I am now 22 years old and having lived in America since I was 14, where most of my identity formation has been developed, I consider myself an American.
I was brought to the country through a non-immigrant visa and at the age of 18 I became fully responsible for unlawfully staying in the United States. Back then, it didn’t even enter my mind that I was breaking a law and that the right thing to do was to leave the country, it was just my reality.
Today is that I can clearly explain to a broader audience that it is non-sense to blame or even call someone in my situation an illegal immigrant.
Taking in consideration that I am also a human being, when I turned 18, I had already 4 years where I developed a sense of belonging to a new society, a new culture, and a new country. It is simply inexplicable to expect a young individual with strong physiological attachments to move to another country because of an unfortunate reality where he/she did not have any say.
In the eyes of many educated undocumented youth this is not a matter of immigration, but of discrimination. Putting together all the reasons of why the DREAM Act should be passed today, we still have to deal with the “Wouldn’t it reward people who come to this country illegally” and the answer to that is “No, it would reward all those who had earned their way to legalization, not forgetting that they became illegal in the first place by consequence and not by action” I think it is time that America starts treating us like individuals and not as a group and to take in consideration that because of a broken immigration system psychological attachments have been formed in many undocumented immigrants who have been allowed to contribute and live in this country for many years.