Search Results

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.

Throughout its history, the United States has wrestled with its immigration policy and practice. These debates play out on national and local stages in the form of moral panics about immigration and crime, fear of loss of jobs and other economic woes due to immigration, and concerns about national security and public safety. This chapter reviews the history of immigration legislation in the United States and the multiple failed efforts to enact comprehensive immigration reform over the past decade. It then identifies a series of legal initiatives introduced by the Obama administration that have mitigated or exacerbated harm to undocumented youth and their families. These mechanisms are considered in light of their effects on young people brought to the United States as young children (Dreamers) and their families, parental detention and deportation, and unaccompanied minors entering the United States, primarily from Central America. Prosecutorial discretion, including deferred action, serves as a central unifying theme.

An unprecedented number of young people are crossing borders; many more are ‘internally displaced’. This chapter explores the vulnerability and resilience of refugee children and adolescents. It examines standards and policies designed to protect and enable these young people to survive and thrive. Given the growth in its importance, the matter of minors being ‘returned’ to countries of origin is also examined. This is followed by an analysis of some real-life situations in which these standards and policies are applicable. What is ultimately clear is that for a range of reasons—including the political and the practical—there are growing challenges to the safety of children and youth who are ‘on the move’.

This chapter studies Koyoonk’auwi Maidu writer Janice Gould’s three poetry collections—Beneath My Heart, Earthquake Weather, and Doubters and Dreamers—to consider how Gould’s writing moves toward a queer Indigenous methodology called “Indigenous assemblage.” It demonstrates that Gould both claims and disavows genealogies of racial descent, filiation, and biological traceablity. Gould locates identity in affective affiliation to Koyoonk’auwi territory while still recognizing the inadequacies of herself and her mother’s relationship to Koyoonk’auwi cultural knowledge.

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 explores how Congress, the courts, and we the people have permitted presidents for the last ninety years to accumulate an immense amount of power with few meaningful and effective restraints. In doing so, the chapter shows how Trump’s abuses of presidential authority were not only the actions of a reckless and autocratic leader, but were also the outgrowth of the steady accumulation of presidential powers that has taken place since the 1930s under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Although progressives since the Vietnam War have worked to limit presidential authority in matters related to armed conflicts and national security, they generally have not pushed for restraining that authority in domestic matters. It is time for progressives to take into account the extent to which proposed laws, regulations, and executive orders expand presidential domestic powers when determining whether such measures merit their political support. This means that there may be times when progressives should refuse to support measures that unduly expand presidential authority even in instances in which the exercise of that authority advances progressive goals. To illustrate this point, the chapter argues that progressives should have been more cognizant of the extent to which President Barack Obama’s humanitarian but unilateral decision to cease deporting Dreamers—the large number of undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children—expanded presidential powers.

This chapter examines variations in diaspora policies across generations and migration status, considering changes in migrants’ precarious status from the perspective of the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program. It focuses on the ways in which the rhetoric and implementation of Mexico’s diaspora programs has adapted focusing on the 1.5 generation, and the ways in which these policies have been challenged by returned migrants. In the context of massive deportations that have coincided with the rise of the Dreamers movement and the implementation of DACA, origin countries’ attempts to engage this group reveal the challenges and contradictions of diaspora policies that offer assistance abroad and expand the concept and practice of extraterritorial membership in specific moments and for particular groups, but have limited resources and opportunities for those same populations upon their return to their country of origin.