By Diego Ugaz —
Every year approximately 65,000 undocumented students graduate from high schools all over the United States and out of those, just about twenty percent will go to college. This statistic shows us that every year the number of undocumented students increases and that more and more of them aspire to go to college and lead a successful life. A couple of years ago, a proposal called the DREAM Act was submitted to the House of Representatives which would have provided conditional permanent residence to illegal students of good moral character, a sound idea that would have brought America one step closer to immigration reform. However, it never made it past the Senate to the dismay of many families of illegal college hopefuls.
There seems to be a common misconception about the average American immigrant. Most people believe that he/she is lazy, steals jobs from other people, and doesn’t pay taxes. The truth is that most of them are hard workers that wind up doing most of the jobs that nobody else wants to do because we all know that most legal citizens don’t line up to pick strawberries for two dollars a day. The state of California receives over two billion dollars in tax money from undocumented immigrants according to stats, in hopes of building a good tax record so that one day they will eventually be rewarded with a residence or citizenship for their contributions. I know this because my family and I have paid taxes since we first came to this country ten years ago from our homeland of Peru and we still do to this very day, to no reward of course. We have spent many years in and out of court, visiting and paying lawyers, and filling out applications and forms; none of this has gotten us where we wanted to be or where we were promised we would be. If anything we have lost more than anything because at a point we were as close as anyone can get to attaining the coveted green card, just to have our dreams crushed by a technicality. Now we linger in limbo waiting for the world to finally accept that this is a real problem that affects many good people who want to make it in America, not leech off of it and move on to the next host.
Higher education for the children of immigrants is a tough hurdle to get through in life because of several factors. First, many colleges do not accept illegal students. Secondly, being forced to pay more than just the regular tuition, they cannot receive any help from the state in form of financial aid or a scholarship since most of them are not geared towards undocumented immigrants.
To make matters worse, last year around April a bill was passed in the state of Arizona to aid in the capture of undocumented immigrants and help reduce the amount of people who constantly enter the country through their border.
The bill originally stated that any immigrant that lived in Arizona had to have their documentation papers on them at all time. Outrages ensued because this would allow the police to guess a person’s immigration status based on guesswork and stereotypes, because there really is no great detective technique to weed out the immigrants and the native born Americans.
The Department of Justice then corrected the law so that the police would not be allowed to request this information from people during a lawful stop or arrest due to the fact that it would cause the state and the country big problems if the wrong person was detained; to this day Arizona is still trying to have that ruling reversed.
With that being said, it already makes Arizona one of the most dangerous places to live in America for undocumented immigrants, and it also will definitely have an effect on those undocumented students who dream of applying to college in Arizona but probably will not due to fear of being caught by the law.
These kids are not the ones to blame for what they want; most times they are brought to this country as children if not younger because their parents escaped their country to make a better life for themselves and their families. Is that not the same principle on which America was founded? Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness seem to have taken a different turn in this modern age.
Whether it was religious persecution, a will to succeed in a foreign land, or just a new beginning, America has always been known to house those who want to strive and live the dream. So when the dream turns into a nightmare, when and how will we be able to wake up and set things right, for the people, for the future, and for our country?