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Posted on Sun, Jul. 17, 2005

Immigrants hit an education wall

A Center City Rally will back a plan to give certain illegal-immigrant students a nand when ti comes to attending college and getting money to pay for it.
By Gaiutra Bahadur
Inquirer Staff Writer

Gabby walked across the U.S.-Mexico border with her parents when she was 5 years old.

For the 13 years since then - while her father shoveled manure from Kennett Square mushroom houses and her mother boxed mushrooms at a factory - she was busy being a model student.

The U.S. Supreme Court gave her that right, with a ruling in 1982 that illegal immigrants can attend public school through the 12th grade.

Every year, about 65,000 students who entered the United States illegally graduate from U.S. high schools. They are a tiny segment of the country's booming population of undocumented immigrants - and they have become poster children for an emotional debate brewing nationwide about how to handle migrants who broke laws to get here.

Will they get caught in the grind of the underground economy that lured their parents here, with them in tow? Or will they be able to advance their education beyond high school, transcending the decisions made for them, as children, to enter the United States illegally?

The National Council of La Raza, the Latino civil rights and advocacy group now holding its annual convention in Philadelphia, will rally today in Center City to support federal legislation that would allow certain students to become legal immigrants.

The organization will showcase a whiz-kid team of four Arizona high schoolers who bested MIT and Ivy League students in a national robotics competition with an underwater creature they built named Stinky. All four teens trekked from Mexico through tunnels or were stashed in the backseats of cars.

Under the current system, all would likely become low-wage shadow workers like their parents. For most illegal-immigrant children, even the standouts, higher education is nearly impossible.

Some colleges deny such students admission. Others let them in as international students, although they lack student visas. Still other schools just look the other way. Often, the students must pay out-of-state rates for public colleges in the state where they live.

"We have students who have grown up in this country ... who have great potential to give back to their community, and we're slamming the door in their faces," said Melissa Lazarin, an analyst with the National Council of La Raza.

"It's unfair and un-American to punish kids for things their parents are responsible for," she said.

The so-called Dream Act (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act), twice introduced in Congress but never passed, would help by making loans, tuition breaks and scholarship money available to such students. It would repeal a 1996 federal law that bars states from giving illegal immigrants residency-based benefits.

The proposal has languished despite a slate of more than four dozen bipartisan sponsors, including Sen. Arlen Specter (R., Pa.), who as chairman of the Judiciary Committee carries much clout. It has not been reintroduced in the current session of Congress.

"Public opinion generally is not very sympathetic to the idea of giving legal status to illegal aliens," said Steven Camorata, an analyst for the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based think tank that favors restricting immigration. The Dream Act, he said, "awards illegal behavior, and that just doesn't seem right."

Nonetheless, nine states have passed laws basing tuition discounts on public school attendance, rather than residency, in the state. Eighteen other states, including New Jersey, turned down similar measures. Earlier this month, a federal judge in Topeka threw out a challenge to a Kansas law that gives illegal immigrants in-state tuition breaks.

Pennsylvania legislators have not touched the issue, although more than 100,000 immigrants live in the state illegally. Undocumented students in Philadelphia hit the 12th-grade ceiling of their education so often that Paul Vallas, chief executive of the city's schools, has publicly endorsed the Dream Act.

At Edison High School, in a once predominantly Puerto Rican swath of North Philadelphia that is increasingly home to immigrants from Latin America, at least eight of the top 25-ranked students in a graduating class of 400 are living in the United States illegally, said Nilza Lozado, director of the school's bilingual program.

"Most of them are at a standstill," Lozado said. "They're embarrassed when guidance counselors want to know what their plans are."

Mamadou, for example, has been washing dishes at a Manayunk restaurant since graduating with honors from South Philadelphia High School a year ago. The Mali native earned enough under the table - $7,000 - to pay for one semester as an international student at the Community College of Philadelphia.

"I just want to go to school," he said.

Gabby, who like Mamadou asked that her last name not be used for fear of being deported, won a full scholarship to a Catholic college in Pennsylvania that is willing to look the other way.

She had a 3.7 grade-point average in high school and worked as a volunteer on a Chester County church farmworker mission. She wants to be a lawyer.

But the young woman who walked across the border as a child fears that without the Dream Act she will just be an illegal immigrant with no right to work or live in the United States.


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Contact staff writer Gaiutra Bahadur at 215-854-2601 or bahadug@phillynews.com.

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The Proposed Law
The Dream Act would give conditional legal status for six years to students who:

• Came to the United States before age 16.

• Have lived in the United States for at least five years.

• Have good moral character.

• Have graduated from a U.S. high school or obtained a GED in the United States.

To become a green-card holder, at the end of those six years, the immigrant must complete two years of university or community college, or serve two years in the U.S. military.