Prejudice Against Immigrants Hurts All

In her op-ed opposing giving financial aid to undocumented immigrant students (“A Dream for Some, A Nightmare for the Rest,” Oct. 19), Yeh Ling-Ling goes on a diatribe against immigrants that exposes the base prejudice and irrationality motivating opposition to

immigration.

The California Dream Act would allow low-income undocumented students to receive state need-based Cal Grants. The federal Dream Act would provide eligibility for federal loans and a path to citizenship. All U.S. citizens would remain entitled to these programs.

The California and federal Dream Acts represent an expansion of educational opportunity for all students. They assert the equality and dignity of

students whose parents brought them here, indistinguishable from citizens except for what side of the border they were born on. It means more sorely-needed teachers, doctors, scientists and political leaders to strengthen the state’s economy and advance social progress.

More than 10 million Californians are immigrants. Of these, nearly 3 million are undocumented. Immigrants contribute immeasurably to the state’s economy with billions of dollars in taxes, making enormous profits possible through their labor. Immigrants have enabled California’s economy to expand, diversify, and become the sixth largest in the world.

Ms. Yeh would sacrifice the social and economic future of California to defend white privilege and maintain a second-class status for immigrant, Latino, black, Asian and other minority students. She supports legalized discrimination and setting up a new Jim Crow in California. Her vision of the future is both unacceptable and unviable.

For California—a majority-minority state—to advance, it must provide equal educational opportunity to all its residents. It must shift its priorities and fully fund public education. Ignoring this obvious solution, Ms. Yeh scapegoats students. She would deny college to thousands who could become tomorrow's teachers and educational leaders to tackle the state’s educational crisis. Her arguments are not grounded in facts—they simply perpetuate the age-old tradition in American politics of appealing to xenophobia and racism to distract from the real problems.

Ms. Yeh’s arguments have been made obsolete by globalization and world economic development. U.S. companies cross borders with impunity to exploit new markets and cheap labor. This movement of capital undercuts and destabilizes local economies, forcing people to relocate. As old economic sectors shift abroad, new economic sectors arise to exploit the search for jobs of immigrants. As corporations follow the laws of supply and demand to raise profits, the world’s poor must follow a more living and human law to feed themselves and their families and better their lot.

Anti-immigrant ideologues have no answer to this reality, except for a hypocritical double standard: for capital, Open Borders. For poor workers from Mexico and Latin America, a wall.

Appeals to “the law” ring false, in light of economic reality and this nation's history of using the law to justify discrimination. At previous times, slavery and segregation were “the law.” Access to American citizenship was proscribed by race. The justifications offered to deny citizenship today are just as groundless and no less arbitrary. Unjust laws must be changed.

Our new movement asserts a more rational definition of citizenship. The United States has always been a land of many nations. What has made us a single people has been our readiness, at times in this nation’s history, to struggle together in the common project of breathing life into the nation's espoused principles of freedom and equality.

The people who live on this nation’s soil, who learn and work here, who contribute their labor and talents to the nation, deserve the full rights of citizenship. The people marching in the great demonstrations of the new movement are taking up the torch of every progressive struggle of the American past against immigrant bashing, scapegoating, racism and second-class citizenship. By striving to make America realize its ideals, they are easily far more American than their hypocritical opponents. They are part of the real nation. This society must acknowledge this basic truth in its laws and practices.

American society has only moved forward when we have stood together as people of all races and nations, as described on the Statue of Liberty, “yearning to breathe free.”

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