Solved by verified expert:READ THE PROJECT GUIDE FILE FOR INSTRUCTIONS! I have attached other readings for reference and to cite to you must use at least 2 of these readings.
project_guide.docx
turban_narratives.pdf
birth_of_a_dreamer_the_dreamers.pdf
labor_and_legality.pdf
reynolds_orellana_immigrant_youth.pdf
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AIMS: This assignment is designed to have you synthesize your learning over the
course of the semester through a reflection on one’s own “immigrant experience” in the
United States.
PROMPT:
What is your immigration story? What is the American Dream to you?
DETAILS:
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This assignment is a 4-6 page paper (double-spaced, Times 12 pt font). Any
images, documents, etc. should be attached in appendix after your paper and will
not count towards this page count.
You will need to utilize and properly cite at least 2 readings from this course
and at least one additional outside academic source in this paper.
You should include a works cited for this paper; however, your works cited page
will NOT count towards meeting the paper length requirements.
We all have a relationship to the concept of the American Dream and immigration
processes in the United States. Whether you are an international student or trace your
heritage to the Native Americans who occupied North America prior to colonization,
your story is connected to the migration patterns that shape the United States today.
This paper asks you to probe your family history and/or personal experiences to make
connections to concepts discussed in this course. You will be writing an autoethnography, a form of research that uses the author’s self reflections to better
understand broader social and cultural processes. Essentially, you are connecting your
own story to the cultural, economic, and political dimensions of immigration that we
have been studying in this course. You may consider interviewing family members,
including any images or historical documents, or writing reflexively about your own
memories or experiences.
This should be a creative exercise that blends narrative writing with academic
insights. You will be required to appropriately incorporate and cite at least two course
readings and locate and cite at least one additional academic source for this
paper. For example, you could reference Brodkin-Sacks piece to discuss the
discrimination against and eventual incorporation of European ethnic groups (Jews,
Italians, Germans, etc.). You could also cite Klein’s article on 2nd generation Sikhs to
discuss what it’s like to be a 2nd generation immigrant. You could draw from Frederick
Douglass’ “What to a slave is the fourth of July?” to talk about the racial dimensions of
citizenship and constructions of nationhood in the United States. For your outside source,
remember that you need to find a quality academic article or book.
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Finding Political Openings in a Hostile Country
organized smaller campaigns to legalize the status of those who stood
the best chances of success rather than invest their scarce resources in the
unrealistic goal of legalizing the status of all undocumented immigrants
in the United States. The strategic response by the rights community was
therefore appropriate and well suited for a context characterized by hostility, enforcement, and slight niche openings.
The growing possibility of comprehensive immigration reform in
2005-7 resulted in a move away from this incremental and piecemeal strategy to a comprehensive one based on centralized unity. The failure to pass
comprehensive reform was for some, including funders and leading rights
organizations, the result of the movement’s inability to unify and exert its
influence in a more effective way. Fragmentation, it was believed, limited
the movement’s abilities to use its collective resources in a more concerted
manner to influence public debate and pressure key politicians. Centralizing the strategy and the movement’s infrastructure was therefore seen as
the only way to overcome the political-ideological hurdles facing them.
The election of a Democratic Congress in November 2006, aDemocratic supermajority in the Senate in 2008, and a Democratic president
in the same year raised expectations that comprehensive reform could
pass in 2009 or 2010. This new window of opportunity reinforced the
view that unity, discipline, and centralization were needed to win the
279 votes needed to pass comprehensive reform. While RIFA’s mandate was to centralize and discipline the different components of the
movement, there were important forces that continued to fragment the
movement. Certain groups continued to face niche openings (youths,
farmworkers) and other groups started to direct their attention to new
battles over local and federal enforcement measures. As factions within
the movement were pulled in different directions, the leadership ofRIFA
worked to maintain control and unity. Those efforts in the face of these
centrifugal forces only magnified tensions between the movement’s central leadership and the multiple groups, factions, and activists making up
the movement. These tensions exploded in spring 2010 when DREAMers lost faith in RIFA’s capacities to represent their interests. This was a
cathartic moment that marked an important shift in the evolution of the
immigrant rights movement and the birth of the “DREAMer” as fully
autonomous political group.
2
The Birth of the DREAMer
Before 2001, “DREAMers” did not exist as a political group. There
were hundreds and thousands undocumented youths facing a unique set
of problems resulting from their position of being “in-between” countries.1 As children, they went to school in the United States, played in the
streets, watched television, rooted for their home teams, navigated fashions, and developed aspirations to move on to bigger and better things.
They absorbed the feelings, dispositions, tastes, and values of America
through the everyday interactions that made up their childhood. 2 They
were certainly immigrants, but most felt and knew themselves to be of
this country. This feeling of being home in the United States, of being
“normal” Americans, was disrupted as the children transitioned into
early adulthood and tried to pursue activities like applying for a driver’s
license, opening a bank account, looking for a job, and submitting college applications. 3 Each of these activities required demonstrating proof
of residency, a process that precipitated difficult and recurrent discoveries
that they did not formally belong in this country. One youth described
this type of experience:
I came to the US when I was six, but I didn’t know about my status until I
was seventeen. My senior year at high school I tried applying for the FAFSA
[Free Application for Federal Student Aid], and that’s when my parents
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The Birth of the DREAMer
finally had to tell me about the lack of the social [social security number].
I didn’t really have an idea. I had no idea what was going on. I had no idea
why it was happening to me. There was this overwhelming feeling of being
so alone and so, like just “aarrrgh.” All of your hopes and dreams are being
taken away for no particular reason, and you can’t know who to blame.
There is nobody to blame and there is nobody you can appeal to. It’s just this
whole sense of being lost, inside and out. You are so lost. I was so lost. I was
really just going through the motions. I was seventeen years old, and I ended
up in that space, and I don’t know. It just happened. 4
In addition to being cast out of the national community, the “hopes and
dreams” that many grew up with were suddenly “taken away.” This sudden experience produces a trauma and consciousness that is shared by
many undocumented youth and that is different from immigrants who
migrated to the United States as adults. 5
These common experiences have made undocumented youths a
sociologically distinct group of immigrants, but they did not exist as
a political group before the 2000s. There were no labels to mark the
group’s political existence (“DREAMers”), there were no common arguments and stories to express a singular political voice, and there was no
infrastructure to foster political connections and consciousness between
dispersed youth. There had been several campaigns to win in-state
tuition for undocumented youths in the 1990s, but these campaigns were
mostly led by state legislators, administrators, and rights associations.
Undocumented youths only played residual roles within them. 6 Their
nonexistence as a political group at the start of the decade stands in sharp
contrast with their major political presence after 20IO when DREAMers
emerged as a central player in immigration debates and became a driving
force of the immigrant rights movement.
This remarkable development over such a short period of time
stems from early efforts to pass the national DREAM Act. During the
early 2000s the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) and Center
for Community Change played instrumental roles in raising the issue in
Congress, developing a strategy to push for the DREAM Act, crafting
a representation of undocumented youths and their cause, and representing them directly to political officials. Given the lack of experience
The Birth of the DREAMer
49
of undocumented youths in national-level activism, immigrant rights
associations possessed the resources needed to transform the grievances
of undocumented youths into a legitimate political voice in the public
sphere.
Operating in a rather hostile and xenophobic environment, the
leading associations of the early DREAM campaigns needed to craft
representations of undocumented youths that would convince liberal
and conservative audiences alike. They stressed the youths’ deep cultural
and social ties to the United States and their ongoing contributions to
the country. By representing them as virtuous Americans, immigrant
youths would be transformed from threats to the national community
into sources of economic, civic, and moral rejuvenation. Although this
strategy was successful in building public and political support, activists and advocates confronted a new dilemma because of it. By stressing
the attributes, such as cultural assimilation and being college students,
that made undocumented students into “good” and deserving immigrants, those who failed to possess these same attributes were by default
less deserving. Crafting a compelling message was extremely important,
but developing a method to “stay on message” was just as important.
The leading associations also developed an infrastructure to train and
discipline undocumented youth activists to stay on message in the public arena. These training sessions helped inculcate youth activists into
the DREAMer discourse and shape their views and feelings concerning
their undocumented status and their position in the country.
The process described here helped transform thousands of different undocumented students into the political group of the DREAMer?
It was a group that bore a common label, infrastructure, and goals, but
it was also a group with common subjective and emotional dispositions.
As individual youths became DREAMers, their common subjectivities,
identity, and emotions fueled commitment to their cause.
Undocumented Youths as the Exceptional Immigrant
The large immigrant rights demonstrations in 1994 were a mes~ag
ing debacle. In the demonstrations against California’s punitive Proposition 187, marchers carried flags from Mexico, Central America, and
SO
The Birth of the DREAMer
other immigrant-sending countries. To the immigrant rights activists
the display of flags was empowering and reinforced their ties to one
another. But to their opponents, the flags were seen as defiantly foreign. 8
Anti-immigrant forces used images from these demonstrations to bolster their arguments that immigrants represented an existential threat
to the country. Having learned the lessons from these demonstrations,
immigrant rights advocates looked to craft a message in the 2000s that
stressed assimilation over distinction and conformity over difference.
American flags were now widely disseminated at public demonstrations and flags from other countries were pushed out of sight. The move
to embrace American symbols and silence displays of foreignness and
otherness has been a central plank of the movement’s representational
strategy.
This strategy has strongly influenced how national immigrant
rights associations represented undocumented youths and their cause.
Lead organizations believed that if they were to gain support from conservative and liberal publics alike, they needed to establish a direct connection between undocumented youths and core American values. The
authors of the original piece of federal legislation developed the DREAM
acronym (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act) to
create a direct connection between the cause and core national values
associated with the American dream. Rather than being a foreign threat
to the country, these immigrants were presented as the exact opposite:
extensions of the country’s core historical values and a force of national
reinvigoration.
The immigrant rights associations leading the DREAM campaign crafted a discourse of undocumented youths that rested on three
main themes. These themes have intersected to form the “master frame”
through which undocumented youths and their cause would be represented in the public sphere for years to come.9
First, it has been important to embrace American symbols and
mark the group’s distance from foreign symbols. One DREAM activist remarks on the importance of American symbols in representing
themselves and the cause, observing, “We have brought in the Statue
of Liberty into the recent campaign. Why? Because this is important to
remind people what we stand for as a country.” 10 They not only stressed
The Birth of the DREAMer
51
national symbols like flags and the Statue of Liberty but also national
values. Another DREAMer adds, “The key values that we stressed were
fairness, hard work, and self-determination. Those are our key values
that we always try to come back to. Like, ‘The DREAM Act is a policy
that supports fairness and rewards hard work.’ These are key American
values. We were talking about the values that this policy supports.” 11
The emphasis on national symbols and values has been aimed at winning over the support of a broad and sometimes hostile public. “Yeah,
that whole spiel about being ‘good Americans’ is strategic messaging. 12
The aim of it all is to gain support from people in conservative places.” 13
The flip side of stressing national conformity is to stress distance with
“foreign” symbols:
1hat is something we all agree on. You can never have a Mexican flag waving
at your rally. One time we said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to have a rally
showing our different flags, you know, flags from Mexico, Korea, Honduras,
etc.” But then we said, “No, we have to be careful because we’re in Orange
County [a very conservative area of southern California] and people are
going to take it the wrong way.” We thought it would be nice to celebrate the
fact that we are from all over the world but we didn’t want to risk it. 14
Stressing the qualities that make these youths wholly ‘~merican” requires the use of overt national symbols (for example, flags, statues of liberty, graduation gowns, and so on) and rhetoric. Demonstrating national
belonging has also encouraged the display of tastes, dispositions, tacit
knowledge, and accents that would be considered distinctly American
by natives. They have been shown to engage in the same activities, eat
the same foods, cheer the same sports teams, and embrace the same aspirations as any other American in their peer group. They are cheerleaders, they love the Lakers, they speak perfect English, and they dream of
becoming middle class, just like any “normal” person. By stressing their
American cultural attributes, they demonstrate that they have internalized American values and that these values are inscribed in bodily dispositions. To use Norbert Elias’s term, they have deployed their “national
habitus” in strategically purposeful ways. 15 For many early supporters
of the DREAM Act, their qualities as “de facto” Americans made the
youths exceptional and deserving an exemption from the country’s ex-
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The Birth of the DREAMer
clusionary immigration laws. “These children are de facto Americans but
their hopes are being dashed on a daily basis.” 16 Demonstrating national
identification has been a means for this “other” to reveal its “normalness”
and common humanity with the native. It allows them to present themselves not as breaking with or “threatening” the norms of the country but
ensuring continuity.
Second, in addition to stressing the attributes that make undocumented students “normal” Americans, DREAM advocates have also
drawn attention to their most exceptional qualities. They are indeed
“normal” American kids, but they are also the “best and the brightest”
of their generation. The former director of the California Dream Network explained:
This message comes from the facts because that is their experience. Many of
these students are going to school and succeeding in spite of terrible barriers.
The only strategic part is that we have focused on the creme de Ia creme, the
top students, the 4.3, the valedictorian. We have always been intentional of
choosing the best story, the most easily understood story, the most emotionally convincing story. So, we have always been intentional but that story
also runs true: young person comes, realizes they are undocumented, faces
terrible constraints but does good anyway because those are the things their
parents taught themP
The image of the straight-A immigrant student rebuts the stereotype of
immigrant youths as deviant and delinquent. Moreover, because these
students are the “best and the brightest,” they stand to make an important contribution to the country. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
has drawn on this line to justify his support of the DREAM Act. “The
students who earn legal status through the DREAM Act will make our
country more competitive economically, spurring job creation, contributing to our tax base, and strengthening communities.” 18
Third, the stigma of illegality has long been used by anti-immigrant groups to undermine the legitimacy of immigrant rights claims.
DREAM advocates and supporters have sought to cleanse youths of this
stigma by absolving them from the “guilt” of having broken the law. The
youths cannot be considered fully “illegal.” They did not “choose” to
cross the border and therefore cannot be held accountable for breaking
The Birth of the DREAMer
53
.the law. A DREAMer in the 2007 campaign argued, “I didn’t ask to
come here, I was brought here. With kids like me, you’re truncating their
future.” 19 The phrase, “no fault of their own” became a standard talking
point used by DREAM Act advocates in various campaigns. This talking
point has resonated widely with the media and national politicians. “The
bill could pass the Senate because it is intended to benefit young people
who grow up in the United States and are illegal immigrants as a result
of decisions by their parents.” 20 This theme has shown to be extremely
resilient and continues to be used by leading officials and politicians supporting the DREAM Act. The secretary of homeland security reiterated
this point in her support of the DREAM Act in 2010. “The students who
would gain legal status under the bill have no fault for being here in the
United States because they were brought here when they were children
by their parents.” 21 Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid employed a similar argument to voice his support of the bill: “If there is a bipartisan bill
that makes sense for our country economically, from a national security
perspective and one that reflects American values, it is the DREAM Act.
This bill will give children brought illegally to this country at no fault
of their own the chance to earn legal status.” 22 Another DREAM Act
supporter, the president of Arizona State University, argued that passing
the act would be a way for these youths to vindicate their “inno …
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