Home.
Home is what’s familiar to you.
Home is where you grew up, went to school and where your friends live.
Home is where your family lives.
But a flaw in this country’s immigration laws has left roughly 250,000 immigrants faced with the prospect of leaving the only home they’ve ever known.
At a press conference last month, California Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla touted his bill to permanently protect these immigrants who grew up in the United States as dependents on their parents’ temporary visas, and graduated from American universities, but aged out of that dependent status.
“For these young people, turning 21 means facing an impossible choice,” Padilla said. “Either to leave your family and self-deport to a country that you barely remember, or to stay in the United States living, undocumented, in the shadows.”
Among the documented Dreamers this legislation would protect are Khushi and Lay Patel, whose family moved to the Hoosier State from Canada in 2012 so their parents – originally from India – could work.
The siblings are still in America via student visas, but Lay, 21, is a senior at Indiana University and is planning to study for an extra semester in the fall in an effort to find a way to stay in the country he calls home. Khushi is also studying at IU, and she’s hoping to get a job in Indiana to stay here as well.
Adding to the obvious flaw in the immigration system is the fact that undocumented Dreamers are protected by DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, but documented Dreamers are not. DACA includes several requirements that documented Dreamers cannot meet.
“If my brother and I were brought here illegally, we would have a better chance of becoming citizens,” Khushi said told The Lebanon Reporter. “If we were brought here illegally, we would have more rights than we do now.”
What the Patels and so many others like them want is to remain in the place they call home. Lay and Khushi want to remain with their family in Lebanon, Indiana, where their parents own and operate a business and where the siblings each captained their high school tennis teams.
“I’ve been here in Lebanon as long as I can remember,” Khushi said. “My home is here. My family is here. … We don’t want to leave.”
America must find a way to do better. Padilla’s bill has bipartisan support in both the Senate and House of Representatives. Congress should approve this legislation, and President Joe Biden should sign it.
Kokomo Tribune
