 "Photo: Raisa Camargo")
In an effort to boost immigration reform, protestors, including several UCF students, rallied outside Sen. George LeMieux's Downtown Orlando office Wednesday to promote legislation that would ease residency status for undocumented students and farmworkers.
According to a letter sent to LeMieux by representatives from the Youth and Young Adult Network, an organization advocating farm worker rights, supporters are urging a response from the senator on two proposed bills: the Development Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, known as the DREAM Act, and the Agricultural Job Opportunities, Benefits and Security Act, known as AgJOBS.
"The majority of farm workers in America are young adults that share our dreams of going to school and having decent living and working conditions," the letter stated. "These dreams are often shattered by a system that keeps farm workers and their families oppressed, in poverty and without access to education."
The DREAM Act would establish conditional permanent residency for students who immigrated to the U.S before they were 16 years old, through military service or attending college for two years.
According to YAYA, AgJOBS allows immigrant farm workers to permanently stay in the U.S. by continuing to work in agriculture, and it reforms the H-2A guestworker program, providing growers with a safe and stable workforce.
The current guestworker program allows for employers to bring in nonimmigrant foreign workers to the U.S. on a temporary or seasonal basis, according to the Department of Labor.
In early February, the UCF Student Government Association passed a resolution in support of the DREAM Act, and later that month, students and supporters walked to Sen. Bill Nelson's office to deliver a copy of the resolution.
UCF political science major Johana Vesga attended the rally to show solidarity because, as a first generation immigrant, she said she is familiar with the struggling desire to succeed.
Vesga was born in Colombia and traveled to the U.S when she was 2 with her family to escape poverty. She said like her parents, many share the belief that the U.S. is the land of opportunity.
"If you don't have an education, the things that you can do are very limited," Vesga said of her home country.
Still, she said arriving to the U.S. doesn't make opportunities less difficult.
Vesga said her mother struggled years to learn English, and she stills feels discriminated because of her accent. She said seeing how hard her mother worked even as a resident, has made Vesga aware of the scarcity of opportunities for undocumented workers.
"A lot of that is because there's so many people who want to deny [immigrants] rights," Vesga said.
In the letter sent to LeMieux, YAYA cites that in 2003 more than 70 percent of migrant farm workers had not completed high school, with 75 percent being functionally illiterate.
YAYA representatives criticized the alleged hypocrisy of a government system that advocates for tougher policies on illegal immigration.
"Because our representatives, including Senator Lemieux, continue to ignore the high percentage of undocumented workers in agriculture, we are facing an economic crisis in terms of the unstable labor supply for agriculture," a representative of YAYA said during a speech. "We are also facing a moral crisis: How can it be that in the richest nation in the world, our daily food supply is harvested by undocumented farm workers who face poverty wages and exploitation?"
In a 15-minute meeting with Melissa Hernandez, a staff member of LeMieux's office, five delegates, including a student whose parent is facing deportation, told personal stories regarding struggles of the immigration community.
"We were all in tears up there … they're not listening," said Lariza Garzon, one of the delegates of the Farm Worker Ministry.
According to YAYA, Lemieux has not responded to repeated calls and messages regarding his stance on the bills and has had no comment on whether he supports or endorses the bill.
"We're tired of asking. We're demanding," Garzon said to a crowd of 60 people. "Our families will not be divided."
In an official statement, Ken Lundberg, the communications director for LeMieux's office, said the senator believes Congress needs to repair the broken immigration system that would secure the border and respond to America's needs. He also said there are conflicted views with AgJOBS.
"While the AgJOBS bill currently pending deals with one industry's need for a documented labor force, it doesn't address the primary issue of border security and does very little to address the status of another 10-plus million individuals currently in the country illegally," according to the e-mail statement.
Garzon said Hernandez advised them to keep calling and that she would let the appropriate contact for Lemieux know of their demands.
The official statement from LeMieux's communications office regarding the DREAM Act bill is impartial.
"The senator believes children should not have to pay for the transgressions of their parents. But at the same time, we have to be careful any change in federal law doesn't have the unintended consequence of incentivizing additional illegal immigration," according to the e-mail statement.
While Congress debates immigration reform, for some waiting on an answer isn't so easy.
UCF graduate student Juan Carlos Barrientos, a native Colombian who attended the rally, knows Congress' division on immigration reform is detrimental.
Barrientos said he carried the burden of being undocumented for almost 20 years.
"It's like you're stuck, and I felt stuck," said Barrientos. "Once I got a green card, I felt some liberation like ‘Wow, I can actually do something.' "
Barrientos said he waited 10 years until he could apply to UCF, scrambling through off-the-book jobs even though he obtained an undergrad degree in New York. He is pursuing a master's degree in Political Administration.
Now Barrientos is one among hundreds of people who are advocating the urgent passage of the DREAM ACT by June 15, and he equally shares the desire for farm worker rights through AgJOBS.