and we’re going to find work’. (Stephanie Suarez in Lost and Found: Story of a
DREAM Act Student)
Lost
and Found tells the story of a young woman called Stephanie
Suarez, who is one of the 11 million undocumented migrants living in the USA
(863,000 are under the age of 16 and 1,815,000 are aged 16-24) (Migration
Policy Institute 2015). Undocumented migrants are people who
are not US citizens or legal permanent residents and who lack the documentation
authorising them to be present in the USA. It is not a crime to be undocumented
in the USA and deportation is a civil rather than criminal penalty (Golash-Boza
2012). People can become undocumented for a number of reasons. While many
undocumented young people entered into the USA as children with their parents
through irregular routes, others initially arrived in the USA on temporary
visas and became undocumented when these visas expired. Due to the 1982 Plyer vs Doe Supreme Court ruling (Zatz
and Rodriguez 2015) undocumented children are eligible to attend elementary and
high school in the USA despite their undocumented status. This means that
undocumented young people who arrive in the USA as children have been educated
in a U.S. education curriculum alongside ‘citizen’ peers (Gleeson and Gonzales
2012). However, (prior to 2012) on graduation from high school the pathways for
undocumented young people diverged from their U.S. citizen peers as they were
ineligible for a social security number and other forms of ID. This meant that
they could not work legally or apply for driving licences or the other forms of
ID and documentation that are often needed in order to go about daily life in
the USA. They were also ineligible for most student financial aid and loans and
in many states were not recognised for in-state tuition fees even if they had
grown up in that state. Finally, as undocumented people they were still
deportable despite having lived for much of their life in the USA. The
undocumented youth-led civil rights movement emerged in the early 2000s to draw
attention to these exclusions and to campaign for a pathway to legalisation and
citizenship for undocumented young people.
This summer I was fortunate enough to receive a Santander
Research Scholarship which enabled me to travel to Los Angeles to find out
about the undocumented youth movement in the USA which has strong roots in Los
Angeles where there is a long history of migrant rights activism. I spent two
weeks in September in Los Angeles meeting with activists from organisations
aligned to the movement and staff from organisations working with undocumented
young people. In this post I will outline the emergence of the undocumented
youth movement and the evolution of their campaign organisation and messaging
leading up to and beyond 2012 when President Obama introduced the Deferred
Action for Childhood Arrivals Programme (DACA). In what are generally hostile
times for immigrants, the undocumented youth movement stands out as having made
some headway in successfully campaigning for some more progressive policies for
undocumented young people in a context of wider immigration restrictions. I
will conclude with some observations about how the movement and its
achievements might be evaluated through the lens of citizenship
The
Undocumented Immigrant Youth Movement in the USA
The undocumented immigrant youth
movement emerged on to the political scene in the early 2000s. In tracing the
movement’s history, Nicholls (2013: 47) states that, ‘Before 2001, ‘DREAMers’
did not exist as a political group’. The movement has commonly been referred to
as the ‘Dream movement’ or the ‘Dreamers’ because it began as a campaign to
pass the Dream Act and the campaign linked the dreams of these young people’s with
the ‘American Dream’. The Dreamer narrative told the story of young people who
were in the USA through no fault of
their own and brought by their
parents. They had grown up in the USA and were culturally assimilated with
little memory or connection to their countries of origin. They were the
brightest and best who excelled in education and simply wanted the chance to
pursue the American Dream. This
narrative while proving to be successful in winning support among politicians
and the media, has been critiqued for its exclusionary tone which humanises
these young people through reinforcing the stigmatisation of other migrants who
do not fit this narrative.
The campaign for the Dream Act (which
would provide a pathway to legalisation and citizenship for these undocumented
young people following completion of higher education or service in the US
military) began in the wider context of a campaign for comprehensive
immigration reform. It had been a long time since the last comprehensive
federal immigration law, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA),
which had provided an amnesty for some undocumented migrants (UCLA Centre for
Labor Research and Education 2008). Over the next decade the Dream Act bill was
introduced several times initially as a stand along bill then as part of a
Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act in the mid-2000s and later as a
stand-alone bill in 2010 (Nicholls 2013).
The undocumented youth movement has a
strong base in California, and Los Angeles in particular. The state’s AB 540
legislation meant that undocumented students who had attended school in
California were able to register to pay in-state tuition fees, as opposed to
the considerably higher out of state tuition fees faced by undocumented
students living in many other states in the USA. These young people began
organising in campus based groups which eventually become part of a coalition
called California Dream Network. Gonzales (2008) documents how many
of these young people participated in the famous 2006 migrant rights May Day
demonstrations, putting student concerns on the migrant rights agenda.
The campaign for the Dream Act was led
at a national level by a network of activists and immigrant rights associations
organised into the United We Dream coalition and by
state level coalitions such California Dream
Network.
These coalitions helped to organise and train groups of young activists.
Initially leading migrant rights activist organisations played a significant
role in representing the needs of undocumented young people to politicians and
the media and in training and advising young activists (Nicholls 2013). However,
from 2010 the youth movement became more autonomous and young activists took a
leading role in guiding the direction and tactics of the movement. At this
point undocumented young activists began to push for the Dream Act as a stand-alone
bill which they thought had more chance of success if it was not tied into a
wider immigration reform bill that had proved difficult to pass. They also
began to engage in more radical and visible protest acts including the
occupation of Senate offices in Washington, hunger strikes, mock graduations
and ‘coming out’ events where they told their stories in public and declared
themselves ‘undocumented and unafraid’ (Swertz 2015). However, although
garnering significant support from many in Congress and the Senate, in December
2010 the Dream Act bill yet again failed to be passed due to Republican
fillibustering. Young people continued to protest and stage actions including a
wave of civil disobedience across the country in 2011 at Department for
Homeland Security and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices. In
Los Angeles four young activists were arrested after occupying the ICE office
in downtown Los Angeles (Nicholls 2012). In 2012 (facing an upcoming election
and needing the support of Latino voters) President Obama announced the
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). DACA gives certain eligible
young people the right to apply for a two-year renewable temporary leave to
remain. To be eligible for DACA young people have to be under the age of 31;
have arrived in the USA before the age of 16; have no felonies, serious misdemeanours
or multiple misdemeanours; and be attending or have successfully graduated from
high school.
La Placita church - a key site in immigrants rights activism in Los Angeles
By March 2014 533,197 young people had
been approved for DACA. A recent study evaluating DACA
(Teranishi et al. 2015) found that DACA has been ‘beneficial to some
undocumented students relative to their financial stability and well-being,
access to resources and opportunities, and participating more fully in college
and society’. However, some students still face barriers to accessing higher
education in states where they are required to pay out of state tuition. DACA
also does not eliminate uncertainties and insecurities about the future as it is
a temporary legal status which must be renewed every two years, offers no
pathway to citizenship and, as an executive order rather than legislation, can
be revoked by any future U.S president. Meanwhile, the strict eligibility
requirements for applying for DACA mean that, as found in a recent study from
the Dream Resource Centre (UCLA) called Police in My Head, many young people
experience anxiety and practice self-surveillance. Eighty three per cent of
young people in the survey for this study reported self-monitoring. Finally, if
they are not at risk of losing DACA status or being deported, many young people
are in mixed status families and fear the deportation of family and friends.
Teranishi et al (2015) found that 55.9% of undocumented young people in their
study knew someone who had been deported including a parent (5.7%) or a sibling
(3.2%). Since DACA there has been a continuing focus at state level on
improving access to education. However, both at state and national level the
undocumented youth movement is now campaigning on issues beyond the previous
focus on a pathway to formal citizenship. In particular there have been actions
against the in the detention and deportation of immigrants in the USA. In
recognition of the exclusionary discourse of the exceptional all American young
‘Dreamer’, there has also been some critical reflection within the movement about
intersectionality and the silencing and marginalisation of voices that did not
meet the strict and very controlled Dreamer messaging criteria. This has seen
the rise recently, for example, of the ‘Undocuqueer’ stream of the
movement. While expansion beyond the narrow focus on higher education and a
discourse of ‘innocence’ has led to greater attention to the criminalisation
and oppressive policing of young people of colour in the USA and has led to
dialogue with activists in the Black Lives Matter movement and in
alliances such as Freedom Side.
Acts
of Citizenship
The Dream Act bills that formed the focus of the
‘Dreamer’ movement in the first decade sought a pathway to citizenship for
undocumented immigrant young people. How successful has the undocumented youth
movement been in achieving this goal? If we look at this question through the
lens of formal legal citizenship then it could be said that the movement failed
because the Dream Act was not passed. Although DACA has improved the
opportunities available for many eligible ‘DACAmented’ young people, this is a
temporary status and does not provide a pathway to citizenship. Meanwhile, the
conditionalities in the terms of DACA, including the focus on productive
citizenship combined with the temporary but potentially renewable status mean
that young people remain under pressure to be well-behaved guests; recipients
of hospitality and compassion, held in a humanitarian rather than political
subject relationship with the state.
However, if we address the question of citizenship through
attention to the process of political action taken by these young people rather
than simply limiting analysis to the formal state of legislation on
citizenship, a more optimistic picture can be presented. Isin’s (2008) ‘acts of citizenship’ theory examines
how citizenship is mediated between lived experiences and formal entitlements
by focusing on moments when, regardless of status, people constitute themselves
as citizens. This enables us to consider how subjects, like undocumented
young people ‘become claimants of rights and responsibilities, under surprising
conditions’ (Isin 2008:17). Insights about citizenship can be gained from
observing moments when non-citizens (Nyers 2008) or those on the edges of
citizenship assert themselves politically to claim rights. This critical
citizenship lens is helpful for understanding the achievements of these young
activists as it enables us to recognise the ways in which they have asserted
themselves as political subjects rather than passive victims. An ‘acts of
citizenship’ approach enables us to see and recognise how these young people,
although not citizens, have been able to enact themselves as political subjects
and make claims on the state. However, have their actions pushed and challenged
the boundaries of citizenship any further or do they still fit within the
citizenship claims-making approach seen in amnesty campaigns for migrants
previously in the USA and elsewhere which is limited to requesting the extension
of rights of inclusion to more people without really confronting the
exclusionary foundations of citizenship itself?
Initially it appears that the movement did simply speak to an
exclusionary and neoliberal form of citizenship. In a sense the Dreamer is the
perfect immigrant because they were not an immigrant at all, but rather an all
American young person in all but name and the epitome of the deserving and
productive citizen or ‘would be’ citizen. However, developments in the
undocumented youth movement in recent years point to an interesting turn and a more
challenging engagement with the concept of citizenship. Rygiel (2011) has used
the term ‘bordering solidarities’ to refer to the ways in which restrictive
immigration policies have also provided a context for solidarity and community
building between migrants and citizen allies in the fight for migrant rights in
a number of settings across the world. I would argue that a form of ‘bordering
solidarities’ can be seen in the new engagement with intersectionality in the
undocumented youth movement and the dialogue being established between
undocumented young activists and citizen activists (e.g. LGBTQ and Black Lives
Matter) from communities in the USA who continue to face oppression and
marginalisation despite holding full
legal citizenship. Solidarity here differs from some descriptions of
migrant/citizen solidarity based on an alliance between the dichotomous figures
of the supposed privileged citizen and marginalised migrant. In a
recent interview for Movements, Kim Rygiel (2015) comments
on the importance of unpacking the unearned privileges of citizenship. However,
citizens are not homogeneous and despite legal inclusion not all citizens
experience such privileges. As Rygiel observes during this interview,
citizenship has been as much about a history of exclusion as it is a story of
inclusion. Many ‘citizens’ have been prevented from completing this journey to
full and equal inclusion and indeed increasingly face the stripping back and
loss of rights. The undocumented youth movement has moved beyond a focus on a
pathway to full citizenship and a number of activists have turned their
attention to the limitations of such citizenship in achieving equality. Activists
I spoke with talked about the criminalisation of young people of colour and the
limits of what can be attained through acquiring formal citizenship. They
questioned whether formal legal citizenship can be seen as the sole or even
primary barrier preventing people from full inclusion in citizenship. This
leads to questions about the very nature of contemporary citizenship under racial neoliberalism
(Goldberg 2008). Solidarity and claims of migrant belonging in migrant and
citizen alliances have often been based on showing how migrants are productive
and contributing members of the community, with the potential to perform, or already
performing, model citizenship qualities. While laudable in many ways, they still
focus on the ‘deserving’ and productive citizen while neglecting to address the
responsibilities and failures of the state which limit opportunities for both
migrants and marginalised ‘citizens’ who may struggle or are actively prevented
from fitting this model of citizenship.
Finally, in exploring undocumented young activists’
engagements with citizen activists I was also interested in the chronological narrative
of struggle told in the undocumented youth movement, with their movement as the
latest iteration in a long history of civil rights movements and protest
movements in the USA including, for example, the Civil Rights movement, the Black
Panthers, Chicano movement and the gay rights movement which had both U.S.
territorial and transnational connections. It made me wonder about what is lost
when we dismiss nation-state based citizenship due to its exclusionary
qualities. How might such a story of nation-state citizenship re-imagined to
an extent through a history the nation-state told through a story of exclusion
and as a history of struggle attuned to ties migrants may have to the ‘nation’
through colonial histories and anti-colonial struggles?
Olvera Street - the oldest street in Los Angeles
