Meet Alejandra Salazar.
She’s a daughter and a sister. She’s a graduate of Amphi High School and a student at Pima Community College, with hopes of transferring to the University of Arizona. She works in retail.
Salazar also happens to be an undocumented immigrant. While her legal status is not what defines her as a person, it’s her legal status that prevents her from being a full participant in our community.
But someday she will be a U.S. citizen because history, demographics and the political winds are on her side.
The 22-year-old Salazar, who has a temporary reprieve from deportation under the Deferred Action initiative, which also permits her to work, is not deterred from seeking fairness for herself and thousands of other Dreamers, including her younger brother.
“DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) is temporary relief but is not the answer,” said Salazar, while we talked in the PCC West Campus cafeteria last week.
I first met her last month when I heard her talk at a forum on immigration and education at the YWCA on North Bonita Avenue. Salazar impressed me with her articulateness and thoughtfulness. She’s like most of the Dreamers I’ve met, individuals whom we need more of.
Her parents brought her and Manuel, her 19-year-old brother, to Tucson 10 years ago, from Guaymas, Sonora. Salazar and Manuel are two of the more than 430,000 individuals who received Deferred Action within the first year after President Obama approved the program in August 2012, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
While Salazar and her brother are safe from being deported to a country that is not their home, their parents are not. Her parents, like the millions of other undocumented immigrants, live stealth lives. Moreover, DACA is a presidential directive that can be reversed by a new president.
Dreamers have become some of the most active groups in the fight for immigration reform. They are energetic and they have a persuasive moral argument on their side. Salazar works with Scholarships A-Z, which provides information and resources to undocumented students.
Politically, Salazar sees the growing number of Latino voters as a critical potential factor in determining future elections. A growing number of these voters have family members who have been hurt by our dysfunctional immigration policy.
Although the DACA program is the first of its kind in our immigration history, it’s not the first time the United States has opened its doors to undocumented immigrants, said immigration attorney Margo Cowan.
Cowan, who has defended immigrants since the 1970s and who spoke at the YWCA forum, said the first legalization came in the late 1920s. A second occurred in the 1940s during World War II. “We wanted to say ‘thank you’” to the undocumented immigrants who helped sustain the U.S. economy during the war, Cowan said.
But in 1986, the “welcoming” policy turned when the Reagan administration implemented the amnesty program.
Cowan said it was the first radical policy departure from welcoming immigrants, as amnesty implied “we must pardon you for your transgressions, for coming to clean the toilet and pick the fruit.”
According to the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank, more than 3.7 million undocumented immigrants have been legalized in the United States since 1986. Between 1929 and 1986, more than 1.5 million individuals’ legal status was fixed by Congress.
Some form of legalization is coming, as political and economic pressures mount. The Republicans in the U.S. House insist there will be no immigration reform this year but history says it is inevitable.
“It’s the next generational step that goes back decades,” Cowan said.
Salazar will wait. She’s confident but she knows she and millions of others like her and who support immigration reform have a lot of work to counter the efforts of the “last gaspers,” those opposed to any kind of reform and, as Cowan said, who are “doing everything they can to make it as miserable and create as much suffering as they can.”
This is a transitory moment for Salazar. For us as well.
