By Amy Butler
This excellent book tells the story of Little Bee, a 16-year-old Nigerian girl who, fleeing the violence in her home village, has stowed away on a British freighter to make her way to the United Kingdom. The story twists and turns, but all along the way it’s told from the perspective of Little Bee, who sees this Western world of ours through the eyes of an outsider. An immigrant.
I happened to be reading Little Bee, in fact, on Dec. 18, when the proposed DREAM Act died in the Senate by a 55 to 41 vote. The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act legislation would allow illegal immigrants who are brought to the United States when they are children to work toward permanent residency and citizenship. While immigration as a whole is a serious and challenging issue all over the world, those who would be directly affected by legislation like the DREAM Act are particularly vulnerable.
Think about it: these are young adults who came into the United States when they were children. They have spent large portions of their childhoods — for some, as long as they remember — living in American culture, speaking English and attending American schools. While their home cultures surely feature prominently in their lives, for all intents and purposes they are culturally Americans. They could go back to the countries from which their parents brought them — but those places would be just as foreign for them as they would be for any of us. And without legal status in the United States, these young adults cannot apply for a driver’s license, for example, or qualify for assistance with college tuition, or do many of the things we take for granted as regular parts of coming of age in America.
So I felt deep dismay when I heard the news from the Senate Dec. 18. Politics is tricky business, for sure, with all kinds of competing interests and allegiances, but there’s a time to do the right thing simply because it’s the right thing to do. And voting to approve the DREAM Act was one of those times. How utterly disappointing that here, in the land of opportunity, even a chance is refused to those who have been innocently caught in the crossfires of economic injustice in our world. Once again, we who hold all the power and most of the resources have locked the door from the inside because we’re so scared — of losing material wealth, of sharing power, of people who are different than we are inhabiting the everyday lives we live. And the result of the Senate’s decision means that we have rendered a whole generation of young adults homeless; they belong nowhere.
I do not personally live the struggle of these young adults, but the injustice of this vote was narrated so very powerfully for me by Little Bee. You’ll have to read the book to know exactly what I mean, but the very last scene of the book sums up her story of anguish and articulates what must be our dream for the children of our country — of the whole world. At the end of the book Little Bee is standing on a beach, watching Nigerian children play in the water with a little blond-haired British boy. “It was beautiful…. The waves still smashed against the beach, furious and irresistible. But me, I watched all of those children smiling and dancing and splashing one another in salt water and bright sunlight, and I laughed and laughed and laughed until the sound of the sea was drowned.”