“Not fully documented.” I found the phrase describing what I had felt one and a half years ago. When I was applying for colleges, I ran into the biggest debacle I had ever experienced in my life. During the three years in a specialized high school in Korea that prepares students for applying to colleges abroad, I had been trying to persuade my parents who were concerned about not being able to pay the high tuition by ensuring them that I would apply for financial aids. However, now colleges were saying I could not even get a chance to apply for financial aids since I did not have a few digits of number called SSN. I definitely did not have the document they wanted me to have. It was frustrating. I saw all the hard work I had done for three years becoming worthless. Eventually I am now here as a Duke student thanks to one private scholarship donator, yet I still remember how exasperating the experience was.
This memory helped me to become more interested in and – though I do not know if it is proper to say this – to sympathize better with the reality undocumented immigrants should face in the US. It is unfair not to give students who have worked as hard as, if not harder than, other American students the opportunity to study only because they were not born in the US, especially considering that most of them did not come to the US because they wanted to – their parents brought them when they were young. I wished to help them, but I did not know how. I found out about the hardship DREAM Act was going through, but what could I do? Then, I saw Duke Engage Tucson program.
I came to Tucson because I wanted to learn more about them to help them more effectively. It is easy to say to them not to give up despite the current situation – I had to contact, and was rejected by, several people whom I did not know at all to finally meet one donator. However, I also know it is not that simple. To cure this problem of unfairness completely, it is not the symptom but the cause that has to be treated. If we want to reduce the number of undocumented immigrants coming into the US, we should not criminalize them but make getting documents easier, cheaper, shorter, and more accessible. If we do not want to have undocumented immigrants coming into the US to work, we should not deport them but find the way to make Mexican economy function better – especially when it is the US who drove Mexican economy into a corner with NAFTA.
Of course, it is illegal to cross the border and enter the US without proper documents. However, to gain legitimacy for judging and criminalizing those illegal behaviors, the process itself should be legal. For example, let’s see the operational streamline now practiced five day a week in Tucson. Is it legal to try five or six people as a group at the same time? Is it legal to assign six people per lawyer and to give those lawyers only three hours to talk with all six? Is it legal to put no obligation to explain the process or the consequence of streamline to those who are randomly selected among numerous apprehended undocumented immigrants to go into the streamline? Are those practices legal and constitutional enough to judge human beings’ lives?
Isabel Garcia said that some people would not like the fact that immigrants’ children, like her, can become lawyers or have any other socially influential jobs. I want to work and live in the US in the future, but I do not want my children to be treated like that. Just as much as I want to have a socially influential job, I definitely want my children to have socially influential jobs too – and I do not want having those jobs to be difficult for me or for them just because we are immigrant or immigrant’s children. Unfortunately, I have already experienced the difficulty once when applying to colleges. Just imagine, if this unfair anti-immigrant sentiment makes even me who has a student visa worry about my future, how much it would affect Mexican immigrants who have no documents at all?
However, they keep crossing the border because they have to. Since I myself decided to come to the US because I wanted to, I might have assumed unconsciously that many undocumented immigrants also did so; however, I was wrong. I came here to study, but they came here to live. Just to sustain their lives. Just to sustain their families’ lives. What kind of parents would remain still when their children are crying out of hunger and they have nothing to eat? It is unreasonable to tell them to wait for a couple of years to get legal documents. As long as there are jobs in the US but none in Mexico, and as long as it takes long to legally immigrate to the US, they will try to cross the border illegally. Thus, as I said above, it is impossible to solve this undocumented immigrants problem without treating the causes – inaccessible immigration processes and destitute Mexican economy. To be able to achieve them some days, I am now here, learning from the heart.
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