Comments on: Undocumented, But Still Pursuing An Education

By: Shiva

Shiva — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 23:01:28 +0000

@Lily – Thank you for the wonderful story

I find this recent backlash on immigrants – legal and otherwise – strangely ironic and completely baseless.

If you look back for the last nearly 400 years of American history, you will see that throughout that period, immigrants have arrived and thrived here by both ‘legal’ as well as ‘illegal’ means.

Over time, this movement – of people from different countries and cultures coming here by whatever means they can and then working as hard as they can – is what has made America this great mosaic of various cultures, people, hope and collective national success.

If the American government had enforced a strict legal immigration policy right from the beginning for the last nearly 400 years, then we certainly would not be where we are today – the Greatest and the most Powerful nation in the world !

By: Lily

Lily — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 05:28:12 +0000

Thank you all for your comments. If you’d like to read a little more check out Roger Lowenstein’s “The Immigration Equation,” and, tell me what you think.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/magazine/09IMM.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

By: Aprill

Aprill — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 19:03:34 +0000

As the teacher, Ms. Tom, put it, “Even if they get a good education, then what? They still can’t get good jobs.” So to icarus12, I would say we shouldn’t be penalizing the immigrants as they are here based on the forced circumstances the American government and corporations put them in with trade agreements like NAFTA which completely deteriorated their domestic markets. Everyone talks about the “immigration problem” but no one talks about why it “became” a problem in the first place. Not to mention the fact that we have more than enough money to put back into our own domestic needs, but that money goes to funding military occupations and corporate bailouts. So while Juan the 20 year old believes that in America if you are born poor you don’t have to stay poor is a slight delusion as there are many obstacles put in poor people’s way from moving up unlike the upper classes (such as access to good schooling or jobs as this article points out). It is the same on the individual level as it is for countries who are entering the international market. You need money to start off with in order to accumulate more. It’s how the system was set up and how it continues to run. We shouldn’t be looking at immigrants as the problem, but rather the those who created the situation in the first place, the government/multi-national corporations who allow it to happen, and in fact need it to happen as they have created themselves a new cheap domestic labor force as we have also seen from the high school immigrants from this article. It’s not the immigrants taking “our” jobs or spending “our” money. Merry Christmas.

By: icarus12

icarus12 — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 17:54:27 +0000

And so it goes on. Citizen tax payers everywhere pay for the free public education of children of illegal immigrants. That’s about $8,000 a year for each student and more for college subsidies at UC and other schools like SFState. I am not saying “send them home”. But we have to overhaul the immigration system nationwide and stop dumping the costs of immigration onto states and cities that play host to those immigrants. Illegal immigrants’children have legal access to public education, but the fact is their parents aren’t paying into the system fully. They can’t unless they are paying all taxes. Most illegal immigrants don’t pay all those taxes, because many of them work off the books.