Student sympathizes with undocumented immigrants who arrived as children

The immigration policy DACA is important to me, and I want to express my opinions about it. DACA stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. It allows people who came to the United States as children from getting deported for a two-year renewable period. President Obama announced the policy in 2012. He had wanted Congress to provide a law to protect these immigrants, but Congress did not provide a law, so the President made this a policy through executive order, giving instructions to the Department of Homeland Security and the immigration and border security entities in the federal bureaucracy to follow this new policy.  

I like this policy for many reasons. First of all, it is not the children’s fault for coming to the United States illegally. They could not make the decision to come or not because some of them were only two or three years old. The United States is all they know and remember. A lot of the people who came here that young do not even know how to speak the language from the country they were born in, so if they were to be sent back, they could not communicate with other people there. It is also really scary to be forced to move to some country where you know nothing about their culture, or it could be a place that has a high crime rate; they could get raped or killed. They would have to leave their jobs here, and those jobs probably pay a lot better than what their native country pays. The United States is supposed to be full of opportunity, so how can we deport people where this is all they know? It is wrong. 

I have heard of President Trump talking about getting rid of DACA; it seems possible that people will get deported if they go to renew their DACA status, and the deportation protection is not available any longer. I cannot imagine how scary it is to one day being forced out of the only place you remember growing up and living. If we send them back, we are basically just sending some of them to die because of how dangerous their countries really are. I personally know someone that is a DACA recipient. I am very close with her, and imagining her not here any longer makes me panic. Why doesn’t everyone who is not a Native American face a risk of being sent out of the United States? This land is not just for European-American people anymore. We need to learn that different people deserve to be here, and especially people who have been here their entire lives. They have just as much of a reason to stay here as someone who was born here.

There are some important issues you raise in your little reaction essay.  You assert that the United States is not just for the European-Americans who have been here 1-12 generations, but that other groups have claims to the USA as their home. This means, I think you're implying, that part of the opposition to the DACA policy comes from persons who fear that many of these undocumented immigrant Americans are culturally or racially different from “true” Americans.  An interesting thing to note is that many of these “aliens” who come to the United States as children may have genetic ancestral lineages that are mostly Native American.  There is a person in my family, for example, who was born in Latin America, and has had a DNA test, and shows that her genetic heritage is 100% Mayan, without any detectable European contributions to her genes.  Another member of my family had grandparents who came to the USA during the Mexican Civil War back in the 1910s, and her DNA shows her to be about 50% Native American.  

But, of course, our genetic inheritance and heritage is not so meaningful as our cultural inheritance and the experiences we have had in our lives that have given us our culture.  And, for immigrants who came here (perhaps without permission from the USA government) as young children and have grown up here, they are culturally American. This is their home.  Some may be highly assimilated, and others may not be, but in any way that matters, this society and country is their “home country” rather than their native country.  So, if you take a genetic approach to who is “really” American, many of these persons who were protected by DACA have better claims to belonging here in the Americas than the European-Americans who are supporting the policies of excluding them or kicking them out.  And, if you reject the idea of genetic ancestral claims to land (as I mostly do), and go with cultural values and socialization as the root of a person’s identity and sense of belonging somewhere, then most of these DACA immigrants are just as American as those of us who were born here.  

It’s only in the realm of state-sanctioned legalities related to citizenship and “immigration status” that anyone can claim that many of these DACA immigrants aren’t American and don’t belong here. What value hierarchy and moral perspective is it that vaunts the regulatory perspectives of states and their bureaucracies over the facts of what culture and identity and socialization mean in terms of a person’s claim to belong to a particular country? If we do believe that the letter of the law must be upheld over the facts of who is really an American in the sense of their culture and life experiences, then what of the laws of the nations that pre-exist the government of the United States?  Can the tribal nations of our land offer membership to persons who are more closely genetically linked to them than than the European-Americans and African-Americans and Asian-Americans who have set up the governance of the USA?  And, if any of the many tribes decided to do this, wouldn't their tribal law hold precedence over the immigration laws of the United States?  I don’t know the answer to this question, but it is one I wonder about.