MEET KIMBERLY AND FELIPE, TWO SILICON VALLEY DREAMERS
After years of success in USA, now they’re bracing for unknown
In Silicon Valley, the tech dreams of many are now fitful.
Chief executives from Apple, Facebook and Google have assailed the Trump administration’s plan to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program for its potentially devastating effect on their workforces and business plans.
The decision threatens to upend the careers of University of California-Berkeley senior Kimberly Schwartz, who is about to begin hers at Apple, and software engineer Felipe Salazar, who has worked at Microsoft and, most recently, start-up Doppler Labs.
These are two of the estimated
800,000 young immigrants that face deportation with the end of DACA. Sometimes known as DREAMers, so-called for failed national legislation that would have carved out a path to citizenship for undocumented children, they hail from cities and towns all over the country and work or study in a variety of American institutions. Hundreds, if not thousands, have jobs at the nation’s tech companies, living and breathing examples of the American Dream.
They often came to the U.S. to escape political strife and violence, and some overachieved, gaining college degrees and landing jobs at some of America’s marquee companies. Now, they are confused and uncertain about their future, with DACA seemingly hanging in the balance.
For Schwartz — her full legal name is Kimberly Enery Schwartz Mercado, reflecting the last names of her grandfathers — it was a “bittersweet week.” Just days after she signed a full-time job offer to work on the business side of Apple’s media product division next year, the DACA decision came down Tuesday.
“This is very distracting,” says Schwartz, 22, a business administration major who interned two summers at Facebook and one at Apple. She’s scheduled to start full time at Apple in July 2018 but wants to start earlier because her Employment Authorization Document (EAD) expires in October
2018.
Schwartz was 3 in 1998 when her family left the dangerous state of Sinaloa, Mexico. “My parents wanted to get away from the crime, cronyism and poverty and pursue the American Dream,” she says. “They wanted me to have a better life and opportunities.”
“The past week or so was quite heavy on me,” says Salazar, 27, who left his job at Doppler Labs last month to tend to personal issues and faces the expiration of his EAD this month.
Salazar was 10 when his family arrived in Miami in February 2001 from Colombia. His parents, who decided to move because of political instability there at the time, still live in Miami.
“It is very cruel and irresponsible what the (U.S.) government is doing,” Salazar says. “We are hard-working, tax-paying Americans.”
Salazar and Schwartz are among some 223,000 DREAMers in California, according to Pew Research Center.
Based on extrapolating the San Francisco Bay Area’s population, there are about 27,000 DACA participants there, according to the policy team of Working Partnerships USA, a community organization that tackles inequality and poverty in the Bay Area.
DACA is an Obama administration executive action that shields the DREAMers, young undocumented immigrants, from deportation. About 95% are working or are in school.
Salazar graduated with honors from Georgia Tech in 2010 and then got a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering the following year.
He has applied for renewal of his EAD through September 2019. “The prospect of being picked up and deported ... is quite heavy,” he says.
Raised in Northern California, in the upper Sacramento Valley, Schwartz is a senior majoring in business administration at Cal and counts Laura I. Gomez — who has worked for major tech companies including Twitter and YouTube, and is now CEO of recruiting software start-up Atipica — among her mentors.
“(DACA) is something I have been thinking about for a year,” Schwartz says. “Trump ran on an anti-immigration platform, and I’ve had to plan my life around
“It is very cruel ... what the government is doing. We are hard-working, tax-paying Americans.”
Felipe Salazar
that. I try to compartmentalize it all, but it’s in my thoughts when I’m taking a test or attending class,” she says, her voice trailing off. “It is a very hard reality today.”
As tech DREAMers are left in limbo and grapple with an uncertain future, many of their employers are pressuring Congress to take swift legislative action. Apple and Microsoft have pledged to shield employees who could face legal troubles or deportation.
Last week, hundreds of tech CEOs, including Google’s Sundar Pichai and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, called on Trump and Congressional leaders to preserve the DACA program and pass legislation to help the young immigrants find a permanent fix to staying in the country.
With their days as a U.S. resident possibly numbered, Silicon Valley’s DREAMers want their voices heard.
“We have six months to push Congress,” says Schwartz, who said she has formed a Facebook group to educate the public on DACA. “I’m trying to plan my life.”
DACA “gave me hope to reach higher and that I had a chance to make it in this country,” says Araujo, a quality-assurance engineer at enterprise-software startup Zuora.
She credits the program with allowing her to attend San Jose State University and graduate.
“I made the most out of it and got my dream job,” says Araujo, 25, whose family left Mexico City in 2000 after it was robbed three times, once at gunpoint. “DACA is my future.”