Griego: DREAM Act would give children a chance

Published March 8, 2007 at midnight

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This is not a Border Street column, but it is informed by my experience there. Ten months observing life among residents of the Denver block has allowed me plenty of time to examine my assumptions about how illegal immigration affects a community, and as the series winds down over the next couple of months I'll talk about that.

But, if Border Street has hardened some of my views, it also has shed more light on counterproductive immigration law, the rules that not only discourage people from becoming legal residents, but hold us back as a community and a state. Which brings me to Maria the Other and the DREAM Act.

The DREAM Act has been introduced again in Congress, the fourth time since 2001. It's always struck me as a no-brainer piece of legislation. Supported by Democrats and Republicans, it basically says that a child brought into this country illegally more than five years ago when he or she was 15 or younger will be given a chance to become a legal U.S. resident. If they have stayed out of trouble. If they graduate from high school or its equivalent.

Those graduates would then be given conditional residency and a choice: serve two years in the military, graduate from a two-year college, or complete two years of college toward your four-year degree. Do that, keep out of trouble, and you can become a permanent resident.

We're talking about people who came here as children. We're talking about Maria the Other, who thought she was coming here for a week to attend a party. After her older sister, a legal resident, brought her across the border, claiming her as her own child, Maria learned she wasn't going back to Mexico. In two years, her sister told her, you'll end up working in a sweatshop like mom.

Maria was 12. She's 23 now. At 12, at 10, at 8, at 4, even at 15, children don't have much control over what their parents decide. Maria's sister thought it was for the best. So did her mother. And Maria says, "When you're 12 years old, you don't really know what it means to be legal or illegal."

Maria was a good student, good enough that her teachers and counselors pushed her toward college, urged her to apply for scholarships. She never told them she was an illegal immigrant. She was ashamed. Only a few credits shy of graduation, she dropped out. As she talks about that decision now, she hits herself, a closed fist against her temple. "Stupid. Stupid."

It makes me think of the students I met at North High School, the ones whose parents brought them over when they were even younger than Maria, the ones who dress and speak American teen, kids you might engage in a conversation and never in a million years guess that they were illegal immigrants. All of them remembered when they first realized what it meant to be here illegally, the way their horizons tunneled.

One of the raps on the DREAM Act is that in granting students conditional residency, they could become eligible for in-state tuition. Some people call this a reward for illegal behavior. It doesn't matter to them that it was not the child but the parent who made the decision to break the law. Some people have told me that they worked hard to put themselves through college, so why can't these kids?

First, of course, they can't legally work. Second, when I last checked, 2006-2007 tuition and fees at the University of Colorado cost $5,643 for a resident and $23,539 for a nonresident. (Metropolitan State College of Denver provides a more- affordable alternative, with nonresident tuition this year at $5,878 a semester.)

This issue of in-state tuition comes up a lot with the DREAM Act, and it did Wednesday as well at a press conference held by Jovenes Unidos, the youth community-organizing group. It was a room full of Marias, all lobbying for the DREAM Act. Three high school students described in-state tuition as a make- or-break deal. They are student leaders rapidly running into a dead end.

To me, in-state tuition is only a means to an end, and it's the end that's important. Legal residency. The ability to work legally, drive legally, emerge from the Border Streets of this city and fully engage. To one day become citizens. I imagine this, too, rankles DREAM Act critics, this specter of now-legal children sponsoring their parents' residency.

If you think that's the worst that can happen, you're not thinking. Because now these kids will either graduate from high school or they won't. They'll go to work, illegally, at a wage lower than what a college graduate would earn. Some will pay taxes. Some won't. Some will run afoul of the law and end up in prison. Some will have children and those children will be citizens and will qualify for all those public programs that light up the conservative blogs.

But most of them won't go back "home." Home is here. I met a 17-year- old named Erika at the press conference. She's one of those kids you'd never know was an illegal immigrant. Her parents brought her here when she was 4.

"Those little numbers," she kept saying, referring to a Social Security number. "For lack of those little numbers.

"It's not just about college," she told me. "It's about a life."

Maria the Other, here illegally in this country 11 years now, has an American husband and an American child. She would one day like to be a teacher.

griegot@RockyMountainNews.com

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