Big DREAMs require big chances, changes
The year was 1979; Santiago Flores was 5 years old.
Told to stay down and pretend he was sleeping, he and his mother and brother, in a station wagon, made it through the border checkpoint on the way to be with his dad in South Bend, Ind.
They were from the state of Zacatecas, Mexico, and, yes, they were undocumented immigrants going to meet their father working illegally in Middle America.
“Chago,” now 40, recalls clutching a Mexican flag as he went through the border, only to have it blown out of his hand and out the window of the station wagon.
A little too symbolic? Sure. But it happened, he said, and it would proudly be replaced by an American flag from that day forward.
Today, Chago is visuals editor and an award-winning photojournalist with the South Bend Tribune in the “home” town where he grew up.
Today, he is a U.S. citizen and has been since 2003, gaining legal temporary residency in 1986, when President Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act that granted amnesty and made citizenship possible for nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S.
Some saw the reform efforts under Reagan as a smokescreen that granted amnesty but never lived up to the promises of enhanced border security or pledges to crack down on employers who swelled the ranks of their workforces through illegal immigrants.
Yet for Chago and his family, it was a chance for a better life, and while not all of those granted amnesty became as successful as he and his three brothers — an auditor for the state of Indiana, a director of finance for a medical group and a factory worker — hundreds of thousands of men, women and children who met the criteria of the reform act are taxpaying, contributing members of society.
What’s to say others don’t deserve that same opportunity? Chago believes they do, if they meet the conditions, keep their noses clean and are at least given a shot.
“Immigrants are not the problem, as long as we are given the tools needed to succeed. We are not asking for anything special, just the chance to live freely in the land of the free and the home of the brave,” Flores said, who lives in suburban South Bend with his schoolteacher wife and their two teenage kids.
One can’t help but to make the connection to Chago’s story and the idea of giving tens of thousands of children and young adults their chance to become Americans.
And as we watch the citizens of Murrieta, its surrounding communities and the anti-immigration carpetbaggers traveling to take part in openly hostile protests over the hundreds of Central American children being bused their way, I wonder is there any compassion for them or the children here before that?
The Border Patrol national union line, appearing in reports across the Southwest, has been to say the Central American kids aren’t coming because of violent gangs, the possibility of murder, and for young girls, the threat of rape. Border Patrol unions out of San Diego and nationally — not here, to the local union’s credit — are saying the children are being lured by the DREAM Act and President Obama’s 2012 executive order enacting Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.
It appears that simply is not true. The idea has been perpetuated by an internal Border Patrol survey of detained children. Yet the methodology and results of the survey have been debunked by both United Nations surveys and academically controlled studies by doctoral candidates at San Diego State University.
In those cases, only a handful of children referred to deferred action, yet all referred to violence, gang recruitment, murder, rape or torture.
And what if they were drawn in by DACA, is that our government’s fault? Should our country be held responsible for the misinterpretation of the laws we pass or the orders that govern our policy? No; that’s on the governments of Central America and Mexico.
The DREAM Act does have merit and deserves to be passed, as DACA doesn’t come with a path to citizenship the way a fully envisioned DREAM Act would.
None of this helps the Central American children, but that doesn’t mean the children here now, who came prior to 16, who would meet the conditions for a chance at a life out in the open, would not be of great benefit to our nation. And it would simply be a compassionate thing to do.
Something similar worked for Chago and his family. “The DREAM Act gives today’s kids a chance to live in the only country they’ve ever known.
“They have lived the life, they have survived and they prospered under very difficult conditions,” he said. “Things that many people, ordinary teens, take for granted are definitely treasured by the undocumented kids.”
This column first appeared in the Imperial Valley Press, July 11, 2014. Later reprinted in the Fort Wayne (Ind.) Gazette.