The Dreamers: How the Undocumented Youth Movement Transformed the Immigrant Rights Debate by Walter J. Nicholls (review)

The ongoing Latina/o immigrant struggle to secure social capital in U.S. socio-political contexts highlights the perpetually recurrent confluence of their national advances with the frequently hostile environments of the public sphere. Additionally, Latina/o immigrants have had to overcome both political exclusions within established and competing U.S. governance structures, as well as internally tenuous moments of solidarity that have all too often undermined their organizational attempts to gain substantial footholds throughout an extensive history of colonial hegemony. In his book The Dreamers: How the Undocumented Youth Movement Transformed the Immigrant Rights Debate, Walter Nicholls judiciously documents the development of a group of diverse and frequently dissimilar young Latina/o immigrant activists. The text documents the group’s origins, as well as its atypical and unexpected ascent to a subjective but undeniable level of national prominence.

The undocumented youth who constitute the heterogeneous group known nationally as the Dreamers are an often-divergent association of young adults. Initially, the movement’s cast and direction was created and groomed by more established Latina/o rights organizations to embody Western notions of the exceptionally deserving immigrant. Organizations that included the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) believed that the Dreamers’ model traits could soften the anti-immigrant sentiment that had significantly intensified after September 11. The inception of the Dreamers paralleled the momentary hopefulness, fluidity, and resiliency demonstrated by myriads of social justice activists, who also have sought to challenge entrenched systems of hegemony and oppression.

However, Nicholls’s holistic account additionally shows that the Dreamers movement contains and reflects many inherent and residual organizational complexities. These organizational dynamics include the interplay of internal and external conflicts involving the immediacy of local economic concerns in addition to shifting regional public agendas on the U.S. national political stage.

The book consists of six chapters, an introduction, a conclusion, and an appendix that discusses Nicholls’s research methodology in greater detail. He draws on interviews, participant observations, social media, and relevant New York Times articles published throughout the 2000s to document the development of this movement. The book’s introduction immediately immerses the reader in the present context of the Dreamers’ public actions, while illuminating the political void within which the emboldened activists were able to create their own space. Additionally, in the introduction, Nicholls begins to paint the socio-political realities in the United States as problematic to the movement, especially as they ramped up after 9/11. While highlighting the development of the Dreamers, the introduction also portrays the group’s heterogeneity as it burst from the seams of the engineered, strategic conformity that foundationally established its shape, a topic more fully developed in Chapter 2.

Chapter 1 details the history of the immigrant rights movement dating back to the 1980s. Nicholls juxtaposes the hostility toward immigrants being pushed by anti-immigration associations and the paradoxical niches that opened up locally at the state and/or national levels that allowed the Dreamers to emerge. The chapter highlights the fact that Latina/o immigration and immigration reform are concepts that are constantly intertwined with much larger political, economic, and social forces:

In a rather paradoxical way, the more the government pushed to seal the borders, the more ambiguities and cracks surfaced in the country’s immigration system. Repressive measures ran up against liberal legal norms, economic needs of employers, the resource constraints of law enforcement agencies, and humanitarian and moral concerns of the public.

(p. 22)

The ambiguous and complex social frame within which immigration reform developed marked the struggle for immigrant rights as a constantly reactionary and limited effort that made noteworthy inroads in national political spaces but which remained mostly a fringe network of assorted actors struggling to maintain their tentative collectivity. Nicholls documents how some of...