Trump offers citizenship, but far from celebrating the "dreamers" are furious

President Donald Trump offered a plan to grant United States citizenship to almost two million illegal immigrants, the vast majority of whom are Latin Americans, but far from celebrating, the undocumented are furious. "To this proposal of white supremacy we say: No," said Greisa Martinez Rosas, who crossed the Rio Grande with her parents when she was seven years old and today is an activist in United We Dream, the largest immigrant youth network in the United States.

"We reject this proposal and urge others to do so," Jonathan Jayes-Green, an Afro-Panamanian co-founder of the black undocumented group UndocuBlack Network, said in the same forum. "What the White House is selling to the American people is nothing more than a wish list in favor of the natives, which would reduce the number of immigrants, especially people of color," wrote Venezuelan-born activist Juan Escalante.

However, the plan proposed by the White House on Thursday to naturalize up to 1.8 million immigrants within 10 to 12 years is "very generous" for many.Why do the potential beneficiaries complain?

"Trump created this crisis"

Martínez Rosas, Jayes-Green and Escalante are "dreamers" (dreamers). This is how immigrants who arrived illegally in the United States when they were children and who can reside temporarily thanks to the Decree of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which grants them a temporary permit, are known. of residence.

The program was created by former Democratic President Barack Obama in 2012, to alleviate the failure of the DREAM Act, an acronym in English of the "Law to promote progress, relief and education for foreign minors", which was not approved in 2010 in a Congress dominated by the Republicans.

But Trump in September revoked the DACA, which will expire definitively on March 5, passing the post to Congress to legislate on the sensitive issue.

The regularization of the "dreamers" thus became the stone in the shoe of the crucial budget law. So much so that the lack of a solution on the issue caused a week ago the partial closure of the federal State for three days.

The Republicans in power and the Democratic opposition finally passed a provisional financing law, which expires on February 8, with the commitment of the Republican majority in the Senate to act in relation to the DACA. "This crisis was created by Trump," said Frank Sharry, director of Americas Voice, an organization that advocates immigration reform in the United States, accusing the president of seeking to "demolish" the Statue of Liberty, a symbol of immigrants they forged the United States.

"Hostages"

"Do not be fooled by the 1.8 million," added Sharry, stressing that Trump "seeks to divert attention from the huge amount of anti-immigrant proposals he seeks to launch."

Some 690,000 people were beneficiaries of the DACA when it was repealed, according to official figures. But according to the Migration Policy Institute, about 2.1 million would be eligible as "dreamers" out of the total of 11 million undocumented immigrants that the Pew Center estimates to be in the United States.

The Trump road map, which Congress will begin discussing next week, includes regularizing the "dreamers", but in exchange for measures that strengthen the repression of the undocumented. It requires 25,000 million dollars to build a border wall with Mexico, Trump's flagship electoral promise that the "dreamers" consider a racist project, a waste of money and an attack on the environment.

The administrations of Bill Clinton and George Bush have already erected stretches of fence on the Mexican border, but in the Trump era, with a negative migratory balance with the country, it has become a racist symbol.The current president announced him when he was a candidate in 2015 in the middle of an insulting speech for Mexicans. He called undocumented migrants from his neighboring country "criminals" and "rapists."

No more residence visas

Trump also eliminates the lottery of residence visas ("green cards"), implemented in the 1990s to favor diversity, and ends with the "chain migration", limiting it to the spouse and minor children. "Those who say they value family should recognize our families, we can not go back to a time when the United States only accepts European immigrants," said John Yang, director of AAJC, an Asian-American advocacy group, who recalled that More than 130,000 Asians qualify as "dreamers." 

"This is a clear attempt to exchange one group of vulnerable lives for another," said Katharina Obser, of the Womens Refugee Commission refugee rights group.

Activists say they will not be taken as "hostages" to institute "xenophobic" immigration reform, and ask Congress to pass legislation that protects them without harming others.