New York Times
By Julia Preston
February 20, 2015
For
Tomás Péndola, an immigrant from Argentina, it was a normal week
teaching chemistry in a public high school here, filling a whiteboard
with dense equations and coaxing
his students to decipher them.
For Yeni Benítez, a Mexican immigrant in Wisconsin, this week was when “everything just fell apart.”
Mr.
Péndola, who came here with his family when he was 10 and grew up in
Florida without immigration papers, has protection from deportation and a
work permit under President
Obama’s program for unauthorized immigrants, known as Dreamers, who
came to the United States as children. Ms. Benítez had been ready on
Wednesday to join an expanded version of the program, which was
announced by the president in November.
But
officials indefinitely postponed the expansion this week after a
federal judge in Texas, ruling in a lawsuit by 26 states, said it would
impose major burdens on state
budgets. On Friday, the administration said it would seek a stay of the
Texas judge’s order.
Yeni
Benítez in a Milwaukee church. A college-educated Mexican immigrant not
in the Obama program, she works in a factory. Credit David Kasnic for
The New York Times
“I’m
back to this sense of insecurity, of being afraid every day, every
hour, every minute,” said Ms. Benítez, who has a college degree in
engineering but is working in
a factory. “It really is taking a toll on me.”
Mr.
Péndola and Ms. Benítez now stand on two sides of a sharp divide
created by disagreements over how far a president can change immigration
policy by executive action.
Those
like Ms. Benítez, whose hopes were raised by the prospect of the
expanded program, must continue to live with fears of being fired or
detained. At the same time,
they are watching others make progress they hoped to achieve.
Immigrants
like Mr. Péndola who participated in the program have seen many doors
open. Still, they worry about how the fiercely contested politics of
immigration could
affect their fate.
Mr.
Péndola was finishing a college degree in chemistry, but before the
program the best job he could get was selling magic tricks in a Miami
tourist shop. With his work
permit and Social Security number from the initiative, known as
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, Mr. Péndola, now 23,
was able to get a driver’s license and buy his own car, freeing him to
commute to college and work without fear of being pulled
over by the police.
After
his college graduation, the high school where he had been a standout
science student asked him to come back as a teacher. At the MAST Academy
in Key Biscayne, a
magnet school that draws science students from across the Miami area,
he is earning a steady official paycheck, with his tax withholding in
order. And he is loving his work.
“This
is a very nerdy school where the kids are encouraged to be curious,”
Mr. Péndola said in his laboratory after an advanced chemistry class. “I
like being able to
excite them about chemistry, which is not normally everyone’s favorite
subject.”
Nearly
640,000 young immigrants have received protection since 2012. As many
as 270,000 others could be eligible under the new rules. The immigrants,
most of whom came
with parents and either crossed the border illegally or overstayed
legal visas, receive temporary work authorization but no lasting legal
immigration status.
Ms.
Benítez, who has lived in the United States since she was 13, is now
36. She was too old in 2012 for the age limit of 30 in the program.
Under the expansion, Mr. Obama
eliminated that age cap. He also reset the date by which applicants
must have been in the United States from June 2007 to January 2010 and
extended the term of the deportation deferrals from two years to three.
Ms.
Benítez’s mother is a legal resident, and several siblings are American
citizens. In 2004 she applied through the legal system for a resident
green card, but because
of vast backlogs she still has many years to wait.
With
a 10-year-old daughter who is a citizen, Ms. Benítez would also be
eligible for the other program the court order suspended, for as many as
four million undocumented
parents of citizens or legal residents. It had been scheduled to begin
in May.
Ms.
Benítez graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, with an
engineering degree. But she has been clinging to a job as a quality
control manager on a castings
production line, relying on car pools to get to work and keeping quiet
about her legal status.
“You can’t show your face because you are holding on to the one job that will feed your family,” she said.
She
hired a lawyer and assembled years of tax returns and bills for her
application, laying plans to get a data job and apply to graduate
school. Then she heard the news
of the injunction.
“I was really raging,” she said. “Now I’m just numb.”
In
his opinion blocking the expanded initiative, Judge Andrew S. Hanen of
Federal District Court in Brownsville, Tex., explicitly did not evaluate
the original program.
He found that the new initiatives would strain state budgets and ruled
that Mr. Obama should have allowed public comment before he started
them.
Recent
scholarship, though, supports what young people have said about the
changes they see. In a new study by the Center for Comparative
Immigration Studies at the University
of California, San Diego, 79 percent of youths with deportation
deferrals said they were earning more in better jobs, gaining financial
independence. Some 41 percent said they had returned to college after
dropping out.
“The
huge emotional burden of having to lead a clandestine life has been
lifted,” said Wayne Cornelius, a political scientist who was an author
of the study.
No
longer dependent on proxies, they opened bank accounts and signed
leases and mobile phone contracts in their own names. They found stable
housing and stayed there longer.
“Before
they had to rely on friends to fill out papers, and now they have a new
kind of security,” said Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, dean of the graduate
school of education
at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an author of a
national study of undocumented undergraduates.
In
the U.C.L.A. study, 86 percent of those with deferrals reported a
positive impact on their education because of new access to financial
aid or paid internships. More
than other students in the country illegally, the study found, those
with deferrals had a strong desire for belonging in the United States,
with 94 percent saying they would become citizens if they could.
Some
Republicans in Congress want to shut down the program completely,
saying it is part of a constitutional overreach by the president. Next
week lawmakers will have
to try to break an impasse over a bill to fund the Department of
Homeland Security passed by the Republican-led House, which includes
provisions to end all the president’s actions, including the existing
program. Democrats blocked the measure in the Senate.
José
Santiago, a Mexican student in Homestead, Fla., said the youth program
was his ticket out of the hard life of his parents, who are farmworkers
in the vast fields
around his hometown. After one miserably hot, backbreaking day picking
squash, Mr. Santiago realized he needed another line of work.
With
his working papers, Mr. Santiago, 19, graduated from high school and
went straight to Miami Dade College in Homestead as a full-time student
in computer science.
“I’m passionate with computers,” Mr. Santiago said. “It’s kind of a natural thing, since I’m good with math.”
The
legal foothold allowed him to win a private scholarship, get a car and
start plotting a course to a four-year degree and a computer engineering
career — indoors.
Mr.
Santiago is part of a group that is helping students who have deferrals
to renew them and trying to bolster the sinking spirits of first-time
applicants now in limbo.
“I
feel protected, at least,” Mr. Santiago said. “But it’s just a work
permit. I can’t say I’m more American until I have a way to
citizenship.”
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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