Career fairs here at the University of Texas were an exercise in frustration for Javier André Huamani, a mechanical-engineering major who was eager but unable to put his knowledge to work. Because he had been brought to the United States illegally, at age 8, he could only watch with envy. “All my friends were getting those cool work experiences,” he says, “that I could only dream about.”
Before transferring to the flagship campus, Mr. Huamani, who is from Peru, saw the defeat of the federal Dream Act, which had promised a path to citizenship for students like him. Still, he and other self-described Dreamers kept lobbying for an overhaul of immigration law while making uncertain plans for their own futures. Graduate school would keep some in a holding pattern; setting up their own businesses could help others circumvent hiring restrictions.
As a rising junior in June 2012, exhausted from intensive summer courses, Mr. Huamani went back to Houston for a weekend of home cooking, not expecting a turning point in his life.
“My father greeted me at the bus and asked if I’d heard about the memo that President Obama had just signed,” he recalls. The memo, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, called for a two-year amnesty for certain young people, including students and military veterans, who were in the country illegally. During that time, they would be authorized to work and couldn’t be deported.
While it didn’t offer the sweeping protections of the Dream Act, it gave those students hope that their college careers wouldn’t come to dead ends. Still, qualification requirements were strict, and the $465 fee to apply for a work permit daunting.
“The day DACA was announced, it was a complete frenzy while everyone was trying to figure out who it would apply to,” says Deborah Alemu, a student at Austin who was brought to the U.S. illegally from Sweden at age 4 and became a legal permanent resident after the amnesty program was announced.
A law-school clinic helped file applications for students who could afford the work-permit fee. Many couldn’t, or found that they weren’t eligible. “You’re either too old,” Ms. Alemu says, “or you didn’t come soon enough.”
Since the amnesty program began, in August 2012, about 553,000 young people nationwide have been granted deferred-action status, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. To qualify, they must have been brought to this country before age 16; be at least 15 years old when they apply and under 31 as of June 15, 2012; and have lived in the United States continuously for five years. They must be enrolled in high school or postsecondary education, or have graduated from an American high school, earned a GED, or served in the military; and they cannot have any serious criminal history.
Even for those who check all the boxes, the program is limited. It doesn’t make anyone a legal citizen and offers no guarantees that the status will be renewed after two years. The entire program may be discontinued if the next president, like many House Republicans, opposes it.
“Because you know there is this ticking clock,” says Ms. Alemu, “it limits how big some people want to dream.”
‘Bittersweet’ Status
The future seemed wide open that summer two years ago as Mr. Huamani scrambled to assemble documents. He met with an immigration lawyer, applied for the special status, and by November had a green light to work. Suddenly he was on equal footing at career fairs. Many of his fellow Dreamers rebranded themselves “DACAmented.”
The following summer, Mr. Huamani landed an internship with an insurance company, earning $25 an hour. That’s more than his parents—a chef at a retirement home and a fast-food waitress—were making combined. While he was grateful for the chance to support his family, the pay discrepancy, he says, “seemed insulting and unfair.”
Other students shared his feelings of guilt over the privileged status not afforded to their parents and older siblings. “It’s the strangest, most bittersweet thing,” says Ms. Alemu, a campus leader with United We Dream, a lobbying group for young immigrants.
Last week a dozen members of the Texas affiliate of the group gathered on steps of the Austin campus’s administration tower to share information about the renewal forms that were due out any day. (The forms became available on June 6.) The first wave of deferred-action recipients had been advised to apply four months ahead of the expiration dates this fall.
For Mr. Huamani, who was approved in November 2012, that gives him about a month to get ready. The timing is crucial: File the paperwork too early, and the application will bounce back; too late, and the protected status could be lost.
For young people who do get the work permits, career prospects beyond that first job are less clear. “Some employers are hesitant to promote them because of the uncertainty about renewal,” says Tom K. Wong, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego and author of the recent report, “In Their Own Words: A National Survey of Undocumented Millennials.”
Commissioned by immigration-advocacy groups and published last month, the survey found that one of the most profound effects of the deferred-action program has been giving recipients a greater sense of belonging in the United States. Of more than 1,400 young people polled, nearly 70 percent had landed their first job after receiving the special status.
Some of them worry that they expose their families to the risk of deportation by coming forward to apply, the survey found. Their biggest concern, says Mr. Wong, is, “What happens, now that I’ve given the government my information, if the DACA program ends?” The $465 application fee, required for renewals as well, is also a burden, the report notes.
Along with Texas, California has thousands of DACA-eligible immigrants, about 300 of whom are undergraduates at the University of California at Berkeley. Last year a campus legal-services clinic helped more than 80 students gain deferred-action status with a grant that covered the filing fee, says Nohemy Z. Chavez, a counselor and coordinator at Berkeley’s Undocumented Student Program, which offers an array of support services.
This year, of 44 graduates in the country illegally, about half had gained work authorization, Ms. Chavez estimates. For the rest, “it’s kind of a different hustle,” she says. Some set up businesses, because while federal law bans employers from hiring workers without papers, no law prevents such people from forming limited-liability companies or working as freelancers. Others accumulate graduate degrees as they wait for immigration laws to change.
“It takes a lot of creativity to figure out how they can use their college degree and contribute back to society,” Ms. Chavez says, “because that’s what they want to do.”
That can also be the case in states such as Arizona and Georgia, which have balked at acknowledging the new work authorization.
Earned the Right
Resistance to the amnesty can also come from classmates who argue that the Dreamers are competing for jobs that could go to legal citizens. Mr. Huamani, who crossed the stage at Austin’s commencement last month wearing a cap reading “Undocumented and Unafraid,” says he’s earned the right to seek a good job.This month he starts work as an engineer with a global oilfield-services company in Houston. He plans to set aside part of his paycheck each month to help his parents pay off their mortgage and someday take a vacation.
Mr. Huamani will continue lobbying, he says, for an end to deportations that separate families. And he hopes to return to Austin periodically to go salsa dancing and hang out with the Dreamers who became his second family. Next month he’ll apply for another two-year work permit. He looks forward to the day, he says, when his future is secure, and his parents don’t have to worry that a traffic ticket could get them sent back to Peru.
“Eventually I know there will be some relief for all of us, and that’s why I don’t want to give up hope,” says Mr. Huamani. “Hope is the reason my parents brought me here. It got me to where I am today, with a college degree.”
