I grew up an American – legally. Our broken immigration system forced me to deport.
America has been my home since I was 7 years old. As I grew up in Iowa, I felt an innate connection to this country. But today, I find myself penning this op-ed from Belgium, forced out of my home due to a barrier in our immigration system.
My journey mirrors that of more than 200,000 children who were legally raised and educated in America. Despite going to great lengths to follow every letter of U.S. immigration law, our ability to build our futures in the only country we call home is obscured in red tape.
What brings me hope is that, earlier this month, when I testified before the Senate Budget Committee hearing on immigration, everyone unanimously agreed it didn’t make sense for people like me to be forced to leave.
I was forced to self-deport after turning 21
My parents moved to America from the Netherlands in 2005 due to rising crime, later starting their own small jewelry business in Iowa to live the quintessential American dream.
Even as they could renew their work visas indefinitely, I lost my dependent status when I turned 21.
Despite being active in my local community and gainfully employed, the system made me jump from one short-term visa to the next. Eventually, I exhausted all my options and was forced to self-deport because the system lacked a straightforward path for me to become a permanent resident. There was nothing I could have done to prevent this from happening.
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My roots in America are deep, with my family history in Iowa extending as far back as 1945, when my grandma, at age 16, wrote a thank you letter to an Iowa City family who sent packages to help famished people across Europe in the aftermath of World War II. We maintained correspondence with the family ever since, with both my father and my uncle making visits to Iowa to help work on their farm as teenagers.
The connection that my grandmother forged with the local community was so apparent that she was invited back to Iowa City on Sept. 9, 1997, and the mayor dedicated the day as “Leny van Beek Day” in her honor.
I attended elementary, middle and high school in Iowa City. After graduating from University of Iowa with a degree in computer science, I accepted a job offer from Integrated DNA Technologies (IDT), a biotech company located nearby in Coralville.
However, my family and I soon found out that though I had “made it” by landing a lucrative job, it still didn’t guarantee my ability to stay in the place I’ve called home for nearly two decades. During my three years of being authorized to work for IDT on my student status, I applied for the employment visa lottery and was among the more than 75% of applicants who weren’t selected – and had little choice but to leave my family and home of 17 years.
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Now I work for the same employer’s Belgium subsidiary and pay taxes there instead of the United States.
Despite my yearning to return home, I still know that I’m blessed to have an employer who allows me to continue working internationally. I’m also fortunate to speak the language of my mother country. But there are tens of thousands of others in my situation who don’t have those luxuries and become a stranger in their own land starting out with nothing.
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Because our immigration system is so bureaucratic and complex, none of our parents foresaw this situation happening when they decided to move to America. And with more of us aging out, countless physicians, engineers and other skilled professionals are considering leaving their careers in America behind to accompany their children back to their country of birth.
And as countries like Canada streamline their systems to attract new foreign talent, America can’t even retain the thousands of kids it raised and educated. This is a blow to U.S. competitiveness, given that most of us have specialized in critical STEM and medical fields that include biomedical engineering and artificial intelligence.
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Congress must fix this problem by passing the America’s Children Act, which offers people like me a pathway to permanent residency if they lived in the United States for at least a decade, arrived when they were under the age of 13, maintained lawful status and have graduated from a U.S. institution of higher education.
This bill already has sponsorship from dozens of lawmakers in both parties and both chambers of Congress – including all four of Iowa’s House representatives and Sen. Joni Ernst. I'm hopeful Sen. Chuck Grassley will join a unified Iowan effort to fix this issue.
For the United States to continue as a global leader, we cannot afford to squander the talents of people like me, who have been shaped by American values and are ready to give back to the country that raised us. I am, and will always be, an American at heart – even if the paperwork tells a different story.
As I work toward a just and sensible immigration policy, I believe more than ever in the promise of America.
Laurens Van Beek graduated from the University of Iowa in 2019 with a bachelor’s degree in computer science. He’s now working as a software developer in Belgium after being forced to self-deport from the United States in 2022. He is also a member of Improve the Dream, one of the more than 200,000 children of long-term visa holders, raised and educated in America.
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Immigrant 'Dreamers' can be legal, like me. We deserve citizenship
