The American Dream Shared, Temporarily, with 800,000 Young “Aliens”

Barack Obama’s Executive Order this past week is being called “The DREAM Act Lite.”

He announced that certain foreign-born minors, brought by their parents to the US illegally, who have “good moral character,” complete high school or do military service, would be granted temporary US residency and could apply for permanent status. (Currently these and all foreign-born adults who enter the US illegally are very limited in access to work, college, driver’s licenses etc., because they don’t have a Social Security number.)

For ten years Democrats in Congress have tried to pass the DREAM Act; Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors, as part of wider immigration reform.  Republicans have blocked all efforts.

 As of this week, some of those young people could get closer to the American DREAM.

The DREAM Act’s title evokes the nostalgic phrase, “the American Dream,” which Obama himself used as the subtitle for his book The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.  Some have cited Obama’s own life story as an example, even proof of, the possibilities inherent in the American Dream.

By which they mean the hopeful conviction that in America anything is possible.  In the words of a dopey jingoistic song from my teeny bopper days; “Only in America, land of opportunity, can a guy without a cent, get a break and maybe grow up to be president.” 

The American Dream myth isn’t just for folks born in other countries, seeking their fortune in the US, with or without papers.  (Don’t get me going on the “Birther” movement that insists Obama wasn’t born in the US – no American Dream for him.)

“The American Dream” pretends to be for everyone, this vague idealistic notion that America offers a universal opportunity for success, upward mobility, prosperity and equality.  The phrase was popularized by historian James Truslow Adams in 1931 (during the Depression, when the dream with distant):

…the American dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.

Such varied Americans as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Martin Luther King, Jr., George Carlin, Hunter S. Thompson, John Steinbeck, Langston Hughes, Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, Ben Franklin and Barack Obama have all written about the American Dream.

In literature and poetry the Dream is most often noted for its failure, its absence or more nightmarish reality.  The great Jay Gatsby, symbol of the Dream, dies, as do Dream seekers like Steinbeck’s Lennie and the feared and loathed of Thompson’s Las Vegas.

African American poet Langston Hughes wrote “The Dream Deferred” in 1951: 

     What happens to a dream deferred?

     Does it dry up
     like a raisin in the sun?
     Or fester like a sore—
     And then run?
     Does it stink like rotten meat?
     Or crust and sugar over –
     like a syrupy sweet?

     Maybe it just sags
     like a heavy load.

     Or does it explode?

The comedian George Carlin said, “It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

But the American Dream does still inspire people to enter the country both legally and illegally.  11.5 million people live in America without documentation.

Announcing the new policy, Obama said that children of illegal immigrants “study in our schools, play in our neighborhoods, befriend out kids, pledge allegiance to our flag….It makes no sense to expel talented young people who are, for all intents and purposes, Americans….This is not amnesty.  This is not immunity.  This is not a path to citizenship.  It’s not a permanent fix.  This is a temporary stopgap measure.”

That’s an expression of his frustration with the rigid opposition/stonewalling by the Republicans of almost anything he promotes.  And he’s certainly looking for Latino support in the election.  So he bypassed the failed legislative efforts, and used the authority of his office to require the Immigration Service to defer for two years the deportation of the 800,000 or so foreign-born people younger than 30 who came to the US before age 16, have lived here continuously for at least five years, are not a security or criminal threat, and are successful students or serve in the military.

The reaction was predictable, with praise and criticism from all sides.  Some complained  “it doesn’t go far enough” and there was much cynicism about pandering to voters.  Mitt Romney predictably tried every one of his Etch-a-Sketch tactics in response: he ignored Obama’s actions for a couple days, then he criticized it, then he said it wasn’t good enough and Republicans would do something permanent, then he said he would keep the policy for those who serve in the military but would require advanced degrees.  (NY Times columnist Gail Collins interpreted Mitt’s quote, “and if you get an advanced degree here, we want you to stay here…” as “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses bearing Ph.D.’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering or computer science….) Then he said Latinos don’t really even care about immigration; the only thing I, Mitt, will speak of is jobs.  (Except when Mitt does what my friend Ed Kilgore calls “dog whistles” to the right - references in code to the right’s party line on abortion, gay marriage and yes, immigration, while sounding less extreme.)

I am no expert on these issues.  I know we are a nation of immigrants.  My husband figures his Swedish grandfather who jumped ship in San Francisco and became a farmer outside Seattle never got any papers.  We have become too much of a nation of us and them, when we all were them at one point.

I know we are in a recession, but illegal immigrants are only 5% of the labor force, and they take jobs most Americans don’t want to do.  I know we can’t really address immigration questions without reconfiguring our whole system of capitalism and our tragic history of racism.  I am an admirer of the work of Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun Magazine and the Network of Spiritual Progressives.  He writes in the May/June issue of Tikkun:

In my view, every country in the world uses oppressive and sometimes violent means to keep out those whom it does not want, and those wants are almost always based on both capitalist economic rationales (“there is not enough to go around, so don’t let others share it”) and racist feelings toward others (“they don’t deserve what we deserve because they are less valuable or less truly human that we are”). That's no justification for any given country doing so.

Members of my own denomination, the United Church of Christ, and the Unitarian Universalist Association are this week protesting the very strict (and racist) anti-immigrant bill in the state of Arizona that allowed detention if a suspect only looked illegal; the US Supreme Court will rule next week on its constitutionality.  Like many Christians, and the Jewish Lerner, they draw on the Biblical heritage of honoring the stranger and alien in our midst, the equal value of all humans, and the belief that land is owned by God, not humans.

It’s a long hot summer ahead at US border crossings and the desert stretches of illegal entry.  Obama was only able to defer for two years the deportation of that small portion of the 11.5 million illegals.  What if, as Langston Hughes says, the dream deferred doesn’t dry up, like a raisin in the sun, but instead, explodes?

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter