Immigration

In January 2010, two Somali men and one Oromo man were killed in a market in Minneapolis’ Seward neighborhood. Their shooters were two Somali-born teenagers, trying to commit an unsuccessful robbery at the corner store.

The news hit my school hard. Somali women cried, both for the victims and for the young perpetrators who had so clearly gone astray. An Oromo man pulled me aside and said, “I do not feel safe in this school. Some Somali guy shoots an Oromo guy, and I have to sit here? No.”  

U.S. public schools are not branch offices of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That’s the message the Obama administration sent out in a letter to the nation’s school districts last week. 

This news story out of Duluth, Ga. yesterday caught our attention. It spotlights a homework assignment given to third-graders at a Gwinnett County elementary school. One of the stories the students were expected to read bore the title What is an Illegal Alien?

“Illegal alien” is, of course, the pejorative term that immigration opponents use to stigmatize undocumented immigrants. That was bad enough in a class assignment for third graders.

I love to receive letters. When I was a little boy, I lived on a straight street where I could see the mail truck coming from a long way off. After the mailman stopped in front of our house, I ran with hope in my heart down our front walkway, between our two giant maple trees and across the street to our mailbox. Would there be a letter for me? Was someone in the world thinking of me?

Earlier this year, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed HB 2281 into law, making it an offense to teach courses at any grade level that promote resentment towards a race or class of people. The law further states that no classes may be designed for any ethnic group or promote ethnic solidarity. This despite the fact that, according to the U.S. Census, 30 percent of the state is made up of Latinos.

Alma wanted to put milk in her children’s bottles. In her native Mexico, she could only afford to fill them with coffee. Like many recent immigrants to the United States, Alma came here to spare her children such grinding poverty. “I’d like to live [in the United States] for my kids,” she says, “for them to study and not live the life I lived in Mexico, because it was very hard.”

Once here in the States, though, Alma could only find employment as a farmworker in Florida. She still lives in poverty as one of the country’s estimated 10.8 million undocumented immigrants. These laborers do the backbreaking work that puts billions of dollars of food on our plates.

When I entered the classroom to interpret for the middle school parent and teacher conference, the student shouted that I wasn’t necessary. The teacher had called for my services because for two semesters she had been telling the mother that her son was flunking. And for two semesters, the mother had grinned ecstatically and said, “Thank you”—her only English words. The son had  “interpreted” to his mother that he was on the honor roll.