Last Wednesday I went to my first Rose Cafe. I didn’t really look at the topic of the cafe before I went, so I was really taken aback when GRF Esmeralda launched into the specifics of the DREAM act and DACA. I honestly hadn’t given much thought to illegal immigration, and especially not in the context of children. I have always been very far removed from these kinds of issues having grown up on a military base in Japan.

Esmeralda explained that the DREAM act was a piece of legislation that was intended to allow children who had been brought into the country and grown up in the country, gone through the US school system, etc. to stay in the US, and allow them to apply for a work permit. However, in the process of selling the bill higher education and the idea of graduates was heavily used, and the parents of the children were criminalized. This does not tell the story of all illegal immigrants who came to the country as children, and many did not support it for this reason.

I think The DREAM act may have been a good first step, but we have a long way to go. It needs to be easier to be a legal immigrant to the US to protect people from becoming trapped in extremely low paying jobs and also to allow children who wholly consider the US to be their home an opportunity to become an American in a legal sense as well.