Dreamers (eBook)

THERE ARE ABOUT ELEVEN MILLION undocumented people living in the United States. You can't tell who they are just by looking at them, but we know they are here. As you walk down the street, ride the subway, or drive on the freeway, you may see them coming home from work, picking up their kids at school, waiting at the bus stop, cooking or cleaning rooms at fi ve-star hotels, or even running a little business out on the corner. While it's impossible to pinpoint exactly who's undocumented and who's not by sight, we know one thing with certainty: our daily lives wouldn't be the same without them.

The work performed by undocumented immigrants is now a firmly entrenched and even essential part of the nation's economy, but attempts to resolve their status have merely turned them into
political pawns. No president has dared to propose a process of massive deportation, nor has any administration openly recognized the essential role this cheap, effi cient labor force plays in the national economy. Undocumented immigrants have become the political currency of private negotiations between Democrats and Republicans, legislators and government agencies, and in campaigns for office. And except for when election time rolls around and minority voters must be courted, especially Latinos, immigration reform is a hot potato no politician wants to touch.

The amnesty law passed in 1986, designed to solve the illegal immigration problem, went only halfway: it granted legal residency to three million people but didn't put effective mechanisms into place to ensure that the situation wouldn't repeat itself. It didn't establish programs to hire foreign workers in the sectors of the economy that needed them most, even though there would still be
a demand for their labor. It didn't develop effective strategies to control illegal crossings along the border with Mexico. No sanctions were enacted to punish employers who hired undocumented workers, and the labor resulting from the exchange of falsified documents has become an essential moving part of the national economy's machinery.

Almost three decades later, the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States fluctuates between eleven and twelve million, six in ten are from Mexico. Many of them work in agriculture, manufacturing, construction, or the service sector. Undocumented workers make up almost 5 percent of the civilian labor force. They are men, women, and teens who came here one, two, fifteen, or twenty years ago. Sometimes they stay here for relatively short periods before returning to their countries of origin to be with their families for a while, or to try and make a go of it there. But they end up coming north again because, even though they must live in the shadows, under the constant threat of deportation, they can earn enough money here to provide the loved ones they left behind a better standard of living.

I remember a conversation I had with a woman who worked in a garment factory in Los Angeles while I was researching a story on sweatshops. The working conditions at the place were deplorable: employees worked twelve-hour shifts with no overtime pay, making seven dollars an hour, one dollar less than the offi cial minimum wage in California at the time, in 2008. When I asked her why she put up with it, she said she had done the same work in her hometown of Puebla, Mexico, under the same or even worse conditions but had earned only fifty pesos a day, or less than five dollars. 'It's the same exploitation, but here it pays better. I can support my
children on what I make here,' she explained.

After efforts to heighten security along the Mexican border in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist...