Opinion: Stopping deportation, one valedictorian at a time?
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The editorial board wrote today that a whole lot of immigration policy is hitting the enforcement side of the matter, but missing the big picture:
He may be a reluctant immigration restrictionist, but Michael Chertoff is remarkably diligent. The secretary of Homeland Security is one of the Bush administration’s most enthusiastic lobbyists for immigration reform, willing to highlight the ‘negative economic consequences’ of tougher enforcement. Yet on items from the border wall to workplace raids to heavier burdens on employers, Chertoff delivers for the enforcement-only crowd.
Here’s a small something for the other crowd. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) introduced a bill to stop the deportation of 17-year-old Arthur Mkoyan, a high school valedictorian set to go to UC Davis unless he gets shipped to Armenia. He hasn’t seen his native country since he was a toddler (and his parents have been seeking asylum since about that time).
But the fine print, as CNN reports: ‘Of the 21 private immigration bills introduced last year, none was enacted. None of the 117 introduced was enacted in 2006. The year prior, 98 were introduced, and four were enacted.’
In other words, Mkoyan can stay, but he can’t get a green card without the bill passing. As Sacramento Bee columnist Peter Schrag notes, Mkoyan and other students like him wouldn’t be put in this situation if the DREAM Act had passed:
Mkoyan is one of the emblems — there are thousands of others — of a self-defeating immigration policy that prefers to deport talented young people at a time when the nation faces a desperate need of skilled workers to replace the millions of baby boomers who are about to retire.... Passage of the federal Dream Act last year, which would have put thousands of young men and women on the path to legal status, would probably have allowed him to stay here. But the act was blocked in Congress by immigration absolutists who’d rather punish children for the sins of their parents than cash in on the talent and ambition they represent.
But Ruben Navarrette Jr. says the law is the law (even if its cruel, counterproductive, myopic, unnecessary...one could go on), and even if enforcement-side folks can get a few bones from the federal government, the other side can’t. But he leaves on a more stinging point, wondering why so few advocates rushed to defend another student, Jesus Apodaca, in 2002:
Why the double standard? I believe it’s because, while Mkoyan may not have a leg to stand on legally, he at least has the benefit of not being Mexican. Much of the immigration debate is fueled by a fear of a changing culture, competing languages, an altered landscape, and what loopy Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist calls the ‘colonization’ of the United States by Mexican immigrants. Arthur Mkoyan isn’t considered a party to any of that. For some people, that makes all the difference. And, in some respects, that’s the saddest thing about this story.
*Photo of Dianne Feinstein from The Times.