American Employers Contact Immigration and Refugee Law Offices for Help Keeping Dreamers Stateside

After spending nearly 20 years in the United States, Dreamers now face deportation to unfamiliar countries with few (if any) connections. Dreamers, the children of undocumented immigrants, were brought to the US by their parents and raised in the United States. While the majority of Dreamers were born in Mexico, many were born in Canada.

Although deportation to Canada might not seem like a bad thing—especially when compared to countries suffering from violence, poverty, and turmoil—deportation is difficult for any of these Dreamers. Immigration and refugee law offices can provide assistance for immigration appeals.

A recent National Post article discussed the hardships Dreamers face with the termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and their possible deportation. These Dreamers accompanied their parents to the US when they were children. Often, their parents were in the US on work or student visas. After their visas expired, they remained in their new home country undocumented.

Since these children were too young to have a choice in the matter, former President Barack Obama created a program—DACA—to protect these children from deportation, allowing them to live a normal life in the US, being able to go to school and work legally. These protected Dreamers must have been 15 years old or younger when they came to the US, and had to be in the US since at least June 2007.

No Different From The Average Citizen

Arriving in the United States as children, Dreamers have spent the majority of their lives as Americans in all but name. For many, the US is the only home they know, being too young to remember life in their country of origin.

They’ve grown up in the US, gone to school, college, and university, made friends, started careers, and bought cars and homes. They have built their lives just like many US citizens have, and consider themselves American. They have had the protection to live their lives like everyone else until Trump recently took that away.

Deportation to Canada Is Still Deportation

Out of the 800,000 Dreamers, 750 were born in Canada. While deportation to Canada doesn’t seem like the worst thing, being forced to move to Canada would mean moving to a foreign country with no sense of home, no friends, no community, or national pride.

These Dreamers are forced to overhaul their entire lives, uproot, quit their jobs, sell their homes, and leave their friends. Deportation could also affect their career paths. One Canadian Dreamer mentioned plans to become a lawyer. But since she studied in the US—studying only US politics and law—this could affect and slow down her career path of becoming a lawyer in Canada.

Immigration and refugee lawyers are also getting phone calls from the employers of Dreamers, pleading to keep their beloved employees in the US, willing to sponsor them and do anything to help them stay. These Dreamers are hardworking Americans who had the protection and status to continue living their lives in the US. They are Americans in almost every sense of the word, but the protected status they have lost changes everything. Taking away their protection means possibly tearing away their sense of home and belonging.