Symposium highlights undocumented minors, immigration reform

Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., headlined the symposium, which centered on the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act and comprehensive immigration reform. The first panel was called “Unfulfilled Dreams: The Reality of Undocumented Children in the U.S.” and the second “Daring the Dream: Access to Higher Education and Pathways to Legalization.”

First proposed in 2001, the DREAM Act is federal legislation that would allow children of illegal immigrants to become permanent residents upon receiving a bachelor’s degree or completing two years of military service.

Panelists discussed the DREAM Act from economic, emotional and psychological perspectives.

Four students — Dan-el Padilla Peralta ’06, Carolina Munoz of Rosa Parks High School in Paterson, Eric Balderas of Harvard and Marisol Conde-Hernandez of Rutgers — spoke about the struggles they faced as illegal-immigrant minors.

Peralta was the Latin salutatorian of his class and is currently a graduate student at Stanford University. He said that illegal immigrants feel an overwhelming amount of fear.

“You are illegal ... What does that mean? You’re always put in a position of feeling as if you are about to be tried,” Padilla said, adding, “You are absolutely powerless, you are waiting and waiting, and you have no idea when the final verdict is going to come.”

Munoz, who is 17 years old, was born in Ecuador. Her parents brought her to America when she was three.

“Being an undocumented person is restricting so much from me and people like me,” she said. “We have unlimited potential, yet we cannot take those steps to keep going forward.”

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While Munoz’s friends learn to drive and apply to college, she said that she faces restrictions.

“It brings us down so much,” Munoz said of illegal-immigrant students. “Guidance counselors come in and they say, ‘Where are you planning on applying to college?’ and I just freeze. I don’t know what to do.”

The panelists agreed that without the DREAM Act, the six million illegal-immigrant youths living in America will struggle or be unable to go to college.

“If you think the housing collapse is bad now, wait until you have a whole generation of people that aren’t educated coming of age,” said Robert Smith, a sociology professor at City University of New York, on the second panel.

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“Children cannot be held liable for the acts of their parents,” he added. “What kind of country sentences a child to a lifetime of hard labor for a nonviolent crime that their parents committed?”

During the second panel, sociology professor Patricia Fernandez-Kelly said that she had just received word that Democrats plan to reintroduce the DREAM Act during the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress. Fernandez-Kelly is a trustee of the Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund and has actively supported the act.

Holt, who supports the bill, asked the audience, “Are we a country that is about preserving privilege, or a country that is about extending opportunity?”

“The general thing that we need right now is re-establishing the validity of facts,” Holt said. “As [Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan] said, ‘You are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.’ The facts are about the number of students that would benefit from the DREAM Act and what they will do with the freedom it will grant them.”

Fernandez-Kelly said opposition to the act was rooted in fear. While she acknowledged that it would likely not pass, she said that “people are really creating a momentum that is similar to the momentum that existed during the civil rights movement in that, at some point in time, it’s going to be absolutely impossible not to realize that this is a great injustice.”

The Center for Migration and Development, Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Program in Latin American Studies, Program in Latin Studies and Office of Population Research sponsored the event.