The DREAMers

How the Undocumented Youth Movement Transformed the Immigrant Rights Debate

By Walter J. Nicholls

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8884-7

Contents

List of Figures............................................................ixAcknowledgments............................................................xiIntroduction: The Voice and Power of Undocumented Youths, an Unlikely
Story......................................................................11 Finding Political Openings in a Hostile Country..........................212 The Birth of the DREAMer.................................................473 Taking a Stand...........................................................744 Rebirth from the Grassroots Up...........................................995 Undocumented, Unafraid, Unapologetic.....................................1186 DREAMers and the Immigrant Rights Movement...............................143Conclusion: Dreaming Through the Nation-state..............................168Appendix...................................................................183Notes......................................................................191References.................................................................207Index......................................................................219

CHAPTER 1

Finding Political Openingsin a Hostile Country

The immigrant rights movement emerged in the late 1980s and 1990sduring a time of great hostility toward immigrants. By that time, anti-immigrationadvocates had become more sophisticated, national, andlegitimate. They included well-respected politicians such as Pete Wilson,scholars such as Samuel Huntington, and sophisticated grassroots activistswith national-level reach such as John Tanton and Roy Beck. Many likethem argued that immigrants posed an economic problem to the country,but even more importantly, they argued that their inherent culture posedan existential threat to national institutions and identity. Anti-immigrationadvocates in the 1990s had not only been successful in pushing theidea of the immigrant as a central threat to the country, but they alsosucceeded in persuading President Clinton and the Republican-controlledCongress to pass laws that rolled back rights, sharply expanded borderenforcement, and required local and state officials to deny basic servicesto immigrants. Most politicians embraced the anti-immigrant fermentand accepted sealing borders and deporting settled undocumented immigrantsas common-sense policy responses to this so-called threat. The "waron terror" only augmented hostility and reinforced the "border first" andenforcement instincts of political officials.

Facing greater penalties, restrictions, and surveillance, all undocumentedimmigrants encountered considerable risks to come out inpublic, protest, and make rights claims. How was it possible, in thatenvironment, for undocumented youths to emerge and establish themselvesas a prominent group in national immigration debates?

In a rather paradoxical way, the more the government pushed to sealthe borders, the more ambiguities and cracks surfaced in the country'simmigration system. Repressive measures ran up against liberal legal norms,economic needs of employers, the resource constraints of law enforcementagencies, and humanitarian and moral concerns of the public. A politicallandscape characterized by general hostility and many cracks providednarrow openings for undocumented groups like refugees, farmworkers,children, and young adults to make claims for basic rights and legalization.While the inhospitable environment reduced the possibilities for big andsweeping immigration reforms, small niche openings provided footholdsto push for the legalization of some groups of immigrants. This resulted inan immigrant rights movement characterized by narrower mobilizationsand campaigns (from El Salvadoran refugees in the 1990s to the DREAMcampaign in the 2000s) aimed at pushing smaller measures that wouldbenefit particular groups of immigrants.

The years 2006–7 marked an important shift in this political environment.After a decade of enacting one restrictive measure after another,the population of undocumented immigrants had grown dramaticallyand the cracks and contradictions in the country's immigration systemhad become unavoidable. In response to these problems and the politicalconcerns of top Republican strategists, the Bush administration initiatedan effort to pass reforms to fix what many believed to be a broken system.For many immigrant rights advocates, this new opportunity requiredthem to rethink the past strategy of small mobilizations pushing piecemealreforms. Even though these first efforts to pass comprehensivereform failed, immigrant rights advocates believed that they could passcomprehensive immigration bill in a friendlier Congress if the movementcentralized its efforts, both organizationally and strategically, andfocused exclusively on securing the 279 congressional votes needed topass a bill (that is, 219 House votes and 60 Senate votes). The DREAMAct would be part of comprehensive reform and the DREAMers wouldserve as an important group in driving this collective effort forward.Thus, in response to the new openings of 2006, the leading immigrantrights associations began a long effort to centralize and exert controlover the many different parts of the movement, hoping that would allowthem to focus their energies on pushing through a sweeping law thatwould benefit most undocumented immigrants once and for all.

The Hostile 1990s

Immigrants and immigrant rights advocates in the 1990s faced anextremely hostile discursive and political environment. Anti-immigrantforces had begun to produce compelling messages for why federal andstate governments should strip immigrants of all rights (social, political,and civil) and forcefully remove them from the country. Immigrants werepresented as a core threat to national stability, both economically and culturally.They were viewed as transforming large parts of urban and suburbanlandscapes into ethnic spaces, making Americans into foreigners intheir own country. Immigrants were accused of competing for jobs andbeing welfare cheats. They drove down the wages of the American workingclass while bankrupting the welfare state. Anti-immigrant forces arguedthat even if some immigrants might have sympathetic stories, it would beimpossible to grant them basic rights because that would open the "floodgates"for more immigrants. In order to sustain the integrity of the nationin these global times, tight border restrictions should be put into place andno rights should be given to "illegals." This overall argument was framedas a matter of life or death for the country.

Where earlier anti-immigrant mobilizations had largely been localand fragmented, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, anti-immigrant activistsbegan to deliver their message on the national stage through theincreased prominence of large and professional anti-immigration associations(for example, Federation for American Immigration Reform,Americans for Immigration...