Reform for Dreamers

Last updated on: July 21, 2013 at 10:38 pm by Father Pablo Migone

Reform for Dreamers 2013-07-21T22:38:00-05:00 Father Pablo Migone

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Imagine you are fifteen years old and you are a legal citizen of the country where you were born. You live in your homeland exercising all the rights and responsibilities of a citizen, but you live with one constant fear: one day you will come home from school, your parents will be gone, and you will be left with your five younger siblings. Unless legal arrangements were made before your parents’ deportation, the state may take you and your siblings and place you in foster care.

Imagine you were taken into a country by your parents when you were one month old. Now you are twenty and the only country you know deports you to your parents’ country. You do not know the language nor do you understand the culture. You are deported to an unknown, unfamiliar place and barred from where you have lived your whole life. You will have to wait at least ten years before the possibility of finding a legal path to return home.

These are not hypothetical situations. They are concrete cases I have dealt with as a priest in our diocese. Because these scenarios repeat themselves daily in our country, Archbishop Gomez of Los Angles has said, “America has always been a nation of justice and law. But as Americans we have also always been a people of generosity, mercy and forgiveness. Unfortunately, our nations’ current response to illegal immigration is not worthy of our national character.” The Church must respond to this suffering.

After years of calling for a path to regularize the immigration status of those brought into the country illegally as children, those collectively called dreamers, the Department of Homeland Security announced on June 2012 that those who entered the United States as children and met certain requirements could register with the government and request consideration of deferred action for two years.

This allowed those under thirty-one who entered the country before their sixteenth birthday, who had not left the United States for the previous five years, who was in school, graduated high school or was a U.S. Armed Forces veteran, and had no criminal record, to apply for a renewable two-year period where they would not get deported. After completing paperwork, gathering evidence and paying $465, young men and women celebrated that they did not have to be afraid. They could work legally, pay taxes and get a driver’s license. The hope of dreamers now is that every two years they will be allowed to pay $465 and remain in the country without ever becoming US citizens. Ideally the Dream Act will be passed by Congress to permanently adjust their status, but the Dream Act has already failed several times in Congress.

Dreamers consider themselves American, speak English and feel at home in the United States. Those who have no mercy for these dreamers must consider the words of Blessed John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor #80 (quoting Gaudium et Spes) where he lists deportation as an intrinsic evil that does violence to the dignity of the human person along with abortion, euthanasia, torture and others. The two options for dreamers are gloomy, either remain in the shadows in the country they love or be deported to their parent’s country which they do not know. Deferred action is a temporary fix, so dreamers await immigration reform with great hope and anxiety, and so does the Church, since it is in the young that the future of the Church rests.

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