Deferred Action: Every Dog has its Day!
Turned 18 here...Came of age to legally drink alcohol here...Yet fell short of 730 days for Deferred Action.
There are believed to be over 11-million undocumented immigrants in the United States. “We’re not always who you think we are,” Jose Antonio Vargas relates. Some pick the oranges for your fruit juice, babysit your children, military men fighting for the interest of the United States, home and abroad. Some are hopeful high school and college students. Others write stories and news articles you might read.
The immigrant in the e-book The Alien: A Letter to Future Self relates he came to the United States barely a month after his seventeenth birthday. He turned eighteen and came of age to legally drink alcohol at twenty-one in the United States—“this is my home now,” he further narrates, but laments that, “even though I consider the United States my country, my country doesn’t think of me as one of its own—makes me feel like the runt of the litter sometimes. I was glad when the Obama administration passed the Deferred Action program to grant work permits and immunity from deportation to immigrants who arrived the United States prior to their fifteenth birthday. Of course, I didn’t qualify for the program because I arrived the United States prior to my seventeenth birthday—730 days short of qualification. Not to say I am not happy for those who qualified. I am genuinely happy for them, but I’ll have to wait for my turn—every dog has its day.”
See more about the hopeful story of this immigrant in The Alien: A Letter to Future Self.
