by David Bacon
Whose fault is it?
Using the phrase “no fault of their own” in discussing undocumented young people does not encourage us to look at the roots of the poverty and violence their families experience. Blaming undocumented youths’ parents avoids assigning responsibility for their displacement and migration beyond the families themselves.
When President Obama introduced his executive order in 2012 to defer deportation for young people (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA), the White House website said it would “stop punishing innocent young people brought to the country through no fault of their own by their parents.
Last year, in the Republican assault on the President’s next order that would have extended DACA to include other family members (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, DAPA), Jeff Denham, a right-wing Republican Congressman from California’s San Joaquin Valley, used the same phrase. Taking pains to explain that opposing President Obama did not mean he supported deporting young people, he explained, “I have voted repeatedly in Congress to protect children who were brought into this country by their parents or guardians through no fault of their own.
The phrase “no fault of their own” sounds sympathetic. Using it to justify halting deportations implies good intentions towards at least some young people without papers. Yet the idea has other troubling implications as well.
If young people came here “through no fault of their own,” then whose fault was it? Denham and Obama both say, “by their parents [and guardians].” Mothers and fathers made the decision to cross the border without papers. Therefore the parents are responsible for their children’s lack of legal immigration status. The fault is the parents’.
This is also the argument presented by the administration to justify building two new detention centers in Texas to hold mothers and children from Central America. Two summers ago the President warned parents in Guatemala and El Salvador that they were endangering their children by bringing them north. Don’t come, he said. If you do, you will be detained and deported.
Of course, people came despite the warning. The pressures to leave home are much more powerful than even the certain knowledge that imprisonment in a detention center awaits them once they cross the border.
Children are not coming to the United States because they have bad parents. They come because poverty and violence make survival difficult and dangerous in their communities of origin. Many are joining family members who are already here, having fled Central American civil wars or having come to find work and establish a base for reuniting divided families.
Many of the young people who tell their stories in Dreams Deported, a new book edited by Kent Wong and Nancy Guarneros, describe the memory of the experience, as it is retold in their families. Vicky’s family in Mexico “was too poor to pay for her mother’s medication and Vicky couldn’t find a job to support her parents.” Renata Teodoro says, “My father had been working in the United States for many years, and we survived on the money he sent us.
The book paraphrases other accounts. “The Gonzalez family left behind a life that Adrian does not remember. What he does remember is that his parents came to this country with hope for economic security.” The parents of Steve Li “experienced the extreme poverty, violence and corruption of Peru. Conditions for Steve’s family went from bad to worse when their restaurant was vandalized and their family was threatened.
The phrase “no fault of their own” does not encourage us to look at the roots of the poverty and violence these families experience. It especially avoids assigning responsibility for their displacement and migration beyond the families themselves. Yet individual families together make up huge movements of people responding to economic changes over which they have no control.
After the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, for instance, the number of Mexican migrants in the U.S. went from 4.5 to 12.5 million in 20 years. The new immigrants were farmers driven off the land after being undercut by cheap U.S.-subsidized corn flooding the Mexican market, or workers suddenly jobless after waves of privatization. Like Renata Teodoro’s father, once they arrived in the United States, they made up the backbone workforce sustaining agriculture, meatpacking, janitorial services and other industries, laboring at the lowest wages.
The companies that dumped the corn in Oaxaca, and those that paid illegally low wages to Oaxacan farmers to pick strawberries in Watsonville, certainly share some of the “fault.” And they definitely reaped most of the benefits. But when Obama and Denham say children came through “no fault of their own,” they are not pointing at the profiteers, much less at the treaties and policies that make displacement and exploitation possible and profitable.
In reading the testimony of the young people in Dreams Deported, it’s clear that parents had little alternative to coming north, and bringing their children with them. Yet they are not victims. They are simply people struggling to survive and make a place in the world for their families. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz says, in the context of Native American genocide in North America, “survival is dynamic, not passive. Surviving genocide, by whatever means, IS resistance.”
Sergio Sosa, a Guatemalan migrant who now directs Omaha’s Heartland Workers’ Center, says the same thing: “Mams and Qanjobales”-two indigenous groups in Guatemala-”face poverty and isolation, even the possible disappearance of their identity. But they didn’t choose this fate. People from Europe and the U.S. crossed our borders to come to Guatemala, and took over our land and economy. Migration is a form of fighting back. Now it’s our turn to cross borders.
Dreams Deported presents migrants as social actors, as resistors rather than victims. The phrase “no fault of their own” casts young people as innocent victims of their parents’ actions. The reality is that the young people who have built the movement of the DREAMers, fighting for the right to go to school, for legal status and for change in immigration policy, are anything but victims. The book recounts the family experiences of migration, life in the U.S., and then the shock of confrontation with immigration authorities leading to deportation. Then it tells stories of resistance, documenting the ways young people pioneered a movement that successfully rescued family and friends from jails and detention centers.
This is the third book in a series produced by activists in the Dreamers movement, published by the UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education. The first, Underground Undergrads, was published in 2008, when the possibility of immigration reform with some degree of legalization seemed possible to many people. It was a “coming out” moment, in which the first of the movement’s organizers sought to make visible a generation of undocumented young people who were beginning to assert their rights. It was followed four years later by Undocumented and Unafraid, which profiled the growing movement in the wake of the huge effort to pass the DREAM Act. Now Dreams Deported chronicles the difficult struggle against deportations.
First introduced in 2003, the DREAM Act would have allowed undocumented students graduating from a U.S. high school to apply for permanent residence if they completed two years of college or served two years in the U.S. military. The act would have enabled an estimate 800,000-plus young people to gain legal status and eventual citizenship. In 2010 the Act failed in Congress, but for the seven years before that, undocumented young people marched, sat-in, wrote letters and mastered every civil rights tactic in the book to get their bill onto the Washington DC agenda.
(Due to lack of space we are publishing only part of the story. You may read the full story at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/18568/dreams-deported-undocumented-unafraid-dream-act).
