When I found this article I wanted to write about it to make the point that there is a large number of Asian undocumented people in the US. But I found another story, the story of young people from any race or ethnicity, that were brought here as children, they were raised here and when became of age to go to college they find that the are not able to do so. Regardless of their good grades and how smart they are, they can’t go to college because they are here illegally.
According to what I read, in California they can. According to the article 40% of the undocumented students in UCLA are Asian. These young women were brave enough to risk their safety to expose this issue. They were interviewed by US Today, and their families were later detained by ICE.
There is a bill in congress called The Dream Act that would provide a way of legalization to those millions of children that were brought to the US and raised here, that don’t know any other country and a lot of which did not know they were not US citizens until they finished high school and could not apply for a driver’s license or go to college.
You can read all about it in the Pacific Citizen Website .
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There are about 10 states that allow in-state tuition for undocumented students–California is one of them.
I am one of those DREAMers. And before anyone can start making a bunch of assumptions,
1. my family came here legally and ‘got in line’
2. my ancestors cannot be traced back to any part of North, Central or Southern America,
3. we pay thousands in taxes and have never used ‘free’ services like emergency rooms or food stamps.
Anyone who is pro-education should support the DREAM Act. It does society no good to create a permanent underclass of undocumented Americans–some of whom, if given the opportunity, have gone on to be world-class brain surgeons, others have doctorate degrees — wasted potential and lost talent.
Thanks for the post.
I agree PL, regardless of how they came here, children are not responsible for the politics and legal matters. It would be a waste of talent to not help them achive what they can.
[...] Dream Act 13 04 2009 Last year I wrote about the Dream Act here about many immigrant youth that were brought to the US usually as infants and that are Americans [...]