SAN ANTONIO, Fla. -- Felicitas Romo slinks into her college freshman painting class.
The domed room is windowless and dark with the heavy smell of acrylics and oil. Students sit in front of easels and brightly colored poster boards.
This is Felicitas' first semester at Saint Leo University, Florida's first Catholic college, where monks in brown robes still walk the grounds.
From Saint Leo's sloping hilltops, Felicitas can look across acres of orange groves offering plump fruit ready for picking.
In those groves is another young woman just three years older.
Her name is Susana. Four hours before Felicitas' 10 a.m. class, Susana and her family steel themselves against the morning chill. They slip on thick work gloves and flannels.
They methodically reach between the prickly branches, stopping only for a quick lunch, until 5 p.m. Every day is the same for Susana, except for church on Sunday.
Felicitas and Susana are illegal immigrants. Their futures depend on the fate of legislation pending in Congress.
Realizing a college dream
Karen Phillips tilts her head and studies the wispy figure of a woman.
"I like the legs and one of the arms," the adjunct instructor tells Felicitas as the two stand before an easel. Felicitas has painted a fairy with a diamond-shaped head and angular limbs.
Phillips tells her to change the head.
"Your next painting, go with abstraction," she says.
Felicitas, 18, knows quite a bit about painting. Before she graduated from Wesley Chapel High School, she painted an elaborate mural there. She has filled a fat portfolio with sketches and drawings on her way to a 4.4 grade point average her senior year and a place in the National Honor Society.
Yet Felicitas almost didn't make it to Saint Leo.
When the St. Petersburg Times wrote about her plight in the spring, Felicitas dreamed of college but feared deportation to a country she doesn't remember.
Her parents, who were migrant workers, brought Felicitas from Mexico to the United States when she was 2. She attended Pasco schools all of her life. Her family worked in the fields while she hit the books.
But without a green card, Felicitas and tens of thousands of immigrant students in Florida and U.S. schools can't qualify for government loans and scholarships.
She attends Saint Leo on a private scholarship and donations.
Her bigger concern: What happens after she graduates?
"I'm going for my master's," said Felicitas, who's taking six classes this semester. "But there's no point if I can't work after."
The DREAM Act could change that.
The federal legislation, which cleared a Senate committee in October, would grant residency to students who graduate from U.S. high schools and satisfy other criteria, such as completing post-secondary education. Residency would allow them to work legally. The bill also would make it easier for states to grant in-state tuition to illegal immigrants _ a difference of $10,000 a year at the University of Florida.
"This bill is really for people who are brought to the United States at a young age and then all of a sudden after high school, they get stuck," said Tampa immigration attorney John Ovink, who has worked on Felicitas' case.
"This is not for people who come to the United States three weeks before graduation," he said.
Opponents such as David Ray, spokesman for Washington-based Federation for American Immigration Reform, say the DREAM Act would reward students whose parents broke the law. He said it also would take coveted college slots away from U.S. citizens.
Ovink calls the argument "total baloney."
If immigrants are competitive for college, it's based on their good grades, Ovink said. If they are stuck in low-paying jobs, they likely will depend on social services.
"The whole reason for this bill is to create productive citizens," Ovink said. "This gives them an opportunity to become legal residents who pay taxes."
Modern-day slave labor?
Down the road from the Saint Leo campus, the morning sun burns frost from rows of trees.
Polka-like ranchero music blares from a van. High in the branches, arms fly. Susana's father and brother hurl oranges into sacks cinched around their waists.
Susana and her family, who did not want their last names used because they fear they would be deported, get paid per tub of oranges collected each day.
Susana, 21, and her husband, Rube, 27, can make about $400 a week altogether. That's working seven days a week, 11 hours a day. No benefits.
Yet it's four times what they could make back in Mexico, when they could find work at all. They say they barely made enough there to eat.
That's why Susana and her husband came here four years ago, walking for 12 hours in the rain before crossing into Arizona. Susana carried their 5-month-old son in her arms.
"If you wanted to buy clothes, you can't eat for a week," Susana said, an orange sack clasped around her waist, her long black hair tied under a brown cap.
For help, they paid $3,200 to a coyote, a term used for people who help smuggle immigrants into the United States.
Four months ago, when Susana, her husband and their two children returned to Mexico for their first visit in four years, they paid another $5,000 to a coyote.
"If my father is sick, I can't go back," Rube said. They can't afford it.
Life on Florida's farms, though better than what Susana left in Mexico, has widely been described as modern-day slavery.
A nine-month investigation published earlier this month by the Palm Beach Post described the buying and selling of immigrants in Florida between coyotes and labor contractors; beatings and rapes by thugs on the border; workers locked in trailers at the end of the day; and a Florida political system controlled by agricultural interests that block worker protections.
Thousands, including Susana, are looking to another proposed federal bill for relief.
Residency through work
Under the bipartisan Agricultural Jobs bill, more than 500,000 undocumented farm workers nationwide could be eligible for legal residency. The requirements include having worked 100 or more days in the 18 months preceding Aug. 31, and working at least 360 days between Aug. 31, 2003, and Aug. 31, 2009.
Farmworkers who meet all of the requirements could apply for permanent resident status.
The bill would benefit growers, too, reducing red tape and streamlining paperwork when hiring seasonal help for the harvest.
"It would help ensure that there is a supply of labor," said Casey Pace, spokeswoman for Florida Citrus Mutual, the state's largest citrus grower trade organization.
The state's $9.1-billion citrus business can afford to keep fruit prices low for consumers in part because of cheap labor.
"If Americans want to pay more for food, that wouldn't be a problem," Pace said.
Ray, of FAIR, which opposes this bill and the DREAM bill, said arguments like Pace's are used by big business to excuse illegal immigration while masking its own failure to modernize.
"Many parts of American agriculture have failed to mechanize because of the availability of slave labor," Ray said.
FAIR is kidding itself, says Barbara Mainster, executive director for the Redlands Christian Migrant Association, with offices in 19 counties, including Hillsborough and Pasco.
She argues that the citrus industry will never increase wages of farm workers in Florida. American growers struggle as it is with foreign fruit shippers because wages in other countries are even lower.
She called the proposal "the best bill in 20 years." It will allow immigrants to safely cross the border en route to Florida; legally get a driver's license to drive to work; and help their children go to college.
For Susana and her husband, the bill would help them make a better life for their sons, ages 4 years and 18 months. They say their futures belong to the kids.
"I want them to have a better life that we couldn't have," Susana said.
Rube, 27, left, and his wife Susana, 21, paid smugglers four years ago to sneak them from Mexico into the United States so that they could provide better for their sons. A federal bill under consideration would help migrant workers like Rube and Susana become residents.
Felicitas Romo, 18, moved to the United States from Mexico when she was 2. Now in her first semester at Saint Leo University, Felicitas says her degree will get her nowhere unless she is granted legal status.
|
