WASHINGTON — As her fellow college graduates busy themselves with spamming every available inbox with resumes, 25-year-old Lizbeth Mateo keeps to the same Los Angeles coffee shop she’s worked in for the past five years.
Matias Ramos, 23, uses blogs and Twitter to help unite young, undocumented students and other supporters to rally for The DREAM Act. (Katie Rogers/MNS)
A native of Mexico and an undocumented immigrant living in the U.S. for more than a decade, Mateo earned a bachelor’s degree from California State University, Northridge last year. Though she said she’d like to find a job that would allow her to give back in some way to the low-income community she grew up in, Mateo’s immigration status has placed a cap on what she is able to achieve.
You could say she’s still waiting on a dream. “You’re not allowed to work where you grow up or have a job that’s related to your field,” Mateo said.
It’s been just over two years since the last version of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act failed in the Senate. Re-introduced in both chambers of Congress in March, the most recent incarnation of the DREAM Act would provide for students like Mateo, people who want to earn a path toward legal U.S. residency over time.
To mobilize supporters, Mateo and others in her situation have taken to social media to spread their message. Using the Web to invite other savvy supporters into the fray, undocumented bloggers and tweeters across the country have formed a coalition called United We Dream. The group rolled out the countrywide “Back to School DREAM Act Day of Action” demonstration in September. Floridians alone hosted 13 demonstrations across the state last month, half of them in Miami.
Recent UCLA graduate and Washington resident Matias Ramos, 23, said undocumented people of his generation are becoming less afraid to speak out against what they see as injustices. On the web, as he is in person, Ramos is an unafraid activist, maintaining a blog on the topic and reaching out to his Twitter following to spread news.
Ramos and others hold hope that policy work on the DREAM Act will begin in earnest next year, either as part of more comprehensive immigration reform or as a standalone bill.
“I think a lot of us are coming together and say enough is enough,” said Ramos, a native of Argentina. “We’re ready to lead this debate and say ‘this is what the undocumented population is about and what it’s not.’”
Undocumented and born abroad, Mateo and Ramos both defeated steep odds for their degrees. As a group, Latinos historically trail their classmates of other races, according to Pew Hispanic Center data.
Being foreign-born just widens the gap.
Though not necessarily undocumented, only 29 percent of young, foreign-born Latinos interviewed in Pew’s 2009 National Survey of Latinos plan to pursue a bachelor’s degree. That’s compared with 60 percent of those who are native-born. After age 18, though, only one-fifth of foreign-born young adults surveyed remained enrolled in school, representing a presence half that of native-born enrollees.
Cinthya, an undocumented 22-year-old, hasn’t been able to find time to get her GED after nearly a decade in the U.S. Smuggled with her parents by coyotes, or human traffickers, from Honduras when she was a teen, Cinthya is in her third attempt at earning a GED since dropping out of high school at 17. Cinthya said she sees no way out of her two jobs, one at a cleaning service and the other at a restaurant.
Unlike Ramos or Mateo, Cinthya he sees no path to college.
Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, updates a “Corruption Chronicles” blog that tracks the progress of undocumented immigrants through higher education. He said that the DREAM Act threatens to draw in even more immigrants illegally than other reform bills offering amnesty.
“There are people who are waiting to get into this country because they’ve patiently abided the law,” Fitton said, “and those who cheat get these proposed benefits. Why would someone who is not a citizen be able to get resources that might otherwise be devoted to helping citizens?”
Qalim Cromer thinks there should be a better path. Cromer teaches a GED class at the Latin American Youth Center in Washington and works with first-generation and undocumented students.
He calls his work “plugging the dam,” not fixing the problem of helping the undocumented access higher education, but biding time until immigration reform moves forward.
If she thinks too long about her limitations, Cinthya panics. She doesn’t dream; instead, she tells of the deportation nightmares that plague her.
“What if this is all I can do?” she asks Cromer in perfect English. “This is the max I can move on without papers.”