Huffington Post
By Dayana Morales Gomez
July 2, 2015
Progress
toward immigration reform in the past several years has been attributed
in no small part to the many undocumented immigrants, particularly
young people dubbed
Dreamers, who "came out" and shared their stories.
Now,
a campaign from the advocacy group Define American is encouraging more
undocumented immigrants to publicly announce their immigration status.
The
campaign, launched Wednesday, revolves around a website where people
can upload videos or pictures and "define American" in 1,000 characters
or less. Undocumented
immigrants as well as allies are invited to submit stories.
Define
American is a project of Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist who revealed his undocumented status to the world in a June
2011 New York Times
Magazine essay
"I
have outed myself twice in my life. The first time was when I was in
high school -- and Ellen DeGeneres' coming out on the cover of TIME
magazine was a big inspiration
for why I did that," Vargas, who is gay, said on a call with reporters
Wednesday.
"More
than a decade later, I outed myself as undocumented," he continued.
"And the goal of that, and the goal of having Define American, is: How
do we use these stories
-- individual stories -- to tell the universal truth about the
immigrant experience in this country? About the fact that we're not
criminals. About the fact that we're not taking away from this country
but contributing to it."
Define
American, which Vargas founded in 2011 to be a "media and culture
campaign using the power of the story," wants the coming-out campaign to
"improve the perception
of undocumented Americans."
Maria
Gabriela Pacheco, who came to the U.S. from Ecuador when she was 8
years old, is one Dreamer who wants to change the perception that
undocumented immigrants should
be feared.
"Many
people have big misconceptions about who we are. And many people, as we
heard last week from Mr. Trump, use that that to try to create fear,"
Pacheco said on the
press call, citing recent comments from business mogul and GOP
presidential candidate Donald Trump, who called immigrants from Mexico
rapists and criminals. "And so, for me, being able to tell my story and
letting other people know the power of coming out
trumps anything that other people try to put out there as
misconceptions," she said.
Pacheco
is a longtime immigration advocate who is now able to work legally
under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. She
works as program director
for TheDream.US, a scholarship fund for other DACA recipients.
In
2010, she joined other Dreamers in a 1,500-mile walk from Miami to
Washington, D.C., to advocate for the Dream Act, which would have
allowed undocumented young people
who came to the U.S. as children to become citizens. The bill passed in
the House of Representatives that year but failed in the Senate.
Dreamers
went on to push President Barack Obama to announce DACA in 2012 and to
expand the program last November -- an effort that is now stalled in the
courts.
Other
Dreamers have also attested to the power of coming out as undocumented.
Greisa Martinez, a field organizer for the advocacy group United We
Dream, decided to come
out as undocumented during a Texas state legislature hearing on
in-state college tuition for undocumented Texans, she told The
Huffington Post. That bill, called the Texas Dream Act, became law in
2001 and helped her afford Texas A&M University.
"There
was a hearing on in-state tuition," Martinez said. "I just knew that,
you know, it was sort of now or never and like my life was being
decided... by other people,
by Texas legislatures and that if I told my story it could be helpful,
for not only for me but for my community."
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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