Students, faculty discuss immigration

Morgan Pratt
Senior Staff Writer


As President George Bush pushes for immigration reform that would legalize illegal immigrants’ work status and put many undocumented Mexicans on a path to U.S. citizenship, people across the nation are weighing in on the immigration debate, and no one has any easy answers.

Alin Lopez, a radiology freshman, is close to the controversy. Lopez’s parents are U.S. citizens originally from Mexico, and many of her family members still live there. Lopez said she visits Mexico a few times a year and doesn’t blame Mexicans for wanting to work and live in the U.S.

“They have a better life here,” Lopez said. “There are more opportunities for everyone, especially in health care.

“In Mexico, medicine is so expensive and doctors are expensive, too, and their paycheck isn’t enough for them to buy what they need.”

She said the only people who have medical insurance in Mexico are those with high-paying jobs, and not many of those jobs exist. She said many people come to the U.S. to work so they can send money back to Mexico for family members who are sick and can’t afford prescriptions.

Lopez said most Mexican parents, like parents in the U.S., want good educations for their children; however, for Mexicans, the wish is more difficult to make a reality.

“It’s really hard to get scholarships in Mexico,” she said. “Even in kindergarten through 12th grade, kids have to buy their own school books. They don’t get to just borrow them like they do here.”

Claudia Vasquez, a human development and family science junior, said she also feels closer to the immigration issue because of her Hispanic background. She said many non-Hispanic people don’t evaluate both sides of the problem not because they are narrow-minded but because they are simply uninformed.

“Most people have not visited Mexico — the real Mexico, not Cancun. They haven’t witnessed firsthand the kind of lives people there live,” Vasquez said. “I have seen it, and I understand why many people come to the U.S. — our country has more to offer.”

She said although illegal immigration is a definite problem, she knows there is no easy solution.

“Our country does need to set limits, but the hard question that many people for many years have tried to answer is ‘How?’” Vasquez said. “If someone is in a desperate situation and is determined to get here, they will find a way.”

Visiting assistant Spanish professor Susana Perea-Fox said she doesn’t think the U.S. has an immigration problem.

“I really think all the noise going on right now is political,” she said. “Illegal immigration has always been a problem. It’s a political problem — someone’s trying to take attention away from the war and the economy.”

Perea-Fox, who grew up in Cuernavaca, Mexico, has been a U.S. citizen for about 20 years. She said illegal immigration is a two-way street and helps both immigrants and the U.S. economy.

Most Mexicans who stay illegally in the U.S. do so because of the dangers they face crossing the border back into Mexico, Perea-Fox said. She said if immigrants were allowed to do so legally, without danger, they would prefer to go back to Mexico after working in the U.S.

Perea-Fox said although she thinks any major decision about immigration reform will be pushed back until at least after the 2008 presidential election, she thinks Mexicans would be happy with a temporary worker program.

“Canada has a guest-worker program where immigrants can come and work for nine months,” she said. “Why can’t that work for the U.S.?”

Bob Darcy, regents professor and Faculty Council chairman, said the immigration debate is complex partly because most illegal immigrants in the U.S. have Native American heritages.

“These are people who for the past 20,000 years have been wandering across this continent in places seized from them in the 19th century,” Darcy said. “I see (illegal immigrants) as the descendants of people who have lived in this area for tens of thousands of years.”
The answer to the age-old immigration question is improving the economic and social situation in Mexico and Central America, he said, which includes getting rid of corruption in the Mexican government.

Darcy said he thinks Bush’s guest-worker program is a step toward curbing illegal immigration. He said he would like to see the U.S. treat Mexicans like many Irish immigrants who come to the U.S. as guest workers and are not required to have visas to do so.

Allison Ford, an international business and Spanish junior, said she became interested in U.S. and Mexico’s immigration issues while doing a high school assignment dealing with the subject.

“Human nature is to want to survive, and no additional border control or regulating policy is going to stop a person who is facing these conditions from attempting to enter our country by any means necessary,” Ford said.

Although she said she doesn’t think the debate over immigration will ever end, Ford said a good solution for the U.S. might be to train immigrants in a trade that would aid their survival in their native country.

“I think we need to be looking toward aiding those countries from which immigrants come — stop the problem at its source,” she said. “I believe that working with the governments who are losing their citizens to the United States would be much more beneficial than trying to simply stop our own problems.” Students, faculty discuss immigration


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