You could write a book about the challenges faced by young, undocumented immigrants who make many sacrifices to pursue higher education only to be locked out of their chosen fields due to their immigration status.
William Perez did.
Perez, PhD., is an applied development psychologist and member of the faculty at Claremont Graduate University in eastern Los Angeles County on a leafy campus where the problems of undocumented immigrants might seem to be far removed. Not for Perez, whose book is titled "We are Americans: Undocumented Students Pursuing the American Dream."
Perez said he decided to write the book to inform American society about the situation faced by these young people, and to express the need for immigration reform and the adoption of the Dream Act, which would allow young, undocumented immigrants a chance for temporary legal residency if they have lived in the U.S. for at least five years, graduated from high school, plan to attend college, and have no criminal record. The Dream Act, as proposed, would give such youngsters six years of legal status to earn a two-year or four-year college degree or serve in the armed forces of the U.S. Students who meet those goals would have a chance for permanent residence. Those who do not would be returned to their orginal immigration status.
Perez makes the case for the undocumented, but also lays out a compelling argument that immigration reform and the Dream Act would also benefit the whole country. In making the case, he shines a light on the hurdles that undocumented students must clear in order to get a college education. Many must work more than 40 hours a week in order to pay for their studies, handling various other cultural barriers and forms of discrimination at the same time.
All of this accounts for little, according to Perez, for many young people who manage to overcome those challenges only to find that they cannot put their education to work in their chosen fields because they lack the legal documents.
"I started this research project in 2006 and that's how I found out that there are more than three million students in this country who are illegal immigrants, who have grown up with an American identity, and English is their preferred language — and that 65 percent of them, nearly two million, are in California," Perez said. "Most of these people do not know their legal status until they are about to start high school or college, which has a profound impact on their lives."
That's been the case for Angel Saavedra, who said he remains a construction worker despite earning a Bachelors of Business Administration degree in Marketing a year ago.
"Like many students, I arrived when I was a kid with my parents," Saavedra said. "I started in high school and got very good grades, then I went to college where I was accepted because of my good grades. I went to college for six years, working nights and going to school in the mornings from eight to five in afternoon, and then in the evening going to work at ten until six the next morning as a machine operator for clay structures."
Saavedra now sees a change in federal policy as the only avenue that will allow him the chance to land a job based on his college education.
"I can't work in my area of studies because I have no papers," he said. "No one will give me work, so my only hope is immigration reform."
Perez said that 65 percent of the undocumented students who are in the U.S. are from Latin America, with the vast majority of them from Mexico.
"In the conversations I had with them, they said they were very confused because throughout their childhood they heard that in order to succeed you have to study, and when they try to continue their higher education they find out about their reality," Perez said. "That causes those young people to go through a period of disappointment or anger with their parents because they were not told before — but the parents do that because they want to protect them."
Perez said that once young college graduates overcome their disappointment, many of those students see parallels to the sacrifices their parents have made as immigrants. They often decide to keep going to achieve their dreams.
"The biggest obstacle they face is economic, because they don't qualify for any financial assistance from the government or from the university," he added. "What they have to do, those young undocumented immigrants who want to continue with their university studies, is that they have to pay for it on their own."
The logistics of finding and keeping a job brings additional challenges.
"Since they aren't eligible for a driver's license, they have to use public transportation, and that service is not very good throughout the country," Perez said. "Then there is the fear that they may be deported at any moment."
The numbers of undocumented students who overcome all of the challenges in obtaining an education only to be locked out of their chosen fields because of immigration status is hard to pin down, according to Perez, who said the situation amounts to a waste of talent, in any case.
"We don't know how many graduating young people are in this situation, because they don't want to talk about it with strangers," he said. "What we do know is that every year, 65,000 undocumented students across the country graduate from high school and of those, between 10 and 20 percent can go to college."
Miriam Reyes is a writer for Impulso.
Photos by Impulso.
Read more stories from Impulso »
Leave a comment