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This chapter examines the role of prosecutorial discretion in immigration matters during the Obama administration. It analyzes several related memoranda issued by DHS during this period, including a 2010 Priorities Memo describing ICE’s civil enforcement priorities and a 2011 Prosecutorial Discretion Memo known as the “Morton Memo,” after the former head of ICE John Morton. This chapter also summarizes the events that influenced the administration to take a strong position on prosecutorial discretion and eventually to create the DACA program. These events included the 2010 failure of the DREAM Act in the Senate and a record number of deportations involving humanitarianconcerns. This chapter also considers why prosecutorial discretion was divisive among legislators, policymakers, and immigration advocates during this time. Finally, this chapter examines the relationship between the failure of congressional reforms and the role that prosecutorial discretion can play in compensating for this failure.

This chapter discusses how appropriation of the LGBTQ rights strategy offers a unique way for understanding how coalitional rhetorics can both gesture to inclusionary and utopian politics and offer an alternative to both. It explores activism for the DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act, which would provide a pathway to citizenship for select undocumented youth. Such activism has been both highly utopian in its deployment of the “DREAM” metaphor and simultaneously normative in the type of inclusion the DREAM Act seeks and to whom it would provide inclusion. DREAM activism has also spurred other uses of the coming out strategy, including the development of “undocuqueer” activism and counter-DREAM activism, both of which turn toward coalition beyond the initial appropriation.

This chapter examines how the undocumented immigrant youth movement has evoked “coming out as undocumented and unafraid” to mobilize fearful constituents. It discusses the local and state-level legislative changes for which the movement as advocated, including the federal DREAM Act. It argues that while the DREAM Act never passed, the undocumented immigrant youth movement arguably led President Obama to sign the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) executive order in June 2012, which deferred deportation for “Dreamers” who meet certain criteria on a two-year renewable basis. It further argues that the undocumented immigrant youth movement has successfully challenged cultural understandings by offering an alternative image to that of “illegal immigrants” sneaking across the border—that of educated and talented “DREAMers.”

This chapter examines the role of prosecutorial discretion in immigration matters during the Obama administration. It analyzes several related memoranda issued by DHS during this period, including a 2010 Priorities Memo describing ICE’s civil enforcement priorities and a 2011 Prosecutorial Discretion Memo known as the “Morton Memo,” after the former head of ICE John Morton. This chapter also summarizes the events that influenced the administration to take a strong position on prosecutorial discretion and eventually to create the DACA program. These events included the 2010 failure of the DREAM Act in the Senate and a record number of deportations involving humanitarianconcerns. This chapter also considers why prosecutorial discretion was divisive among legislators, policymakers, and immigration advocates during this time. Finally, this chapter examines the relationship between the failure of congressional reforms and the role that prosecutorial discretion can play in compensating for this failure.

Chapter 6 describes the efforts of North Carolina’s “Dreamers,” young undocumented people who were part of a national social movement for immigrants’ rights and access to higher education. Dreamers began to mobilize throughout the United States soon after the implementation of local immigration enforcement programs in the mid-2000s and an increase in restrictive state and local policies. The Dreamers’ generation came of age in a society that barred them from attending college, obtaining a driver’s license, applying for jobs with a liveable wage, joining the military, or starting a business. Many of these problems had persisted for decades for immigrants, and Dreamers both engaged in and diverged from a tradition of immigrant advocacy led by Latin Americans and others since the 1980s in North Carolina. Dreamer actions publicly exposed the inequalities and dysfunction in the U.S. immigration and educational system and influenced President Obama to create the “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

This chapter considers recent life narratives by undocumented youth who are activists for the DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act, including the UCLA students’ compilation Underground Undergrads: UCLA Undocumented Students Speak Out (2008), William Pérez’s, We Are Americans: Undocumented Students Pursuing the American Dream (2009), and interviews of undocumented students. DREAM activists engage in an ethical intervention into immigration debates through their insistence on “coming out of the shadows.” The chapter examines how these youth have shaped their stories for particular rhetorical and political ends, creating out of the raw material of their lives plots and themes that are remarkably consistent across stories (despite differences of situation or country of origin) and that are clearly crafted to achieve a testimonio function, to move people to support of the DREAM act. The “Dreamers,” as they call themselves, thus constitute a visible counterpublic that challenges norms and assumptions about who can be a subject and agent of political activism and change.

This chapter looks at how storytelling was used by mainstream immigrant rights groups to produce an aspiring class of upwardly mobile and self-reliant undocumented youth while defusing broader migrant rights activism. In the campaign for legalization through a DREAM Act, the undocumented students known as Dreamers told their stories to the legislature and the media. The students were given scripts to follow that emphasized their achievements, assimilation into American society, and rejection of their home countries. In the lead-up to the 2008 national election and the subsequent push for Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR), groups of young people were mobilized in mass storytelling trainings across the country to support the electoral and legislative agenda of mainstream organizations. Eventually, many young people rebelled against this orchestration and sought to take control over their own representations. Some even began to move away from storytelling as a mode of political engagement altogether.

This chapter examines how a shift from the notion of compassion that is felt at a distance to a practice of compassion as suffering with one another in solidarity has been achieved by the undocumented youth movement in the United States. It begins with an overview of the origins of the undocumented youth movement, followed by a discussion of their campaign for the rights of the country's undocumented young people, their campaign for the passage of the federal Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, and their response to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) introduced by President Barack Obama. It also considers the movement's use of storytelling as testimony in their DREAM Act campaign and shows how compassion as solidarity and co-suffering can play an important role in enabling witness bearing and the building of a more inclusive and enduring resistance to suffering and social injustice.

From the perspective of immigrant advocates, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) has been the high point of the Obama administration. By providing protection against the threat of deportation, as well as conferring a range of social and legal benefits upon the 1.7 million young people potentially eligible for “dacamented” status, we discuss the development and implementation of DACA in the context of legislative inaction, including the failure of Congress to enact comprehensive immigration reform or the more limited DREAM Act, and the mobilization of the Dreamer social movement. This chapter addresses why DACA was so necessary by examining the challenges confronting mixed-status families and its impact on child development, early education, and health outcomes, as well as the experiences of the 1.5-generation as they enter adolescence and early adulthood. This chapter concludes with an examination of the structural mechanisms that help and hinder undocumented youth and mixed-status families.

This chapter examines the murder of southern Arizonan rancher, Robter Krentz, and how it served as a political tipping point in the immigration debate in Arizona, leading to the passing of the controversial immigration law known as Senate Bill 1070 (SB 1070). Amongst its tough anti-illegal immigrant measures, SB 1070 granted new sweeping powers to law enforcement agents to interrogate and arrest anyone suspected of being in the country illegally, causing some to say the law was drafted in a spirit of racism and xenophobia, while others claimed the law was a necessary and rational step in the effort to secure the border. The chapter looks at differing opinions of the bill, and the spirited debate that ensued across the nation in its wake, including a federal injunction to block the law, as a way to demonstrate how the U.S. is deeply divided over the issue of immigration. It also looks at the need for comprehensive immigration reform at the federal level, and at the many interconnected reasons that such reform has proven difficult, including a brief philosophical discussion of the existential dilemmas inherent in the self-other encounter.

This chapter examines different views on how to resolve the so-called immigration crisis in the United States and offers a pragmatic and economically sound proposal for immigration reform, with particular emphasis on undocumented immigration. It argues that we need to end the hostile rhetoric aimed at undocumented immigrants and calls for an immigration policy based on reality rather than hateful attacks. It also discusses the three policy options that are commonly addressed in the context of comprehensive immigration reform: mass deportation, blanket amnesty, and a guest worker program. Finally, it explains what it calls the 2013 Kennedy-Bell Comprehensive Immigration Reform Law intended for current undocumented workers and which consists of five main components, including a guest worker program and a form of the DREAM Act.

This chapter examines the effects of undocumented immigration on local and state economies as well as the objections to immigration often made at the state or local level. It first reviews studies on the local impact of immigration, including the 1997–1998 National Research Council report, before discussing the notion that healthcare and K-12 education for undocumented immigrants and their families impose increased costs on state and local economies. It then considers efforts by state and local governments to implement immigration policy, such as the DREAM Act. The chapter concludes with a proposal aimed at easing the effects of undocumented immigration on states and local economies.

This chapter uses the civic republican tradition as a theoretical lens to examine how previously excluded groups were able to draw on their wartime service to demand equal treatment as citizens and why unauthorized immigrants should be able to earn naturalization through military service. It first considers how Mexican American veterans were able to leverage their military service to demand the rights and benefits of first-class citizenship. It then interprets this historical account through a frame of “Mexican American republicanism,” connecting loyalty and service to citizenship claims. Unauthorized immigrants who want to follow this pathway to citizenship can no longer do so, given current barriers to enlistment. This chapter closes by analyzing and critiquing U.S. policies governing immigrant military enlistment. As a whole, this chapter serves as a work of applied political theory with implications for the contemporary U.S. immigration reform debate.

During the 1990s and into the 2000s, three basic barriers prevented undocumented youth from achieving major milestones of independence—acquiring a driver’s license, submitting college applications, and working legally. The circumstances repeated again and again in the accounts of undocumented youth. Elioenai Santos recalled, “Living like that is a real problem. It’s a real blow to your self-esteem, because you always feel like you are somehow less. It’s awful to always feel like you’re inferior. You see your friends driving around, traveling to other countries, while I don’t have money to go to school.” Nor could they keep their families together, as everyone felt constantly threatened by separation. The result since the early 2000s has been a growing, powerful movement among undocumented youth to redefine “who belongs” as a citizen in the United States. This chapter explores how the Immigrant Youth Justice League, Freedom University, Cristina Jimenez and United We Dream, and other undocumented and undocuqueer youth immigrant activists have fought for DACA and the DREAM Act and against deportation and the border wall. They have fundamentally challenged all US citizens to reimagine who belongs within the circle of belonging.

This conclusion reflects upon President Trump’s stances on immigration and citizenship in the first year of his administration. I frame recent developments in the historical context of a nation that still grapples with the implications of its aspirational heritage as a country of immigrants, even as the U.S. continually backslides into its legacy of multiple discriminations. Though we are in a period of restrictionism, reflected prominently in the Trump administration’s attempts to cancel the DACA program, immigrants continue to resist exclusion and to serve as workers, parents, volunteers, and soldiers. This chapter concludes by focusing on the moral claims of DACA recipients to inclusion in the United States. It argues that like their native-born peers and younger siblings, they are already Americans by virtue of their upbringing, education, and formative experiences in this country, and they should be permanently protected from removal from the United States.