ARCADIA, Wis. — Ramon Romero doesn’t remember much about the first few years of his life, other than the carefree days he spent climbing mango trees outside his home in the village of Las Lajas, Honduras. His most vivid early memory is of the day he was told he would be leaving his birthplace.
When Ramon was 7, his grandmother informed him that they would soon begin a journey to reunite with his mother in the United States — “El Norte.”
Ramon’s mother and grandmother (he has never known his birth father) felt that only by moving to America would Ramon escape gang life and possible early death.
Ramon and his grandmother set off on the perilous 2,500-mile trek to Texas with a group of about a dozen other migrants. “We walked a lot, jumped on and off trains,” Ramon recounted when I met him in early February. “There was the fear of someone hurting me, of getting killed. Rape. Anything can happen.”
Then something did happen. Making their way through Guatemala, the group was kidnapped by a group of men posing as Guatemalan border patrol agents. Ramon later learned that their abductors were members of Mara Salvatrucha, better known as MS-13, who stole the captives’ passports and other valuable documents. Ramon spent the next two days cleaning gang members’ guns, handing out food, and fearing for his life.
At one point, when Ramon refused to distribute food to the other hostages, a gang member pointed a gun at his grandmother’s head and threatened to kill her. “I got to see people die,” Ramon said, “I was the only one that never got tied up. But I saw other people get hurt.”
After two days, Ramon and his grandmother were let go, he thinks because he was too young and his grandmother too old to be of much use to their abductors. Frightened but undaunted, they resumed their trek north.
After nearly three months of travel, Ramon and his grandmother finally crossed the border into Texas, where they were apprehended by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Ramon’s grandmother was immediately deported, and Ramon spent 92 days with a host family in Texas before being reunited with his mother in Arcadia, Wis.
Today, Ramon is an energetic and smiling 18-year-old. On the brink of high school graduation and having recently been awarded academic and athletic scholarships to attend the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, Ramon has reason to smile — except that he lives in constant fear of being deported.
Arcadia senior Ramon Ramos was brought to the U.S. from Guatemala when he was seven. DACA allowed him legally remain in the U.S., where he has earned college academic and athletic scholarships. “I felt like DACA gave me wings to go to school and get a social security number,” Ramon said. “And now, I feel like someone has come along to cut my wings.” (Daniel Allott for Washington Examiner.)
Ramon is one of nearly 700,000 immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as minors and subsequently granted temporary legal status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.
President Trump ended DACA in September, calling it an “unfair system,” and giving Congress until March 5 to legislate a replacement. After that date, pending a court ruling, recipients — sometimes called “Dreamers” — could begin being deported. With that deadline fast approaching, and with the prospect of deportation looming, DACA recipients and their families fear for their futures.
“I’m feeling fear, but my mom always tells me, ‘have hope,’” Ramon said.
“But everyday I feel like I’m running out of hope. The news makes me angry, because not all of us are bad, not all of us are rapists, like [Trump] said. I don’t know Honduras. I have nothing there. I have nothing more than my birth there. I love this country. I feel like I’m between a country that doesn’t want me and a country I don’t know.”
I met Ramon at the Arcadia Family Restaurant on a frigid Wisconsin Friday evening in early February. We were joined by Jon Schultz, Ramon’s cross-country coach, and Ashley, who asked that her last name be withheld to protect her family. She will graduate with Ramon from the Arcadia High School this spring.
Ashley was born in the United States to Mexican parents who are living in the country illegally. Ashley suffers from depression, which she said has worsened because of Trump’s harsh rhetoric. “I already don’t want to exist, and I hate hearing people say things that strengthen that idea that I shouldn’t exist,” she said.
Ashley was born in the U.S. to Mexican parents who are living in the country illegally. Ashley suffers from depression, which she said has worsened because of President Trump’s harsh rhetoric. “I already don’t want to exist, and I hate hearing people say things that strengthen that idea that I shouldn’t exist,” she said. (Daniel Allott for Washington Examiner.)
Ashley and Ramon have channeled their anxiety into earning partial scholarships to attend college. Ramon has become one of the state’s top runners. He finished fourth in last year’s Division II cross country state championships.
I asked Ramon and Ashley how other DACA recipients at school are handling the uncertainty about their status. “Everyone has fear,” Ramon said.
Fear is the defining emotion of America’s immigration debate. Both political parties stoke voters’ fears about immigration for partisan gain. Republicans argue that undocumented immigrants are simultaneously stealing their jobs and bleeding the welfare system by refusing to work.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump exploited conservatives’ fear that gangbanging illegal aliens would rape their daughters and murder their families. In Arcadia, nearly every immigrant I spoke with mentioned with anger and frustration Trump’s contention that most Mexican immigrants are criminals, drug dealers, and rapists.
Democrats, meanwhile, exploit the fear of many immigrants that ICE officers are roaming the streets waiting to deport any unauthorized immigrant they can get their hands on. And Democrats regularly talk about Republican immigration proposals in explicitly racial terms, as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi recently did when she said that Trump’s immigration proposal was an effort to “make America white again.”
In the middle of this debate, immigrants can sometimes feel like hapless pawns in a high-stakes game of political brinksmanship.
I traveled to Arcadia to learn how this city of nearly 3,000 people views immigrants. Located along the Trempealeau River in rural western Wisconsin, Arcadia has undergone one of the most rapid demographic transformations in the country. Two decades ago, according to Census Bureau data, fewer than 1 percent of Arcadia’s residents were Hispanic or Latino. Today, more than one-third are.
At Arcadia High School, Hispanics make up a majority of the roughly 300 enrolled students. Superintendent Louie Ferguson, who has spent the last 19 years in Arcadia, said, “We were just putting the kids into regular classes and hoping they’d cope”
Once Hispanic students began trickling in around 2007, Spanish teacher Olga Dedkova-Hasan began teaching English Language Learner classes, the first time the school earnestly began teaching their Hispanic students. Soon the school recruited more bilingual teachers and Hispanic administrators.
Dedkova-Hasan has overseen several mentoring and career readiness projects for Latino students, and recently launched a “parent college” to educate the parents of immigrants about the U.S. school system and scholarship opportunities for their children.
Superintendent Ferguson doesn’t know how many of his kids are DACA recipients because the school doesn’t ask about their legal status. “We have tried to assure [the immigrant students and their parents] that they are safe in school and they don’t have to worry about officials coming and taking them out of school,” he said. Dedkova-Hasan estimates that DACA recipients make up at least 10 percent of the high school class.
Ferguson said the experience has made him more sensitive to the plight of the families and the legal and financial hurdles they must surmount to attain legal status. “The vast majority of these families just want to fit in, get a good job, and be contributing members of society,” he said.
Arcadia School District Superintendent Louie Ferguson estimates that 80 percent of elementary school students are Hispanic immigrants. “Makes me think, what would those class rooms look like without them here?” he said. (Daniel Allott for Washington Examiner.)
A few blocks away at Arcadia’s elementary school, Principal Paul Halverson was directing traffic amid the controlled chaos that is lunchtime at an elementary school.
I knew Halverson was wary about meeting me. When I tried to contact him last summer, he let repeated requests for interviews go unanswered. I couldn’t really blame him. I had heard from several Arcadia residents that a media account before the 2016 election had misportrayed their community, depicting Trump’s appeal here as a backlash to the influx of immigrants.
But that story never made much sense to people here. Nearly 60 percent of Arcadia voters cast their ballots for Trump. Trempealeau County, in which Arcadia is the biggest city, also voted for Trump, after going for Obama in 2012 and 2008.
But there isn’t a lot of evidence of a backlash vote. As I wrote last summer, Hispanics have been settling in Arcadia for two decades, so it’s reasonable to ask why the electoral backlash didn’t occur earlier, say, in 2012, when Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney suggested unauthorized immigrants would “self-deport” under his presidency?
Also, Trempealeau County wasn’t the only rural Wisconsin county that Trump won. In fact, he won more than a dozen rural Wisconsin counties that Obama had previously claimed. Most of them hadn’t experienced an inflow of immigrants. As Father Sebastian Kolodziejczyk, a Spanish-speaking priest at Arcadia’s Catholic Church, Holy Family Parish, told me last summer, “[Trump] won the whole state, where not every county is experiencing the same [demographic] situation that we do.”
Back at the elementary school, Halverson praised Arcadia’s newcomers. “With Latino families, they don’t have the boats and the other nice things that better-off families have,” he said. “They have family.”
At a time when many rural towns are disappearing, Arcadia’s immigrants are not only a welcome presence here, but a necessary one.
“Everybody knows that many area businesses would not be able to exist the same way if it wasn’t for them,” Kolodziejczyk said of the immigrants.
“Without the influx [of Hispanic immigrants], we would be cutting programs and staff, just like other districts,” Ferguson said. “Without them at our schools, we would be in a lot of trouble, cutting jobs left and right, so they’re definitely a plus for us and our economy. We have job openings in the community already. I can’t imagine what it’d be like without them here.”
Ferguson estimated that 80 percent of elementary school students are Hispanic immigrants. “Makes me think, what would those classrooms look like without them here?” he said.
Without its Hispanic residents, Arcadia’s school district likely wouldn’t be considering a $16 million expansion, $12 million of which would be privately donated. Without its Hispanic residents, Arcadia’s largest employer, Ashley Furniture, likely would not have broken ground on a $40 million expansion last year.
After speaking with Ferguson and Halverson, I met with Arcadia Mayor Rob Reichwein, who gave me a tour of his city.
As we drove down Main Street in Reichwein’s Ford F-150, I began to see just how integral Arcadia’s Hispanic immigrants have become to the city. Hispanic-owned businesses line both sides of the road. There’s Don Juan Mexican and La Tapatia restaurants, MM San Juan grocery store, Ramos Tax and Services, and Laura Torres Services.
“I think it’s great,” Reichwein said of all the Hispanic-owned businesses. “I grew up here and I’ve seen the [demographic] change. I don’t think it’s a bad thing. A lot of small cities in America are dying.”
Reichwein is right. Many rural towns across the country would be disappearing if not for inflows of immigrants. In places likes Arcadia, immigrants have arrived in numbers substantial enough to offset the departure of many whites, extending the lives of towns that otherwise might have already vanished.
According to the Census Bureau, Arcadia’s population increased by 25 percent between 2000 and 2016, from 2,402 people to 2,990. During that period, the number of whites living in Arcadia dropped by 17 percent, a net decrease of 402 people. But the Hispanic share of the population rose from 3 percent to more than one-third, a net increase of nearly 1,000 people.
Hispanic immigrants have also made Arcadia younger. The city’s average age dropped from 37 to 32 over that 16-year period. Another indication of Arcadia’s revival as a town of immigrants is the ratio of English to Hispanic baptisms at Holy Family, which Fr. Sebastian estimates is one-to-six.
In Wisconsin, it seems clear that immigrants aren’t taking jobs away from native-born workers. In December, Wisconsin’s unemployment rate dipped to 3.0 percent, matching a record low.
Reichwein said his biggest challenge is enticing people to move to Arcadia to fill vacant jobs. He said that the local newspaper, the Trempealeau County Times, usually features two pages of “now hiring” ads. I saw several signs throughout town broadcasting the same message.
DACA has had a particularly positive effect for unauthorized immigrants in rural towns like Arcadia. According to data compiled by the Joint Economic Committee, 91 percent of DACA recipients living in rural areas are employed, and nearly two-thirds say DACA allowed them to pursue educational opportunities not previously open to them.
Without DACA, former recipients will no longer be able to work to help pay their way through school. This isn’t a problem facing just a few people. According to the Migration Policy Institute, 241,000 DACA-eligible students had enrolled in college as of 2014, and many of them worked to pay their way. They need to work because as undocumented immigrants they don’t have access to federal financial aid programs, and most states, including Wisconsin, don’t offer in-state tuition to DACA recipients.
The Trump administration has proposed legislation that would create a pathway to citizenship for as many as 1.8 million DACA eligible immigrants. In exchange, Trump wants to cut back on the number of family members new immigrants can bring with them and eliminate the visa lottery system. His plan would also enhance border security, including putting a significant down payment on a wall on the southern border.
Trump has said he supports a pathway to citizenship for DACA recipients who “do a great job.” If anyone meets that criterion, it would be Gerardo Gonzalez. The day after I spoke with Ramon and Ashley, I met Gerardo and his family at their home in Whitehall, a town 15 miles northeast of Arcadia.
Gerardo was brought illegally from Mexico to the United States when he was one year old. His family moved to Spencer, a town in northern Wisconsin, where his parents worked on a dairy farm. Twelve years ago, Gerardo’s parents moved Gerardo and his two younger siblings to Whitehall, where his father works at an Ashley Furniture facility.
Last year, Gerardo graduated as valedictorian of Whitehall Memorial High School. In his valedictory speech, Gerardo criticized the president for “negative, racist comments and actions.”
With DACA in limbo, it’s been difficult for Gerardo to plan his next steps. He would like to study radiography at a four-year university, but he is ineligible for in-state tuition, which averages about $6,000, and he cannot afford the cost of out-of-state tuition, which averages more than $18,000. For the time being, Gerardo is attending a community college in nearby La Crosse, Wis.
President Trump has said he supports a pathway to citizenship for DACA recipients who “do a great job.” Because his legal status is in flux, DACA recipient Gerardo Gonzalez, who graduated last year as valedictorian of Whitehall Memorial High School, has had to put his plans to attend a four-year university on hold. Gonzalez and his family are shown at their home in Whitehall, Wis. (Daniel Allott for Washington Examiner.)
Gerardo fears being sent to a country he left as an infant. “If I would get sent back, the way of life is way different over there compared to here,” he said of Mexico. “It would be something to get used to, for sure.”
Ramon dreaded the moment during the application process when he had to mention his uncertain legal status. The University of Wisconsin-Parkside designated Ramon as an international student and offered him academic and athletic scholarships, allowing the school to sidestep the question of Ramon’s status.
Ramon appreciates that Parkside accepted him for who he is. “I run fast, so they’re like, ‘We’ll help you as much as we can,’” he said. “That was the big worry. Not knowing if I can study, with what’s been happening with DACA. But they accepted me with my status.”
Ashley plans to take a gap year to save money by working at McDonald’s and focusing on her mental health. Because her parents are unauthorized immigrants, she didn’t qualify for in-state tuition as a minor. Ashley also wants to use the year to establish Wisconsin residency as an adult so she can qualify for in-state tuition.
Gerardo, Ashley, and Ramon would all be the first in their families to embark on the college journey. But America’s failure to adequately address its immigration problem is making that journey much more precarious than it would be otherwise.
“I felt like DACA gave me wings to go to school and get a Social Security number,” Ramon said toward the end of our meeting at the Arcadia Family Restaurant. “And now I feel like someone has come along to cut my wings.”
Daniel Allott (@DanielAllott) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is author of Trump’s America: The Race to 2020 and formerly the deputy commentary editor at the Examiner.
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