How We Waste the Potential of Immigrants

The county career center in my school district boasts a 96-percent placement rate, even in these days of near double-digit unemployment. That’s because its graduates develop skills our community needs. Students build houses. They repair cars. They network computers. Whether their next step is college, an apprenticeship or immediate employment, most high school students who complete a tech school program exit with a head start toward security.

If only that were true for all.

When Amelia, aspiring to be an obstetrics nurse, enrolled to study health-related occupations, we weren’t concerned that the demands of  training would be too great; she qualified on her merits. Other details nagged. As an undocumented immigrant [2], she knew her prospects for legitimate work in the foreseeable future were dim. Life for these immigrants [3] is often a series of worries and complications. Still, Amelia made the choice to proceed and work hard.

We encouraged and rewarded such effort. As teachers, we spoke of the inherent value of education, the unpredictability of life, the possibility of revised laws. We spoke of hopes and dreams. In the meantime, she learned to be a nurse. She looked the part from the beginning in her mandatory scrubs. And as the months passed, she truly filled that role. She took pride in her new position; her satisfaction was evident. Now and then we’d acknowledge the shadows at the edge of her future, but she forged on until she completed her program and was awarded a portfolio that documented her skills. Page after page vouched for her competence. Her supervisors were complimentary and encouraging. She was offered an entry-level nursing home job. 

So she graduated. And for the next year, she worked—though not in any health-related occupation. She didn’t abandon her ambition or lose her motivation. Instead, she ran into the paper roadblock that had been ahead all along. Unable to provide the documentation required to use her credential and help her community, she helped her family instead. She babysat.

Now I'm told she works for a company that makes rags. Rags. This young woman is an upstanding citizen in every sense she can control, and her potential is wasting away. Through the education to which she is entitled by law, she learned to think as an American, to believe an individual can shape her own destiny. She learned of a nation designed to thrive on the fruits of those pursuing their own happiness, not on the backs of a permanent underclass. If only that were her truth.

Until new laws [4] provide undocumented youth access to the basic tools of success, our schools and communities will be filled with millions of young people for whom the American Dream is an illusion [5]. It matters to me as a teacher, witness as I am to their uncertainty and heartbreak and hope. It should matter to everyone. The squandered talents, thwarted hopes and unrealized promise are not just their losses, they’re ours. Only when each individual is able to contribute to her fullest extent can the whole reach its potential.

Parrett is an English language learning teacher in Missouri.