Rene Gonzalez isn’t panicked. Maybe a little worried, but the 22-year-old “dreamer” is still optimistic about humanity.
“I really don’t think it’s in anybody’s heart or conscious mind to look at someone or walk into their home and say, ‘I want you out of there,’ ” Gonzalez, told me. He’s a Pikes Peak Community College student who was able to get a Social Security number and work permit through President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action For Childhood Arrivals.
“I don’t think it’s in human nature to be that cold,” he says.
Gonzalez is right about one thing: Walking into someone’s home as they are forced out, not only of their house but of their jobs, state, and country, is a heart-wrenching experience.
As the debate over the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act was reaching its peak in 2008, I found myself in the home of a family split in two: A daughter could stay, the parents had to leave.
They packed. They cried. They rode in a patriotic float in their hometown parade, then they said goodbye, expecting decades to pass before they could hug again.
The DREAM Act was first introduced by Republican Sen. Orin Hatch of Utah in 2001. Despite broad bipartisan support over the years, including becoming a key provision in the 2007 immigration reform package that President George W. Bush urged his own party to send to his desk, it has never become law. Both Democrats and Republicans, who were nearly tied over much of this time in the House and Senate, share in the blame for the failure to support high school graduates who aspire to go on to do great things in the only country they’ve ever known.
After more than 11 years, the lowest of low-hanging fruit on the immigration tree still hadn’t been harvested.
If we grant childhood arrivals, kids brought here by their parents through no fault of their own, a legal status, they could work, go to college, achieve great things, and continue their productive, American lives out of the dangerous shadows of fear.
That economy-driving, community building, nutritious fruit is common sense and it’s been sitting on the ground just waiting to get picked up.
Finally, in 2012, Obama issued his executive order creating DACA. It may have been executive overreach, but it was the right thing to do.
To undue the policy now without a replacement, like the ones still floating around in Congress 16 years later, would devastate hard-working young adults who consider themselves Americans.
At the time of Obama’s order, Gonzalez was a senior at Palmer High School in Colorado Springs. He had a 4.1 GPA and longed to go to college. Gonzalez’s mother hired an immigration attorney.
It took a year to get deferred status. Now he is a full-time caregiver for a disabled individual, working his way through his degree to become a registered nurse.
“I’m hoping that once I get that degree and I finish my classes I can take a year off and go to Africa and volunteer somewhere with Doctors Without Borders,” Gonzalez says.
He wants to get the required work experience and go somewhere he can help.
More than 752,154 applicants have had their deferred status approved since 2012, according to statistics from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Colorado has had 16,902 applicants get their initial deferred status approved, which is among the 11 states with the highest number of DACA residents.
Gonzalez is waiting for his work permit to be renewed, the extension could be for 10 years. That would give him a deserved sense of security in a world where so much is still unknown.
“I think a lot of minorities, the refugees or even people who have been born here, but are second generation or have ethnic roots are just kind of worried,” Gonzalez said.
But it’s his mother he worries about most. She’s on the verge of gaining legal status through her husband, who is a veteran.
“The scary thing about that is she could get it done before … Trump gets into office or she could get it done in September of next year,” Gonzalez says. speaking of the president-elect. “Yeah, I’m scared but we’ll see what happens. There’s the potential for a lot of bad things that can happen in my family and I’m sure a lot of other people are worried about that too.”
Worry about the future is inevitable with so much on the table of immigration reform, so let’s quickly set aside the easiest of answers, one that should have been solved more than a decade ago, and then tackle the difficult questions.
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