‘Two Countries, No Home’

By Verity Oswin

Earlier this year, I met a group of young people in Mexico City who call themselves “the other Dreamers,” undocumented young people taken to the United States as children who returned to their birth countries. Some had been deported, while others had voluntarily returned to Mexico and were working or making their way through college. Many told me of their struggles to adapt to what, for them, was largely a foreign culture. They had left behind friends, family and important parts of their identity in the United States, which for many of them was the only home they had ever really known.

This Op-Doc tells the story of one such person: Rufino Santiz Díaz. After growing up in a small town in Georgia, where he graduated from high school, Mr. Santiz willingly moved from the Deep South back to his family’s poor indigenous community in Chiapas, where he thought his odds of attending college might be better. If Mr. Santiz had delayed his decision to return to Mexico by just two years, he could have applied to stay in the United States through President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which started in 2012. (Dreamers who leave the United States are not eligible for the program.)

> Continue reading and watch video on The New York Times website

Atlantic’s Reconciliation & Human Rights programme in the United States funds efforts to advocate for the rights and inclusion of immigrants.