Roshan Taroll said his mother, Beena Preth, brought him to the United States when he was a child in the hope that he would work hard and fight for American independence. There are abundant opportunities. He wouldn’t stand a chance.
The irony is why.
The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, established under President Obama, was designed to protect people who entered the United States illegally as children through no fault of their own from deportation. Many of these people don’t actually know that there is another country to call home other than the United States.
Tharoor shared the latter part with DACA recipients. But his story differs from theirs in one key way: His family didn’t come here illegally.
In 2008, 10-year-old Tharoor arrived in the United States with his father, younger brother and mother Preth, who found a job at a U.S. technology company on an H-1B visa. He then became a “Dreamer of Record”: the same nickname as a DACA recipient, except with a twist. The core of being a “Dreamer” under DACA’s purview is that they andAs a result, Tharoor was ineligible for the protections offered by the program—not despite having come to the United States legally, but because of it.
About 250,000 documented Dreamers came to the U.S. legally as children but face self-deportation if their parents cannot help them obtain green cards or if they cannot find other visas before leaving dependent status at age 21 Outbound. The typical response: These immigrants must not have done their part in trying to get permanent residency; they came here as children, so they had plenty of time.
This is a core misconception that masks just how chaotic the U.S. immigration system is. Completing the green card application process can take decades or longer due to long wait times caused by country of origin caps.
The federal government allocates approximately 140,000 employment-based green cards each year. But each country can only receive a maximum of 7% of immigrants in a year, meaning people from countries with a disproportionate number of highly skilled immigrants are penalized based on where they were born. That’s how the backlog was born.
Tharoor’s country of origin, India, is a case in point. There is a backlog of approximately 1.8 million cases. over a million Among them are India, where the queue is getting longer and longer but hope is slim. Many will wait decades. Most perversely, this is essentially a best-case scenario, as today’s new applicants now face mortality-regardless wait times: approx. 134 years. Hundreds of thousands will die waiting.
Tharol’s mother was one of them. In 2018, Preth passed away from cancer before he could reach the front lines. Although the federal government allows family members to apply for permanent residence after the death of the main applicant, this hope is more theoretical than practical, as Tharoor can foresee that before he too can reach the front line, he He has already left his dependent status. He subsequently converted to a student visa to complete his degree at Boston College and received a temporary work permit assigned to international students earning science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) degrees. His employer, a semiconductor company, submitted Taroll in three rounds of the H-1B visa lottery, in which the odds of winning were fell off a cliff Last few years. He was not selected.
So last month, Tharoor was forced to self-deport to Taiwan, where his employer found him a position. He did not understand the local language and had no family ties to the country. “Growing up in my hometown of Boston, I was just an ordinary kid and never thought that my status would determine the rest of my life,” he told me. “Like so many documented dreamers, it is only as we approach aging that we truly understand the consequences and must begin to plan how to remain in the only country we call home.”
While the legal structure doomed Tharoor’s chances of obtaining permanent residency from his mother, some documented Dreamers never had any such hope in the first place, as certain visas do not have a path to permanent residency or citizenship. . Laurens Van Beek’s parents moved him from the Netherlands to Iowa in 2005 on an E2 small business visa, which can be extended as long as certain requirements are met.
However, it does not allow them to line up to apply for a green card. Van Beek attends the University of Iowa on an international student visa and, like Taroll, received a temporary extension for studying in a STEM field. But by 2022, after three failed attempts at the H-1B visa lottery, he had no choice but to leave the country. Van Beek said his father, who was still suffering from severe kidney disease when he was fired, remained in Iowa running his small business, Harold’s Jewelry. “I believe DACA is a good thing,” Van Beek told me, “but why don’t these protections extend to documented Dreamers? Or at least prevent us from having to give up our lives and roots?”
Some lawmakers from both parties have tried to answer that question. In 2021, Rep. Deborah Ross (D-N.C.) introduced a bill in the House that would effectively close the loophole in documenting Dreamers and pave the way for citizenship. It would also resolve another, more frivolous inconsistency with DACA, which allows recipients to apply for work permits. Recorded dreamers cannot. “When I was a freshman and sophomore year, I didn’t go to any career fairs,” record dreamer Pareen Mhatre Tell Me in 2021, “because I knew I wouldn’t be able to apply for any internships.”
Sens. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) and Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) have introduced identical legislation in the Senate. “My bill, the American Children Act, addresses the documented Dreamer problem by prioritizing the children of legal immigrants for permanent status,” Paul said. reason. “As a result, children whose parents entered the country legally will not face deportation when they turn twenty-one.”
In 2022, change seems to be coming. A version of the bill passed the House as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Then, after the death of Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), it was buried in the Senate Legislative Cemetery. was flatly rejected The proposal. So while the change has not been widely controversial or broken down along predictable partisan lines, it remains paralyzed for now. “Comprehensive immigration reform has become the enemy of progressive reform,” Paul added.
The momentum hasn’t faded yet. June, Padilla and Ross submitted A bipartisan letter signed by 43 lawmakers urges President Joe Biden’s administration to ease the plight of “documented Dreamers” through executive action, although legislative solutions are so far in sight if Congress has the political will to do its job. By far the better choice. “Every day without action results in young people legally raised in America by skilled workers and small business owners being forced to leave the country, separating them from their families and preventing their ability to contribute to our country,” Said Deep Patel, founder of Better Dreams, an organization that advocates documenting dreamers. “The economic situation is clear, the moral situation is clear. It’s common sense.”
Tharoor is just one such victim. He still hopes for a different ending. “This country means everything to me and I owe everything to it,” he said. “While I always say that my parents raised my brother and I, I also believe that this country raised us. It provided us with opportunities to engage academically, personally, and professionally. We always considered it home and View it as a responsibility, always making sure to leave our positive mark. Van Beek agrees: “My current hope is that my employer will be able to get me a visa to return to the U.S.,” he told me, “but with that. In the meantime, I’m trying to stay positive. “
Both men had strong family reasons for returning to the United States, albeit in different ways. Van Beek’s father was “in poor health,” he said, but he survived after one of his employees donated a kidney to save him. Meanwhile, Tharoor’s mother has been dead for more than six years. But he still wanted to come back for her. “She just wanted my brother and I to work hard and have a chance to live the American dream,” he said. “It felt like I was letting her down by not fulfilling one of her wishes.”
