The Undocumented Americans

DACA stands for “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.” It refers to a US immigration policy enacted in 2012 that allows undocumented immigrants who arrived as children to avoid deportation in certain circumstances. The policy allows these immigrants to reside in the US, obtain work permits, and receive educations but does not include a path to citizenship. The Obama administration, which created the policy, also worked to expand it, but the Trump administration represented an enormous threat to its very existence. Trump proposed an end to DACA in 2017 but district courts prevented the policy from being phased out. The case reached the Supreme Court, which upheld the decision of lower courts, in 2020. That ruling did not represent a permanent endorsement of DACA, but it rejected the set of reasons that the Trump administration cited in its declaration to phase out the policy.

Several hundred thousand people in the US benefit from this policy. Those who use the policy to remain and work in the US, particularly young people who are obtaining formal educations, are often referred to as “Dreamers,” a term that stems from the DREAM Act. That act never passed in Congress but was an attempt during the Obama administration to reform immigration policy with new paths to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. DACA was an executive order born of Congress’s failure to pass the DREAM Act, which stands for “Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors.” Villavicencio deliberately does not focus on Dreamers because they do receive attention (positive but reductive attention) in the mainstream media, whereas “people who work as day laborers, housekeepers, construction workers, dog walkers, deliverymen, people who don’t inspire hashtags or T-shirts” do not (xvi).

The Staten Island chapter is about day laborers. Day laboring is a system of short-term work obtained through informal negotiations with contractors in construction, maintenance, or other forms of physical labor. Historically, these negotiations take place on urban street corners, where anywhere from a few to perhaps a hundred people (mostly men) line up hoping to be brought onto a jobsite and earn income. The system is extremely exploitative. Because short-term employers want to make profits and avoid the implications of hiring an illegal workforce, and are often white and racist, they forgo formal documentation of whom they hire and fail to provide proper workplace protections for the workers. In many cases, they pay either disproportionately low wages or fail to pay the day laborers at all (10). Villavicencio stresses the physical and mental hardships of day laboring. People line up in all weather conditions to compete with their friends for irregular, dangerous work, even though the quality of their skills is high. Places called worker centers have emerged in places like Staten Island to help regulate this informal system of employment. The worker centers provide a central location for daily congregation indoors and employ dispatchers who are proficient in bilingual negotiation and can negotiate precise conditions and transactions on behalf of workers.

A green card is a legal document that allows for permanent residence and work eligibility in the United States. It is formally known as a “permanent resident card.” Green cards are issued by US Citizenship and Immigration Services, and they establish legal, documented residence in the country. People with green cards are therefore not undocumented.