California Dreaming – Dream Act Students Fight On

The news is that young immigrants are not going to become Americans. These are the students that have been raised as Americans, who despite their status as immigrants have managed to complete their education. The educational system is one big hustle, especially when you don’t have financial aid, when the cost of your dreams land right in your hands. Our country promises a lot to the working class, but the truth is that to them it does not deliver.

All those high hopes to hard work and dedication fall flat when you realize what one has to face. I have seen my brothers starve before city hall, stand in their white shirts and hold out their flags to a nation that chooses to overlook them. The other day the Senate put to vote the Dream Act, an act that would legalize many Americans raised migrants who aspire to become part of a first world nation. Five votes from advancing the house, the bill was stopped.

Democrat leaders like Mark Pior of Arkansas, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, and West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin have declared their opposition to the bill. They are Democrats with careers to look after, especially when elections are one year away, but politics has always been rid with fear, it is its one defining quality.

The thing about our brothers is that they really try, they try so hard to become like the Americans, and they compromise to be accepted. It’s no different from the 50’s Mexican who changes his name, who forces his children to forget Spanish. Americans are a one-dimensional people, they speak one language, and they see through one lens. To them we must conform, become simple minded and leave our past.

Now you may not understand but when I look at my brothers march, and hold out their flag you can see that they are slowly becoming more and more like them. I can see that they are grateful for every inch of leverage and achievement that they get, not everyone gets to go to college, not everyone gets to become a science graduate, but such things are irrelevant when you got to go back to the same world you left. What I find displeasing is the fact that people forget that we were the first to discover this land, we were the first to raise an empire in the Americas, that despite what the American may think we were this land’s first kings, and then as is now, we are its inheritors. Now this statement is not to revile the Americans, but to distinguish our creed as one of achievement from the onset, my brothers should never forget who we are.

When Malcolm X was a boy he was told to become a carpenter, that aspiring to become a lawyer was not a black trade. He was told that Jesus was a carpenter, but what people fail to acknowledge is that he was also a theologian, and a philosopher. In a country that raises capitalism as its highest virtue, one can not help but realize the gears that keep that monster moving. When I say that Americans are a one dimensional people I mean to say that they cannot yield from thinking a certain way. When you speak to them about why foreigners choose to raise their kids in this nation, why they have to flee poverty, they respond “why does everyone want to live in America when they have so much to complain about it”.

What my American friends choose to ignore is that this country is the cause of all that migration, living in a the globalized world teaches you that the grasp of American capitalism cannot be escaped. No matter where you go, someone is hustling to Americanize your nation, to sell you a Coca Cola, to make a product that ends up on the backs of the first world slavers.

As one of these students you are taught and mobilized under corporate interest, your compromise first is with corporate America, being that they are the one backing you, that spend their money on shaping your campaign. This would all be fine if at least one of these students became American.

The thing about being one of these students is that you see the walls of the movement, when you become a student your protest is not to a denial, it is not so much legalizing someone but compromising your virtues. What I mean by that is that as we become more and more educated and see the gears of the Americans Machine, we have to contemplate the possibility of a different governing body. W.E.B Dubois was a college educated Negro who abandoned this nation for one that gave him what this one never could, equality. Now I know most politicians are fearful of Socialism, but it is socialism that unites our brothers, that makes them band together and make movements.

What is socialism but the act of socially bringing change to the masses, to a critical mass, a dissatisfied people. These are the virtues of the American immigrant, if you are not taught about equality or freedom, and liberation, you come to these conclusions independently, they are needs that all men have searched for throughout history.

There have been many before us, that were not as educated as us, that were not as well fed as us, whose dreams were simple, whose desires were one breath away, who became Americans with nothing more than the clothes on their back. To these people we owe our allegiance, to them our enterprise. The reason we want to become Americans is because we too hold virtues as grand as equality, liberty, and property, that the change is not for us but for the people that forget that such ideas are the foundation of our nation. Liberation is not for the immigrant dreamer but for the American as well.