This appeared in the editorial pages of the Philadelphia Inquirer today
in (dis)honor of the La Raza's annual conference, which is being held tomorrow through Tuesday at the Convention Center in Philadelphia.
I will send Ms. Murguia a note explaining that I have no particular affinity
for border jumping criminals.

La Raucus? La Roach? La Rat?


http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news ... tstory.jsp

Posted on Fri, Jul. 15, 2005

Undocumented immigrant geniuses

Janet Murguia is president and CEO of the National Council of La Raza
Contact Janet Murguia at http://www.nclr.org/section/about/

The next Albert Einstein might be in Philadelphia this week. Four young men who have garnered national attention for their remarkable story - Cristian Arcega, Luis Aranda, Lorenzo Santillan, and Oscar Vasquez - will be attending the Young Leaders (Lideres) Summit at the National Council of La Raza's annual conference, which is being held tomorrow through Tuesday at the Convention Center.

In 2004, these four students from Carl Hayden Community High School, in one of the poorest sections of Phoenix, entered the Marine Advanced Technology Education Center's Remotely Operated Vehicle Competition, a prestigious underwater robotics contest at the University of California at Santa Barbara sponsored by, among others, the Office of Naval Research and NASA. Up against college students from the likes of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the high school team astonished the competition, their teachers and themselves by taking first place in the contest.

But these future Einsteins might not have the opportunity to pursue the kinds of dreams that minds like theirs can achieve. They are brilliant, innovative, hardworking, resourceful, eager - and undocumented immigrants. Brought by their parents to the United States as young children, they have grown up in Phoenix and excelled in school, but as undocumented students they don't qualify for federal loans or even most private or merit scholarships.

As a result, paying for college on their own won't be an easy feat for these four despite being dubbed "among the smartest young underwater engineers in the country" by Wired magazine. Of the two who graduated from Carl Hayden, one is a file clerk and the other had been working construction hoping to earn enough to pay for college. Fortunately, they will be able to enroll in college in the fall with the generous donations of people who hated to see such talent go to waste. They consider themselves lucky since most kids in their situation do not have this kind of support.

But, even if Oscar Vasquez does earn that mechanical engineering degree, we will probably never reap the full potential of his brilliant mind because he will likely never be able to work legally. His only hope, and that of the other 65,000 students like him who graduate from high school each year, is passage of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, a bill introduced in the last Congress that would help these students, if they work hard enough, to go to college and would put them on a path to U.S. citizenship. This legislation, despite strong and widespread bipartisan support, is languishing in Congress, robbing us of some of our nation's best and brightest.

Opponents of the DREAM Act say that it would "reward" lawbreakers, yet these students did not make the decision to come to this country: their parents did. And ultimately, who gets shortchanged if these students cannot pursue higher education and instead must take the kind of jobs - noble and hard work but unlikely to change the course of the world - that are available to high school graduates? Is it just the students and their families? Or is it all of us who may be deprived of the inspired genius of the next Einstein?

It is hard for me to believe that in the 21st century we cannot reconcile our history as a nation of laws with our proud and rich tradition as a nation of immigrants. And I cannot believe that we are better off as a nation or that we won't pay a greater price in the future by denying opportunities to the Cristians, Lorenzos, Oscars and Luises of the world.

We should be better than that. We are better than that.


Contact Janet Murguia at http://www.nclr.org/section/about/.